Storage drive for .VOB playback and storage

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

I'm interested in a good storage drive for backing up my DVDs and viewing.
Price range between 99-150$
Sata
Looking for top notch quality

Thanks

 

[boomhower]

You can get a Hitachi 2TB for $150 from Microcenter.

 

[MalVeauX]

Heya,

WD 1.5TB for $105. Best Gig/$ ratio.

Very best,

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Is there any good site besides the very outdated storagereview for a good look at how these big drives perform?

I have a WD FALS 1Tb drive that I had intended for some other use; how do the drives mentioned above compare?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

How is the Samsung F3 Spinpoint HD103SJ 1Tb model? Is there a larger capacity model that uses the 500g platters?

 

[LtGoonRush]

You should absolutely be using Western Digital Caviar Green drives for this application. Neither backing up DVDs to or playing from the drive is going to come close to using its performance, so there's no reason to use a 7200rpm in this case. The WD Caviar Green drives have great sustained transfer performance, are very quiet, and run very cool. I'm personally using two 1TB Caviar Green drives in my system for storage and they were the perfect choice.

Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB WD15EARS $119.99. This is one of the new Advanced Format drives (see Anandtech article), the older kind is available for $10 less.

 

[pjkenned]

You should absolutely be using Western Digital Caviar Green drives for this application. Neither backing up DVDs to or playing from the drive is going to come close to using its performance, so there's no reason to use a 7200rpm in this case. The WD Caviar Green drives have great sustained transfer performance, are very quiet, and run very cool. I'm personally using two 1TB Caviar Green drives in my system for storage and they were the perfect choice.

The 1.5TB greens are <90MB/s, so considerably slower than GigE.

Also those Hitachi 2TB drives are $139.99 at Newegg, and are a lot better behaved in raid.

 

[LtGoonRush]

The 1.5TB greens are <90MB/s, so considerably slower than GigE.

99MB/sec is nothing to sneeze at, and is vastly higher than the peak read speed you'll ever get while backing up a DVD. Storage drives are simply not a performance-sensitive application for most users, because the drive is basically never going to be the limiting factor. Remember, you actually have to have a data source/destination faster than the drive to see a performance difference.

Also those Hitachi 2TB drives are $139.99 at Newegg, and are a lot better behaved in raid.

That's a pretty sweet deal on a 2TB drive, though I'm not sure what justification you have for saying that they'd work better in a RAID array, and the OP isn't talking about a RAID configuration.

 

[pjkenned]

99 to 62MB/s on the linked review. I'm only aware of the WD Green 1.5TB drives and Hitachi 2TB drives discussed here because I own eight of the greens (well have 5 as 3 are in RMA land since they died quickly) and six of the 2TB Hitachi's (all still well). Not a ton, but enough that I have a sense at this point.

Assuming you use decent (i.e. Intel) NIC's and a decent switch, 99MB/s isn't that hard to surpass over a LAN. If you directly attach the drives you are OK if you only plan to have direct access, and not simultaneous access from the network. While Greens are OK for simple read/write operations, the random access times, sequential reads, and more aggressive head parking are noticeable. If you do a big sequential read, you don't want to try doing a write, or a second read off the same disk. It depends on what the OP is after. Realistically, the difference in power consumption isn't going to be more than 2w so the "green" part of hard drives that are 11w parts is fairly moot.

Although the OP may not have mentioned RAID, by the time you fill up a 1.5 to 2TB drive you will think about how much data is on there, and quickly start looking at Raid 1/5/6. 2TB of data is worth keeping somewhat safe just because even backing up physical media takes time and effort that is worth more than the price of additional drives. Google (or search here) "WD TLER Raid" if you aren't familiar with why the newer Greens do not play nicely with raid.

 

[LtGoonRush]

Obviously 7200rpm drives provide faster seek times and higher throughput, but the reason we use 5400rpm drives in storage applications (as opposed to system drives) is because those features don't matter there. A DVD backup will max out at 30MB/sec on the outside edge of the disc, assuming ripping at 24X, which is higher than you'll achieve in practice. The Hitachi 2TB drive is also one of the worst performing 7200rpm drives, so if high performance was a consideration this drive would be a poor choice. It's true that most users don't care about the power usage of their drives, but most DO care about how noisy they are, and the WD Caviar Green drives are the quietest on the market.

You might want to read my post in the thread about TLER on WD Caviar Black Drives for an explanation of why this feature is only present on Enterprise drives and isn't valuable in the kind of RAID arrays consumers would be running.