Seagate FreeAgent 1TB

[Rubycon]

This drive is nearly twice as thick as smaller capacity models. Does it have a pair of 500GB drives internally striped? If so...:shocked:

I know WDC has a 500GB dual platter 2.5" notebook drive so theirs has only a single drive.

The 640GB FreeAgent is slim as previous models under half an inch thick.

 

[Russwinters]

If your talking about the 2.5inch form factor 1TB, then yes, its probably got 2 500GB set in RAID 0. or a JBOD.


Im pretty sure that they use RAID 0 though.

 

[Rubycon]

Yes these are portable self contained USB drives. Strange they would use RAID0 with the constraints of the interface (one drive is already way faster than USB 2.0). And of course if you drop the drive and one gets jarred and drops ALL the data is gone sans expensive recovery. At least with JBOD you'd have 1/2 of the data intact, right?

 

[Russwinters]

manufacturers do things that dont make alot of sense often.



For some reason they tend to think RAID 0 provides a performance boost even through USB 2.0, while it may...the difference is very minimal compared to the insecurity of using a RAID 0 volume as a backup.


JBOD works like this: It takes the two disks and combines them so they are seen as one disk.


So it really depends on what sectors your data is being placed on that decides if you will get half or not.

like 55% into the volume is the "beginning" of the second disk.

this is why alot of time the MFT information for these types of disk is at the end of the first disk because NTFS likes to put the MFT at 45% (for disk performance reasons)

 

[RebateMonger]

I had a design business call me one day with a failed box like that. It apparently held two 500 GB in RAID 0. They'd been placing their ONLY copies of the entire office's files on it.

It took me about two seconds to turn the data recovery job down. RAID 0 with a probably proprietary operating system controlling the disks. No thanks.

 

[n7]

Ugh, seen too many like that.

Great "backup" HDD that is. NOT.

 

[Russwinters]

They are a headache of course, unfortunately I don't have the liberty of getting to turn down these jobs. These are usually high profile cases where the customer is more then willing to pay for the time and effort to recover the data.


My first step is to always attempt to request the system the raid was in to be shipped to us as well, if possible.

This way, (assuming the controller is still functional) I can simply make backups after repairing the physical problems with the drives. I then make a duplicate of the backups (A back of a backup, haha) and place those into the host system, and a lot of the time the controller will do the rest of the work for me.


It is interesting that Logical failures in RAID are actually more difficult then the Physical repair. Replacing headstacks, moving platters is (in most cases) not too difficult for me anymore, but attempting to repair a RAID stripe without knowledge of what controller built it....ill pass.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: n7
Ugh, seen too many like that.

Great "backup" HDD that is. NOT.

Actually if it's used in a backup set I would consider it acceptable. If a disk fails you replace it with no losses since it's strictly a backup. Now if backup means an external drive to copy your pictures on, then definitely not.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
Actually if it's used in a backup set I would consider it acceptable. If a disk fails you replace it with no losses since it's strictly a backup. Now if backup means an external drive to copy your pictures on, then definitely not.

Yeah, I have no big problem with a RAID 0 backup array. Especially if there's more than one array. Especially with the huge arrays being constructed, it might be appropriate as a cost-effective way to create a huge backup array.

As Rubycon notes, I'm talking BACKUPS here. Meaning that it's a secondary copy of the data, and not the ONLY copy.

As always, the backups need to be verified when written and TESTED periodically. And somebody has to be paying attention to the success or failure of the backup process.

 

[Rubycon]

I've had one of these for about three weeks now and it's the biggest POS in my humble opinion!

First it was DOG skeet slow with writes! 15MB/S MAX for large file writes. Second after about a week of use it developed bad clusters and files stored on it have become completely lost! What's up with the quality of so called top of the line stuff these days?