Great deal on Hitachi 500gb SATA drives

[David Roth weiss]

Just got off the phone with MWAVE and they just got more drives in, still at $199.90 each. Get ’em fast, they only have 34 units left.

DRW

[Ed Dooley]

Storage review did a review of 500g SATA drives a couple of weeks ago. But they left out the Hitachi.
I didn’t see anywhere in the review why they didn’t include it. They did the Seagate, Western Digital, and Maxtor.
https://www.storagereview.com/articles/200607/500_1.html
Ed

[Chris Poisson]

SATA RAID question for everybody:

So I’ve got the Firmtec and the Hitachi’s coming, I’m wondering if any of you see any value to sacrificing some speed for some security by striping at RAID 3. I won’t be doing any uncompressed HD that I know of, so the speed should do.

I am a bit gun shy after losing 3 LaCie Firewire 400’s, a Maxtor 250 gig 400, a Big Disk Extreme 500 (after only two weeks!) and a Huge Media vault that is back in the shop for the third time in 3 years, so reliability is an issue with me. In fact, if I hadn’t striped the Huge Vault at 3 when it came back from the second hospitalization 6 months ago, I would surely have lost some important files, thank god when it started beeping last Saturday I was able to get everything off it.

As an aside, I will still have the 800 gig SCSI RAID (when it gets fixed) for backup, plus I have 1.2 TBs in Firewire 800’s with a 2- drawer Promax enclosure, the new BDE and another LaCie 250 Firewire 800 drive for additional backup. I’m thinking the Huge vault will just be for latent storage (what a shame/waste!)

Have a wonderful day.

[David Roth weiss]

Hey Chris,

The Raid 0 vs Raid 1,3,5 question is an age-old question that has been batted around for nearly as long as man has owned large hard drives — about a decade. I must say, now that I too will be bumping up to 2TB the matter suddenly takes on slightly different meaning. I have never considered anything but Raid 0 until now, as the cost/benefit ratio did not seem worthwhile, at least not for me. Losing both the space and the speed was simply giving up too much. Now, with the space consideration suddenly almost meaningless, the speed consideration is everything.

I’m getting my drives later today or tomorrow and now that you have mentioned it I’m going to look into this, and I will run the Blackmagic throughput test to see what I get with different Raid configurations. The people at Firmtek have been very helpful in the past, and I’ll give them a jingle to see what they recommend. I’ll post the results here and will send them to you.

DRW