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Quest for storage

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All right, I think I have enough info to do this. I'm not feeling 100% on the WD Greens and I need to find a good retailer, but apart from that I have at least a decent plan.
 
How is Directron for hard drive packaging? I'm striking out finding the drive I want in stock at any other decent place.
 
Is there a benchmark that shows the 2TB model testing out "twice as fast as the 1TB" version? (aka 100% faster)
The linked review was testing two 2TB WD drives against each other.
 
I just bought the DeskStar 7K/2000 2TB packaged as Simple Drive at Fry's for $139. Ive tested the hell out of it (36 hrs on it while using it RW for all kinds of multi-media projects) & it runs great. Dont know what people are talking about noise with this drive. Yes, it can get a bit warm as it is 5 platters/7200 rpm. Until further notice, be it know that it is a good drive & I didnt notice any returns on the shelf ay Fry's (I always look for discounted returns - possible sign of customer dissatisfaction/disappointment).

The one thing I would point out, however, that I found is that when used as an external USB, then Hitachi's supplied Turbo USB driver really speeds data transfer. It's a got to have. The advertised transfer increase is 25% (presumably an average), but I have clocked a 67% decrease in transfer time (w/Turbo vs wo/Turbo) and 17% decreased transfer time over other USB externals (eg, Iomega drives). An added benefit is that the drive does seem to run even a bit smoother & even quieter with Turbo (although noise was never objectionable at any time/under any circumstance). Also, it handles well in WINXP (can delete partition & quick reformat in a minute) & passes all check/scan tests. If you use it as a big media drive, though, you may want to consider using a larger allocation unit (maybe like 64KB or at least 32KB).
 
I bought four of the retail 2TB Hitachi's at Fry's. They make the 7200.11 farm sound quiet, but I have been happy with them thus far. No DOA's yet.

Tomorrow the next 12TB of storage for the new server arrives, and the Asus P6T7 Supercomputer motherboard for the 37GiB of installed storage thus far (23GB usable due to GiB-> GB, parity drives, and hotspares).

I have to say I'm loving the fact that you can move arrays at will between Adaptec controllers. I'm also happy I didn't do something like Raid 50/60 as you can't migrate controller to controller apparently.
 
Blain said:
Is there a benchmark that shows the 2TB model testing out "twice as fast as the 1TB" version? (aka 100% faster)
The linked review was testing two 2TB WD drives against each other.
Click to expand...

Excuse me for not expounding on my point, the 1TB drives average about 50-60MBps:
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3161&p=4

I was just showing that the 2TB green drives are much improved, and are much more competitive beside standard drives (~110MBps).
 
ShawnD1 said:
My server boots from a 1TB WD Green and I do not recommend green drives. They're incredibly slow. It'll work, but seriously I would rather just pay the extra 20% and get a Caviar Black.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't want to boot from a green drive either, but for storage they're perfectly fine. The time decrease I'd get by going black over green would likely not be noticeable while loading up my family pictures, music files, or even large videos. It would certainly be noticeable while booting an OS.
 
How do people feel about the Hitachi 2TB drives? It's not as expensive as a Western Digital of the same capacity (Green variety), but it's 7200 rpm and has 32mb cache. I think it will be fine but I do remember some bad mojo regarding Hitachi. People used to call their Deskstar drives Deathstars. Is it still wise to give them a wide berth?
 
FYI, with respect to the 2TB greens, you mentioned you have an SSD. If you are running windows 7 you may run into the same issue I have, namely that the 2TB green drive disappears after sleep mode and requires a reboot to be recognized again under the default windows SATA drivers. Changing to Intel's drivers fixes this but then breaks TRIM for your SSD. I currently wish I had a different drive for my mass storage since I use sleep mode quite often and rebooting everytime I want to watch tv sucks.
 
I've been using 4x new Hitachi 2TB's for a few days now. I think they are not so bad. A bit warm/ loud, but not bad. I lost one of eight 36 hour old WD Green 1.5TB drives last night :-(
 
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