2 questions

[sybaris]

Im looking for a new hard drive or drives and need some advice.

My current 1.5Tb is running low on space and is getting on a bit. I think its life expectancy is not too long either.

The questions are
Should I get a 3Tb drive or 2 2TB drives?

2 drives = better redundancy
1 drive = cooler and less power consumption, and well is only one drive.

The drive will be accessed by a single pc and not shared, though it is used for all round use.

Im not interested in raiding them.
I have an SSD for my OS (win 7 64 bit)

I've an ASUS P5Q-E mobo and I don't think it runs SATA 3.
As I understand something like the WD or the Hitachi 72000 rpm would drop down and use half the cahce. Is this true?

I also have a removable drive bay to backup on to other spare drives.

So what do you think would be best?

 

[sybaris]

As you wrote the book on backups for an FTSE100 company you should be able to answer your own questions.

Im sure in your haste to try to have a dig you noted where I said back in the day. To most people that would indicate it has been some time and that times have changed and I have move on to do more meaningful things. Hence, why I am a little rusty. Different times, different technology.

You are probably fresh out of tech school and probably don't even know what a LTO, dat4 or SDLT is. Back then before we had TB drives, there was tape and some long command line instructions. That was a real system. None of todays GUI point and click the schedule. Techies today have it so easy in comparison.

 

[sybaris]

Hey Surveyor, no problem, was 1am when I replied and a little tired. Actually its nice to have a little banter on here. No offence taken.

This is for my home PC. I am basically out of space and replacing one drive in the system for another larger one.

Then I noticed that I could get 2x2TB drives for the price of 1x3GB drive. This put me in the dilema of one drive is easier, has less effect with airflow in my case, marginally less to power, though I have 3 drives in the case so far.

Im not too bothered with redundancy and backup, as one of the other existing drives has software mirroring and I have a removable drive bay for backing up.

I know this is not the most accurate method of calculating free space, but I normally estimate that i will lose 10% usable space on the drive anyway so 2 drives with 3.6gb each or 1 drive with 3.7gb. Not much in it.

Also I take the point.
1 drive is a single point of failure.
however 2 drives could mean twice the risk of failure or they could mean 1/2 the risk of failure. But as I mentioned that is not really a huge factor.

Are the Hitachi drives any good?

I think it comes down to
cost
hassle factor
access time (though for one standalone PC its not going to be too bad even at 54000 rpm)