[Tfug] In need of hard drive info

[Harry McGregor]

keith smith wrote:
>
>
> Hi,
>
> I need to add a second drive to two of my boxes for back up purposes
> only.  I was looking on NewEgg and found prices have dropped more than
> I would have ever imagined. 
>
Storage, for lowend to high end is getting cheaper than we would have
ever imagined, and it's only going lower.

>
> I'm wondering the best place in town to buy hard drives?
>
Internal or external?  For external I like the Western Digital MyBook
series, and for that checking the ads, and going with a big box store is
probably cheapest.

For internal and almost any computer parts, nothing in Tucson beats SWS
(shopsws.com).

In a lot of ways I prefer to buy an external enclosure and a drive
separately (from SWS or NewEgg), than to buy a bundled set.  I can then
figure out which part has failed, and deal with it, instead of a single
monolithic warranty claim...

>
> Also I seem to recall cooling was a concern for larger drives some
> time ago.  I'm thinking 500 GIG would work.  Is cooling still a problem?
>
Not that big of an issue, unless your putting 180 of them in a single
cabinet...

Check the cost per GB, and the drive size, and warranty.

It may surprise you, but it used to be that the largest drive was never
the cheapest per gig, right now Seagates 1.5TB is looking really good
cost per gig, though they are having some firmware issues.

> What drives are the best these days?
>
I like both Western Digital and Seagate for Desktop, and Seagate and
Hitachi for laptop.

Keep in mind that Seagate has/had a 5 year standard warranty, January
1st that goes back down to a 3 year.

Many consumer sale drives (retail boxed) only have a 1 year warranty.

Western Digital has standard 3 year warranty on most drives, and 5 years
on their "enterprise" class drives, such as the Raptor and VelciRaptor
drives.
> As you can see I'm really out of the loop.
>
Personally, I really favor RAID, both RAID1, RAID5 and RAID6 (all linux
software raid), hard disk failures are not an if, they are a when, and
every little bit helps.

                Harry

> Thanks for your help and feedback.
>
> Keith
>
> ------------------------
> Keith Smith
>
>
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>
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