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DEAD: Seagate 500GB Ultra DMA Retail HD (free shipping)

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<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: binister
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Cheapest ever?</end quote></div>

Not only is it the cheapest price on this drive ever, but I believe it's the cheapest per-GB drive price ever at $0.18/GB.

In for two more to bring the RAID-5 server I'm building up to 4TB. That's two five-drive 2TB arrays on a 3ware 7506-12 controller (that I picked up for $90 shipped on eBay).

These may or may not be perpendicular drives (these ST3500641A drives are supposed to be 7200.9, perpendiculars are 7200.10). Of the shipment of six I ordered recently from Fry's, two were perpendicular and the other four were not. For those shopping in a store, the model number on the boxes always indicates it's a 7200.9. However, it appears that the first digit of the serial number is an indicator; if it's a 3 they are 7200.9, if it's a 9 they are 7200.10. At least that was true for all of my drives.

Benchmarks I ran show that the 7200.9's transfer at 60MB/second while the 7200.10's are 75MB/second. The 7200.10's should also run cooler because there are less platters.

I also picked up two Maxtor (manufactured by Seagate) Diamondmax 21 500GB drives from Frys.com recently, and both of them were perpendicular drives. Other than the label on the top and the model number they report to the operating system, they are Seagate 7200.10 drives. (Oh...and other than the Maxtor 3-year warranty vs. the Seagate 5-year warranty.)
 
4TB RAID array?

Is this for personal use? What on earth could you possibly need that much space for!? 😉
 
Yes, it's for personal use...for recording HDTV, mostly. The average hour-long show runs about 7GB, and I tend to watch shows in batches. For example, I haven't watched any episodes of this season's "24" yet, and that's taking up 155GB of hard drive space. (That's kind of an exception...I love to watch an entire season of "24" in one weekend, when I find the time.) Other shows I tend to watch in 4-hour sessions or so. And with the way the networks are cancelling shows in recent years after just a short run, I don't even bother to watch most of them at all unless they've aired the majority of a season. That way when they cancel it, I just delete it. Anyway, HD recording eats a ton of drive space, and I'm tired of missing recordings because my hard drives are full.

Also, I'm a big fan of quiet, especially for my HTPC. (The Antec P182 I picked up from Fry's for $50 AR recently will help in that regard.) That's why I'm planning to move to diskless computers for both my gaming and home theater computers, with the only drives in the house being in the file server that's located in the closet in the garage where I can't hear it.

When I realized I could put together 4TB of space for about $1000, it seemed like a must-have. Sure, next year I'll be crying because the 1.5TB drives are on sale for $199 and I won't have used even half of the drive space that I bought this year...but it'll be worth it to have essentially infinte drive space, even just for a little while.

By the way, I just finished speed testing an array of five 7200.9 drives on my file server: 175MB/sec read, 70MB/sec write. I think I can live with that RAID-5 performance hit. 🙂
 
2 of these on the way. Great for backing up my Blu Ray and HD DVD movies until an affordable form of Hidef disc recording comes along.
 
Dammit! I couldn't resist! At least I've got time to make up a story before the wife gets the visa statement.
 
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