The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I'll second that. Even though I've never done it. Definitely buying a dock soon anyhow

 

That's what I do and I stay away from any GREEN drives as I don't want them sleeping on me. I also buy RAID/ENTERPRISE style drives that are meant to run 24/7 but have also used desktop drives too. Unlike general conception here I've switched from Seagate hi-performance drives to WD since Seagates' have had serious issues lately, I used to be Seagate exclusively but once again times have changed. I also can't say I love WD drives but at least they aren't going belly-up on me and I'm not losing data. If you want to get by cheap the WD Blue drives are good the Black is better of course with longer warranty as well. I will not use IBM Deskstar drives which are now made by Hitachi since they run too hot and have a shorter life span due to that. I've heard from friends that Samsung drives are OK but that is hear-say of course.

At one time I thought Eagle enclosers were OK for a cheap solution but now after encountering compatability issues and even having one go down on me with little life I would steer clear of them.

 

So you wouldn't recommend this one eh?
Eagle Tech 120GB USB 2.0 Black Pocket Hard Drive
One of my work buddies wants it. One of the reviews says there's a WD drive inside

Just got a 250Gb Verbatim Clon drive. Seems to be a nice little pocket drive. Runs off of USB power. Even works perfectly from the front HAF932 ports. Transfer speeds are much better than the flash drives i'm used to. 27.5MB/sec on average.

 

If you want it to be compatible with all systems that's not a good solution and quite often requires both USB connections to run. That enclosure is the one I've had the most problems with but it is a newer version of mine so I can't say that it is 100% bad as they may have changed the chipset since mine. So I would say at best it is a gamble. The motherboard these have the biggest problem with is ASRock were they almost never work consistently, but it does depend greatly what MB drivers you are using.

I didn't know that Verbatum made external hard drive solutions, interesting!

 

I'll probably recommend the verbatim drive to him then. Seems to be a nice one. Plus the 7yr warranty He won't like that it's twice the price though. I'll probably recommend the 320Gb though. It's currently only a couple dollars more :S I should have noticed that for my brother

 

Seagates usually run the hottest from what I've seen.

 

Seagates' run hot and that is one of their problems but the biggest problem is quality control, they have none from what I can tell.

Deskstars' run the hottest hands down.

 

A build I did for a buddy has a 250Gb deskstar :S I didn't buy it, it came from a Pavilion I rebuilt. Its smart looked extremely good for 20,000K+ hours running time
Windows 7 runs fine enough on it. Never did check the temp on it. But the tower seemed cool enough.

 

Deskstars' are great performers IBM has always made a solid drive up until when they changed their MFG to Hitachi just prior to that they started to have quality problems and they boosted their performance too the new design, which runs very hot. A lot of businesses that relied on the Deskstars' in their arrays switched to WD or Seagate, but most to WD enterprise drives. I'd say Seagate is close to Deskstars for heat but have bigger issues with thier quality. Regardless the heat takes away from their MTBF even though the companies haven't adjusted those stat's for their newer drives as far as I could see.

I cooked an egg on one of their drives years ago. LOL

 

Are you using them in a server or array with RAID, I doubt it because they would then cause you problems, especially in a RAID configuration. You can make them work in those situations but it isn't worth the effort when you can get a better drive for the same price practically.

 

In my opinion, RAID is almost unnecessary anymore. Velociraptor drives are an excellent single mechanical drive solution. SSD's are insane fast. So RAID 0 is out. Unless you like living on the edge :S I suppose if I had two of them, I'd be pretty happy with the bandwidth gain though. But if one were to fail... devastating. I can see the need for the industry to employ Redundant arrays. But for people like me, a sata docking bay is an excellent means for cloning data.

So far the green drives have been near perfect for me. Can't wait to play with a 3Tb+ drive. Depending on my needs, I may wait for the 3tb drives to come down, or wait for something larger to be released. I'd really like to see a 10Tb drive released. That'll probably be SSD though. Or perhaps some new cutting edge technology. I'm sure it'll cost 2 arms and 2 legs LOL

 

SSD's are not fast they are slow, but what makes them seem fast is when you turn off redundancy and error checking so Windows 7 boots very quickly due to that. SSD's are expensive and wear out fast. Because of that I personally wouldn't use them unless the environment requires it. Any ROM based OS will boot fast but writing to them is very slow and again you don't get many write cycles. Windows can be hard on hard drives because they hammer certain areas of your hard drive so this wouldn’t bold well for SSD’s.

RAID is still very strong and required for mass storage and performance, just because you don't have need for it is none the less in the needs of others.

If Green drives work for you knock yourself out, I prefer performance, the little bit of energy you save verses the hit in performance isn't worth it for me, I don't want my drive sleeping on me just like I don't allow my OS to sleep either. There is only about $10's difference so I see no reason to buy a Green drive and be limited with what I can do with it.

 

You can reconfigure a Green drive but then you might just as well get a real drive, so what's the point screwing around.

 

I did say that raid has their uses. And I wouldn't mind doing it, JUST to say I did it. And you're right. SSD's are still a little too cutting edge for me.
The green drives are excellent storage drives. I don't require anything BUT storage from them Fact of the matter is, I wouldn't mind configuring a Raid 0 with 2 of my WD1001FALS drives. Don't have enough backup space for their files just yet.

 

I rotate drives around periodically so even though green drives are more than fine for a storage device I still buy real drives as I don't want to limit myself when rotation comes around, and like I said the price difference is nothing really so why pigon hole yourself. If you don't find yourself in this situation then the little bit you save might be worth it, it just isn't for me.

 

tbh how long are you going to keep an OS drive? Esp with an SSD, a couple years? Till the next windows? Something along those lines right? Why not get an SSD for your OS drive, esp how the new sandforce drives are turning out. They seem fantastic!