The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

My drives fill quickly too, but by the time I run out of space (17 drives) there's likely to be much lower prices on newer drives. To me, if it's 4TB and two spaces for £100 or 3TB in one space for £140, the answer to me is obvious
Also, needing separate S-ATA cards for each pair of drives is a bit of a pain. I need the 6 onboard slots to fill my case with drives, and the 3TB drives can't be used with them.

 

I would have spent 10USD more on 2 2TB drives. Yes, that would be a smarter decision, but as I said, I love new toys. And the card does support two drives. So I'll be ok til I get the new motherboard with multiple ports that support AF drives.

 

Yeah it makes more sense for smaller numbers of drives. For me though, I have a maximum of 6 ports on the board, and 8 ports in PCI/PCIe SATA cards (assuming two port cards). With this setup I can fit 14 2TB drives (28TB). If I used 3TB drives I'd be limited to 8 drives, or 24TB. (And that's with buying two 3TB-compatible cards on the opposite interface to what they give you, as I have two PCI and two PCIe 1x slots)

 

Anybody know how to get Xtra Drive Letter out of Disk Management, I've used all that is offered . but still have 4 more Drives . If it gave you the full Alphabet you'd be OK

 

You're going at it right Kevin, bigger is better and less is more. I don't know why if you have a choice you would go with more smaller drives then less bigger drives. Who wants to have all that extra heat, extra power, add on cards and extra cabling if you can afford not too.

What do you mean you get the full alphabet? You can't use "A" and "B" since they are for floppy drives but all other letters can be used.

To add beyond that though would require a 3rd party tool.

 

Convenience is wonderful I've owned 500Gb drives, 1Tb drives, 2Tb drives. It's time for the next best thing And since I've got 3 Green drives, I've made the decision I can trust them now. I don't know why so many people have problems. They probably don't know what they're doing

 

Actually they may know more than you but that is a whole other argument. If green works for you keep on trucking as you have to do what works best. There typically isn't much needed in knowledge when it comes to hard drives unless you are having problems since they really are plug and play these days. Even the dumbest of the dumb can add a hard drive.

 

Go read the newegg reviews. Clearly, people expect plug and play with these, which is NOT the case LOL!

 

It is true that NewEgg has a group of EXPERT's that can't even screw a light bulb in, so you're definately right about that.

 

12TB, 18TB, 24TB, 28TB? What in the hell are you guys storing the New York Library? LOL.

 

It's possible they got a copy of the new Healthcare bill that Pelosi & Obammy just passed? LOL But wait a minute that might not be enough space??

 

I hate it when that happens, Double Post and I even waited 5 minutes.

 

I store my DVD collection. Some HD. As I'm sure you can guess, HD takes up a LOT of space. I plan on storing my favorite Blu Ray movies for sure. It's simply more convenient to click click click, and it's playing. I've actually had a few ideas for programs, so when I have guests over, all they'd have to do, is scroll through movie covers, and select a movie. Thereby mounting an ISO image, and playing the movie. VERY similar to how a modified Wii/PS3/Xbox can run. Of course my Programming knowledge isn't even off the ground yet. Fact of the matter is, I haven't found much time to study. I really need to make the time. I imagine there is probably some software out there, that does similar to what I propose.

And, believe it or not, I could probably saturate multiple terabyte drives with Raw image files. I love art, and specific types of imagery. When I get the Dell monitor, I'll begin photoshopping again. My monitor discourages me lately

 

They hid a rider in the 25th TB allowing hardware upgrades for congressional offices while cutting health and wellness education from state hospitals...

On a serious note, i had an issue recently that i'd like to kick around the forums.
Since SATA drives are hot-swappable, while powered, i plugged in a drive i keep around when i need my snow leopard partition. The instant i plugged in power cable I heard a loud alarm. It was my RAID card alerting me of a dead/degraded drive. After ID'ing the offending drive, i replaced it and rebuilt the array (RAID5) and didnt lose data thankfully.
A day later while testing the "dead" drive, it passed all diskcheck utilities, formats, and has typical I/O characteristics.
The drive that died was on the same (650W corsair)power line (2nd of 4 connections) as the drive i added (3rd of 4 connections). Since it happened at the same time, on the same line, I have to assume its related, but the device powered by the 1st (end) connection is my OS drive i had no issues there.
Am I diagnosing this correctly? Does anyone have ideas why this happened?
BTW..."dead" drive has worked for 8 months, and is a WD green drive that isnt supposed to work in a RAID array but was flashed to do so.

 

Now that is too funny I can't stop laughing, way to go!!!!!

As to your problem, you're not hotswapable if you have to plug in the power cable. To be hotswapable you need a controller and drive bay system that supports that. You can't just pull out a drive and replace it just because it is SATA. It is no wonder your system freaked and of course your green drive is good.

It would not be too hard to make a little program with VB that would show pages of images that you can click on and launch that movie with let's say Media Player, or whatever. You wouldn't have to start from scratch as you find examples all over the web and could modify other peoples work. It is a good way to get going and you get up to speed faster that way.

 

rick5446: If you have 25 locally attached drives, then that's damn impressive. If they're just partitions, then you should be able to mount them as folders instead and index them that way, without drive names.
I was amazed that in the years of windows development, we're still stuck with individual letters for drives, it's pathetic.

Mr-Movies: You can use B, that's not reserved, only A. Also, with regard to drives, it's a question of economy, if you're pretty confident you won't need beyond X amount of space, using 2TB drives to do it is far cheaper than using 3TB drives to do it (not to mention simpler to setup) - the only occasions I'd advocate 3TB disks at present are when you absolutely have to keep the case (as it's cheaper to buy a new case than use 3TB disks a lot of the time), and you will be maxing it out with drives, so using 3TB drives affords you more space.

Omega: Plug and play with WD Greens works. Plug and play with RAID? not so much. Is one of the reasons I don't use RAID (but far from the only one), WD Greens are known to be a bit of a pain in RAID, but standalone I've had the most success with them (no failures yet out of 21 of them). As Mr-Movies says, take newegg reviews at a distance, there are some pretty damn stupid people out there.

Fredbun: A 45 minute (hour show minus the ads) TV show in SD might be 350MB in size. The HD version, depending on what quality is available will be between 1.1 and 4.5GB per episode. Apply that to an entire show that's spanned several seasons, you quickly start filling those terabytes.

Mr-Movies: Is a bug with afterdawn, whenever you scroll onto a new page, either your post will be hidden until you post again, or you'll end up with a double post that does it for you. Amazes me that after all this time they still can't get that right.

Deadrum: Not sure what you did, if you just pulled and drive and put another one in, you might have issues. First and foremost SATA is not innately hot-swappable without AHCI enabled, secondly if you have the drives hooked up to molex power (even using molex-SATA adapters) you shouldn't really be hotswapping them at all. I always power off my PC when adding/removing internal drives, the exception being eSATA external docks.

 

My double post had nothing to do with the scroll bug I closed out and re-initiated several times. I think it has more to do with activity and thread sizes but I don't know what AD is doing or using so that is a lack of knowledge guess.

It's not Kevin either it is Deadrum33 who has had the problem and why you are re-stating what I've already stated that just because you have SATA doesn't mean you are hot swappable is beyond me?

Kevin is smarter going with 3TB for $10 more than he is to mickey mouse around with two 2TB drives, it is pretty plain and simple approach I think! Less is more....

I think Fred understands movie size his point might be you shouldn't need that much space as you may be getting carried away or he is just amazed that you have acquired that much stuff, pack rats are in.

 

Scroll bug? What's that one?

Quite right, it was Deadrum, I'll edit my post. I didn't exactly re-state what you said, you didn't even mention AHCI.

 

I didn't mention a lot of things as they did not apply like AHCI!!

 

ahci is needed for hotswapping.