16MB Cache 250GB SATA Hard Drive $93

[Vigil522]

Originally posted by: ironk
you could buy the SATA II one for almost the same price:

http://labs.anandtech.com/alllinks.php?pfilter=4264

not hot.

Thanks for the link. I've been looking for a deal on a SATA2 drive!

 

[karstenanderson]

not on the onboard motherboard controllers it won't. raid 1 is way slower on those. trust me i've done it.

Originally posted by: gwag
RAID 1 can read faster than a single drive, RAID code employs a rather good read-balancing algorithm, that will simply let the disk whose heads are closest to the wanted disk position perform the read operation. not as much as 0 but can be faster.

 

[karstenanderson]

you only need 3 drives for RAID 5..

Originally posted by: Hacp
buy 5 and run raid 5 FTW!

 

[Xchus]

I got to input my 2 cents here.

I had a 20GB 7200rpm Maxtor for around 5 years as a system drive running 24/7 almost no problems at all.
Then I had a 80GB storage WD that started making this horrible noise 1 year after buying it.
Then I had a Maxtor 160GB that it failed on me after 3 years.
Now I have a seagate 300GB hopefully this will last longer.

So at the end I guess they all suck!! LOL

 

[RideFree]

Originally posted by: Vigil522
Here's my take on hard drives. They are all made so fast these days that one brand doesn't really seem to be better than another in the long run. Hard drives die all the time regardless of the brand. Hitachi SCSI drives used to burn up all the time, Maxtor and IBM drives are kind of loud, the Seagates have 5 year warranties. The only semi-safe way to protect your data is to run your drives in RAID5 and BACKUP the important stuff on tape, CD, DVD, etc. In my server I run 6 IDE drives (2x160GB, 4x120GB; total usable space=600GB) in a RAID5 array and have 2x40GB drives in RAID1. Some of the drives are WD, some Maxtor, some Seagate. I have lost 2 WDs (one died, one actually caught on fire), unfortunately at the time so my RAID5 was killed. I replaced them with Seagates because they were on sale. I just buy whatever size I need that's on sale. Eventually they will all fail (hopefully not at the same time). However, I also have some old WD drives (1.6 GB) that were supposedly flawed when they were made (the 3 platter version), but they are still running strong.

You must have a lot of $s in a tape drive that would handle ½TB on occasion.

 

[cerebusPu]

Originally posted by: ironk
you could buy the SATA II one for almost the same price:

http://labs.anandtech.com/alllinks.php?pfilter=4264

not hot.

maybe cause the thread is from 4 months ago.

 

[KAMAZON]

Disadvantage of Raid is the cost since you need more HDs, advantage is much faster HD Seek Time which is great for video editing and the such. Do a search for "Raid facts" or "basic raid info" or something on google. Most people I think do a Raid 0 configuration.

 

[Vigil522]

Originally posted by: RideFree

Originally posted by: Vigil522
Here's my take on hard drives. They are all made so fast these days that one brand doesn't really seem to be better than another in the long run. Hard drives die all the time regardless of the brand. Hitachi SCSI drives used to burn up all the time, Maxtor and IBM drives are kind of loud, the Seagates have 5 year warranties. The only semi-safe way to protect your data is to run your drives in RAID5 and BACKUP the important stuff on tape, CD, DVD, etc. In my server I run 6 IDE drives (2x160GB, 4x120GB; total usable space=600GB) in a RAID5 array and have 2x40GB drives in RAID1. Some of the drives are WD, some Maxtor, some Seagate. I have lost 2 WDs (one died, one actually caught on fire), unfortunately at the time so my RAID5 was killed. I replaced them with Seagates because they were on sale. I just buy whatever size I need that's on sale. Eventually they will all fail (hopefully not at the same time). However, I also have some old WD drives (1.6 GB) that were supposedly flawed when they were made (the 3 platter version), but they are still running strong.

You must have a lot of $s in a tape drive that would handle ½TB on occasion.

Well, the truly critical stuff fits on 2-3 DVD discs. I also have external 250GB and 200 GB drives that I backup to occassionally...

 

[rugger29]

listen, obviously a manufacturer like Maxtor doesn't honestly have any real problems, and I really hate when people sit here whining. And I gotta say I don't even believe half the posts. "I bought 23 maxtor drives and they all failed in the first week!!!!" come on people. 1 in X off any assembly line is going to fail, it's a cost of doing business. It's possible some people have bad luck with drives because they don't know how to handle or take care of them. Or they expect a hard drive to last 10 years. As I hope most people here know, hard drives are consumable... they aren't designed to last forever. After X many read/writes, they WILL fail. That's what RAID is for, that's what backups are for.

Personally, I've had a nice ATA RAID 0 x3 stripe going for years now, with *gasp* maxtor drives... and haven't had a problem yet.

 

[rugger29]

hmm... seems I should have read the post all the way through

 

[nyker96]

Is the 16MB really makes a huge diff on performance compre to 8MB?

 

[MonkeyK]

Originally posted by: karstenanderson
not on the onboard motherboard controllers it won't. raid 1 is way slower on those. trust me i've done it.

Originally posted by: gwag
RAID 1 can read faster than a single drive, RAID code employs a rather good read-balancing algorithm, that will simply let the disk whose heads are closest to the wanted disk position perform the read operation. not as much as 0 but can be faster.

Right! It's controller dependant. My 3Ware Raid controller will read independantly from the two drives in RAID 1 and runs pretty quick under load. And I am only using PATA drives.
I configured the controller in RAID 1 to host all of my music (about 300 CDs encoded to FLAC). This prevents a situation where a two music clients are trying to access large files that are very far apart on the drive (one all the way inside and one all the way outside). Two slim devices clients, and three home pcs can all play music from the server with no read problems. While I was at it, I left partitions for pictures and backups.

 

[Vigil522]

Just as a recommendation. Be sure to have some sort of cooling for your hard drives, especially if you have a bunch of them stacked up together. I have had far less drive failures since moving my hard drive array from a tower case where the drives were pretty closely stacked, to a 4U server case where the drives are mounted on their sides with about 1/2" inch of space in between them and a 120mm fan that blows across them. They are much, much cooler than they were stacked in the tower case with only a few millimeters of space in between them and an 80mm fan blowing across some of them.

Also, if anybody is looking for a good IDE RAID card to do RAID5, I have had favorable results with the Promise SX6000 (6 IDE channels). My server boots from a RAID1 array from the onboard IDE RAID and the data drive is 6 drives in RAID5 array using a SX6000 controller.

 

[vtohthree]

blah, I was late to post

Nice price OP, I'd bite but I gotta save up for my AM2 rig, ...even though I could use this in there, but I've got a spare for now.