Help me decide on Hard Drives and advise me on Hot Swap.

[E. C. Yian]

Hello,

ONE

On my Music creation Windows 10 PC I am looking for backup drives. I will back up my 1TB projects drive and 1TB audio samples, content etc drive. Will use this 2 TB internal drive and partition them in two halves. These drives will be used as external drive which will end up in the Bank vault. I will get two drives and rotate them.

When I will need more data space I may use these Hitachi’s as internal.

I am looking a three drives
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?CompareItemList=14|9SIA5AD1P08389^9SIA5AD1P08389,9SIA5AD2NA9155^9SIA5AD2NA9155,9SIA5AD3H22332^9SIA5AD3H22332&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-Skimlinks-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3987228&SID=25446X847199X15f6ea97c362581f7b8ab4b8f3764053

The specs look similar.
Can someone please recommend one of these or another economical drive?

TWO

I have 18” SATA 3 cable with power that I will hot swap the 3.5" backup drives periodically. The eSATA never worked even with the 2.5” drives. This is my alternative to eSATA. Is anyone else doing it this way? The Motherboard has 2 6.0Gb/s ports.

MOTHERBOARD: GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R LGA 1366 Intel X58 - REV 2
Xeon W36900, 12 GB RAM, GPU: EVGA 012-P3-1470-AR GeForce GTX 470 (Fermi)

Thanks in advance.

 

[Elixer]

I would invest in caddy-less hot-swap bays, makes life easier, instead of using the long cable.
As for the HDs, having a rotation plan is a good way to go, but, it is also wise to store multiple copies of critical/important work on a variety of devices and/or the cloud.
In the grand scheme of things, the brand of the HD doesn't really matter that much, there have been horror stories about every brand, and just because someone says brand X has never failed on them, that doesn't mean it won't fail on you.
That said, for important stuff, I tend to use WD black drives.

Forgot to mention, those specific drives you are looking at, seem to be either pulls or refurbs, since they only have a 1 year warranty from the reseller, NOT directly from the Hitachi/WD, so, I would stay away from those drive.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I would invest in caddy-less hot-swap bays, makes life easier, instead of using the long cable.
As for the HDs, having a rotation plan is a good way to go, but, it is also wise to store multiple copies of critical/important work on a variety of devices and/or the cloud.
In the grand scheme of things, the brand of the HD doesn't really matter that much, there have been horror stories about every brand, and just because someone says brand X has never failed on them, that doesn't mean it won't fail on you.
That said, for important stuff, I tend to use WD black drives.

Forgot to mention, those specific drives you are looking at, seem to be either pulls or refurbs, since they only have a 1 year warranty from the reseller, NOT directly from the Hitachi/WD, so, I would stay away from those drive.

I agree. But I do not understand why his eSATA fails to work. Don't have time to look at the old Nehalem X58 motherboard spec. But there is no need, I think, to use an onboard "eSATA" feature-controller from JMicron, Silicon-Image or whatever with this. If you are using a feature-controller, check to see that it isn't conflicting with something else by checking the mobo manual for indications that using one feature means turning off another, or changing usage of a PCIE slot.

If you have available ports on your main Intel motherboard controller, check the BIOS to under SATA or PCH-Storage menus to see if each port can be configured as "hot-plug" or hot-swappable. There should be a way to configure this, whatever the BIOS provides.

Then just run an SATA-to-SATA cable to a $7 eSATA adapter plug and PCI adapter.

There should be nothing wrong with using 2.5" disks for this, and there are some good ones available. All my disks now in my Z170 system (just added NVMe!!!) that are not SSD are 2.5", and I found a 2.5" Seagate Barracuda 2TB with a 128MB internal cache for about $90+.

 

[E. C. Yian]

Thanks Elixer and BonzaiDuck

Today I receive a new eSATA with USB power $6.00 cable. The 2.5” drive swapped but not the 3.5”. My other similar eSATA cable adaptor failed so did my 3.5” powered external drive case with eSATA port. Oh, well.

My 18” SATA cable works on both the 2.5” and 3.5” drives. So now I have two ways to hot swap my backup drives.

My next computer which I hope to get in two years or so will have hot-swap bays! I was not aware of such a feature. But for now my method work so I will do it this way.

The “1 year warranty” drives are not re-furbished or at least it is not stated as so. As strictly backup drives powered only for backup perhaps they will be Goudenoff. (The name of the Russian that developed the quality control standards). Yes I would prefer the WD blacks for thee are 2x the money. Please comment.

The similar 2.5” drives are more expensive than 3.5”. I also understand that 3.5” are more reliable and last longer. If you can please clarify.

Read that the smaller drive has less sustained transfer speed and less on-board cache. SO? But as backup dives the size does not matter? Though it may if I end up using them as inertial drives. My audio samples drive is sometimes used to stream audio.

And yes I have a few smaller capacity drives around that I use for back-ups. And yes I should store data on the cloud but I am concerned about the expense. Cheaper to use my drives and rotate than store on the cloud. Am I right about this?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Thanks Elixer and BonzaiDuck

Today I receive a new eSATA with USB power $6.00 cable. The 2.5” drive swapped but not the 3.5”. My other similar eSATA cable adaptor failed so did my 3.5” powered external drive case with eSATA port. Oh, well.

My 18” SATA cable works on both the 2.5” and 3.5” drives. So now I have two ways to hot swap my backup drives.

My next computer which I hope to get in two years or so will have hot-swap bays! I was not aware of such a feature. But for now my method work so I will do it this way.

The “1 year warranty” drives are not re-furbished or at least it is not stated as so. As strictly backup drives powered only for backup perhaps they will be Goudenoff. (The name of the Russian that developed the quality control standards). Yes I would prefer the WD blacks for thee are 2x the money. Please comment.

The similar 2.5” drives are more expensive than 3.5”. I also understand that 3.5” are more reliable and last longer. If you can please clarify.

Read that the smaller drive has less sustained transfer speed and less on-board cache. SO? But as backup dives the size does not matter? Though it may if I end up using them as inertial drives. My audio samples drive is sometimes used to stream audio.

And yes I have a few smaller capacity drives around that I use for back-ups. And yes I should store data on the cloud but I am concerned about the expense. Cheaper to use my drives and rotate than store on the cloud. Am I right about this?

I'm a bit backward about "the Cloud." I'd rather keep my files and backups a local system or local LAN server matter.

I had been reticent about 2.5" HDDs, and had built my first Sandy Bridge system with a 600GB WD Velociraptor before replacing it with an 840 Pro. I have it from my retired electronics-tech friend that '2.5"' is the way to go for HDDs, when the 3.5" units make the system heavier, may consume more power, etc.

If you use HDDs just for large capacity and backup, there shouldn't be any concern about the spec speeds. The 2.5's in simple configuration give good sequential throughput benchies -- or good enough. I don't care about the 5,400RPM rotational spec, either.

I can cache those HDDs or volumes to an SSD and RAM if I want them to allow faster access. Even with 16GB RAM, I have plenty to spare for that.

I also had the same misgivings as you about using "laptop" drives (as opposed to "enterprise 2.5" drives"), but we've had a 500GB WD Blue 2.5" in one of our systems for almost two years now as a data drive. It's just fine. I've seen where others use them for XBOX storage, media servers and DVR recording.

And -- a final point -- putting forth first my disclaimer that there are at least a handful of caching utilities to be found online. I'm using PrimoCache 2.7. Some people are using it for some "serious" workstations. One guy does forensic computer analysis of disk drives, and he uses his entire 1TB 960 Pro NVMe to cache "500GB data-sets" as he calls them.

The caching will actually reduce the wear and tear on a mechanical hard disk. If you're going to use disks in RAID, though, I'd recommend NAS 3.5" or fault-tolerant disks -- whatever the size.

 

[E. C. Yian]

I have never used nor plan to use 5400 RPM drives.

Wow! you reminded me. I have a 64 GB SSD 2.5” I have not used for a while. So please let me know if I should format it then go to Performance Options > Advanced > Change > Virtual Memory > and point to the SSD drive. At this point what to do?

I am not at all familiar with PrimoCache. I would love to see a performance improvement but not if it creates any issues such when installing new programs or backing up the C or D drives.

If the 1TB 2.5” vs 3.5” drives are within $20 then I will get the 2.5” drive.

So as a rule get drives with 3 or more years guarantee? How is it enforced? I do not want return a bad drive to get a replacement. I don’t know how they will handle my bad drive so I will likely keep it and destroy the drive with a high speed grinder. In this scenario why then be concerned about the guarantee other than that a many year guarantee on a drive means the drive has longevity. Perhaps?