Great deal on Hitachi 500gb SATA drives

[David Roth weiss]

My first SCSI drive was a whopping 2gb drive, which cost me $1500. I thought I would never fill it up.

[Chris Poisson]

David,

What kind of enclosure and card are need to use these as an external RAID?

Have a wonderful day.

[David Roth weiss]

Chris,

You can see what I’ve got at https://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata2even4.html. This is the controller card and 4-drive hot-swappble SATA enclosure. I also own own their 2-bay model. Both are terrific, well made, and very quit. Check out the review at https://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/firmtek/1ve4/

DRW

[Tom Matthies]

For what it’s worth. I just put my two Hitachi 500Gb drives (see above entry) into a Firmtek two drive enclosure just today. Hooked it up to the 4 port card I installed in the G5. A quick trip to the Disk Utility app. and in about a minute in had an almost 1Tb striped raid online. I copied all my files off of my LaCie raid. It took nearly three hours. Everything went well. I then took the LaCie’s offline and fired up FCP, reconnected my files to the Firntek raid and everything played back without a hitch. Total time, minus the time to copy the files from the Lacies to the Firmtek raid…probably about 30 minutes or less. Now that’s the way it’s supposed to work!
Tom

[David Roth weiss]

Tom,

Thats it!!! Not much to it. It just works. My SCSI array became a big noisy paperweight the day I got my first Firmtek SATA setup. Its once of the few times in this business when you can have it all — cheaper, faster, and better.

DRW

[Chris Poisson]

Hey David,

Thanks for the links. Yes, I spent all day Saturday frantically copying everything off my SCSI RAID which gave me 4 slow beeps that morning when it booted, which according to the manual means a drive is either going or is down. I ran out to the Apple store and got another Big Disk Extreme as a cheap backup and thankfully I got everything saved.

So anyway, your post above couldn’t have been more timely, and I guess for others here as well, ’cause I just called mwave and they only have one unit left. Problem is I need to get this SATA box up ASAP, as I have an HD job coming in this week, and no more SCSI for a while.

So I guess my next question is, what other drive units will fit in the Firmtec enclosure?

Have a wonderful day.

[Chris Poisson]

David, Tom,

If I get the 4 drawer enclosure, does it have to run with for drives or could I just put in two or three for now?

Have a wonderful day.

[Ed Dooley]

The unit supports *any* SATA drive, 1.5 or 3 gbps. The cost per gig sweetspot still generally favors 300g SATA drives, on average,
but just like the 500g drive mentioned, it’s now getting better with the bigger drives. The recent troubles with the new perpendicular
drives notwithstanding, Hitachi, Seagate, and Maxtors seem to get the best reliability, warranty, performance marks. Barefeats
tests them all, and they’ve been favoring the Maxtor Maxlines for performance and 5 year warranty. I’ve even owned a bunch
of Western Digital ATA drives that are still going strong after 5 or 6 years.
I don’t have the Seritek model, but every other 4 or more bay enclosure I’ve had allows any number of drives up to the max.
Ed

[Tom Matthies]

Chris.
Check out Firmtek’s web site. Drill down deep enough and there will be a page with specific drives/model numbers they have tested with their enclosures.
FWIW, I called my local distributor I usually deal with this morning and that particular Hitachi drive is now out of stock there. Last week when I ordered the two I bought, they had showed almost 200 units in the warehouse. Looks like the inventory is going fast! Darn…late again.
Tom

[David Roth weiss]

Chris,

Check out the Hitachis at Zip Zooom Fly https://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=100600-1&prodlist=nextag. Not as cheap as MWave, but still a darn good price.

If you get the 4-bay Firmtek enclosure you can put any number of drives in and just use that number, creating a raid with 2, 3, or 4 drives — your throughput will of course be greater with a four drive raid. Adding drives to the raid at a later time would mean moving all the media off the drives before adding additional drives restriping all four together.

Its all so easy, but don’t hesitate to ask if you have any more questions.

DRW