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[benn600]

Has anyone had any reasonably positive results with the 2TB drives on the market?  I may be building another data server and 2TB would be a must for the configuration I am hoping for.  I saw some Hitachi drives at a good price, but with bad reviews.  In my limited tests, I have found Seagate to be outstanding and Western Digital to be excellent, in terms of reliability.  I have very little to back up these claims, obviously!  I have never intentionally chosen Hitachi.

[DarkPenguin]

I know a lot of people who work at Seagate.  So buy them.  The development team of the Devil came from WD.  So don't buy them.

[roopertd]

I used to use Maxtor drives, and have never had a problem with them. When Seagate took over Maxtor I switched to Western Digital.
I have six 2TB Western Digital drives. 3 that I use for movies and music, then 3 for backup. They work great and i have never had a problem. Just take a look at the number of 1 star reviews for Seagate on Amazon and Tigerdirect, and that should be enough to deter anyone from buying them.

[Mr ChriZ]

I love the pace that storage requirements increases.
I was hoping to make the leap to 2.5" drives this year, but alas it's not to be, to much stuff...
I'm also kind of waiting/hoping for a 3TB 3.5" drive to arrive to push the price of 2TB's down a bit.

[benn600]

My plan is to take our previous server, which has sit as a casual backup machine mostly powered off, and replace the 16 500GB drives with 2TB drives.  RAID6 of course...28TB.  3.5TB less than our current server which will get mirrored.  Looks like around $2,500 for all the drives...gonna watch prices closely.

[Magic_Randy]

A week ago I purchased 2 of the Seagate 1.5tb drives. They immediately started clicking and making other noises. So I purchased a couple of  of Western Digital 1.5tb drives and they seem just fine. The Seagates are going back to the store. Maybe I just got a bad lot. I had good luck with Seagate drives in the past.

[benn600]

I don't know what is up with Seagate...everyone is complaining about sudden issues with their drives.  Before I started using Seagate, I had used almost exclusively WD.  24 live drives have been working great for approaching a year now with only one of them arriving DOA.

[newsposter]

you *could* forgo SATA connections entirely and run with PCIe-slot SSD devices.

Cost is about $1k/per Tb.  But you get devices that are around 100x the speed (raw throughput and iops) of SATA3.  All running at a power budget of around 20 watts/slot.

I think that the install density is 2.5Tb per PCIe slot.  So with an 8 slot server mobo you could get 40Tb of silent and cool storage.

If you want.

[Mr ChriZ]

you *could* forgo SATA connections entirely and run with PCIe-slot SSD devices.

Cost is about $1k/per Tb.  But you get devices that are around 100x the speed (raw throughput and iops) of SATA3.  All running at a power budget of around 20 watts/slot.

I think that the install density is 2.5Tb per PCIe slot.  So with an 8 slot server mobo you could get 40Tb of silent and cool storage.

If you want.

That would be $40k 

[hit_ny]

you *could* forgo SATA connections entirely and run with PCIe-slot SSD devices.

What benefit will SSD offer if the main use is for media storage  ?

Cost is about $1k/per Tb.  But you get devices that are around 100x the speed (raw throughput and iops) of SATA3.  All running at a power budget of around 20 watts/slot.

Quite the claim there, here's how i see it.

SATA - 150MB/s
SATA 2 - 300MB/s
SATA 3 - 600MB/s

Despite those specs, the real transfer speed is somewhere around 110MB/s for all of them because there's only so fast a platter can spin and be VFM. These are the speeds you can expect when mirroring to them. Burst is faster but then what does that translate into in practice ??

Presently a SSD drive will give you twice that or approx 200MB/s give a take a few.

So its a 100% faster but only 2x as fast

All the hype about SSD is just that, not worth it at the price asked.  Even the advantage offered is questionable, who cares how fast you boot up or your apps load. Do you do this all the time, nah.

The only use where it benefits is in custom apps, a HTPC would be great, that quick startup time, awesome or a kiosk type app.

For general PC use currently, SSD is extravagant, it would be ludicrous for media storage.

[DarkPenguin]

A week ago I purchased 2 of the Seagate 1.5tb drives. They immediately started clicking and making other noises. So I purchased a couple of  of Western Digital 1.5tb drives and they seem just fine. The Seagates are going back to the store. Maybe I just got a bad lot. I had good luck with Seagate drives in the past.

Were they actually failing or were you just being paranoid?

[benn600]

I use SSDs in limited cases as the primary drive and they do offer faster boot up, faster program launches, better thumbnail reading, etc.  Of course media storage on SSD would be ridiculous.

Turns out that the sites with the best prices on the 2TB drives limit quantities to 3 or 5.  That's gonna be a problem...

[Magic_Randy]

Were they actually failing or were you just being paranoid?

Maybe I'm just paranoid.

I could hear clicking on the drives. I've had drives fail in the past that behaved like this.

The drives were not operating smoothly. I could feel the desk shake (kind of like China Syndrome) and found this was coming from the drives.

I have other Seagate drives and none of them act like this.

[Matt]

All the hype about SSD is just that, not worth it at the price asked.

I agree the prices are terrible.

But switching my boot drive to a fast SSD was one of the biggest 'wow' hardware changes I've ever made.  It's up there with seeing a 3D graphics card (a Voodoo) for the first time and using a dual core CPU (Core Duo) for the first time.

[newsposter]

I am not advocating the prices of SSDs.  Nor am I advocating the use of sata connect SSD devices.

Sata, even sata 3, holds back the potential speed of an SSD.  A PCIe SSD device, installed right on the system buss, gets you the full potential speed of the tech.

for a price.   if you want.

or not.

[DarkPenguin]

I agree the prices are terrible.

But switching my boot drive to a fast SSD was one of the biggest 'wow' hardware changes I've ever made.  It's up there with seeing a 3D graphics card (a Voodoo) for the first time and using a dual core CPU (Core Duo) for the first time.

I can imagine.  My switching from a 7200rpm drive to the new 600gb raptor did wonders.

[Mr ChriZ]

I agree the prices are terrible.

But switching my boot drive to a fast SSD was one of the biggest 'wow' hardware changes I've ever made.  It's up there with seeing a 3D graphics card (a Voodoo) for the first time and using a dual core CPU (Core Duo) for the first time.

Which SSD did you buy out of curiosity?

[fitbrit]

I'm using WD EARS and EADS drives successfully in my 20+ TB unRAID server. Beware the Hitachi drives since they use 5 platters compared to the 4 of other manufacturers; this results in more heat and power usage, which may be a factor in longevity of the drives.

[hit_ny]

I'm reading bad things about WD EARS, apparently they don't seem to be very reliable