Looking for a large 1TB+ storage drive

[NickK]

Ok, I'm looking for a large storage drive. It'll be used as an archive drive and as a quarterly backup snapshot drive for Time Machine. I have a 1TB firewire TM drive already more frequent daily/weekly backups and just wanted to ensure it's not going to fail. Last time I bought drives the bang for buck was 200GB for large drives!

Requirements:
1. 1 or 1.5TB
2. High reliability
3. Low cost per MB
4. Low power/quiet would be good as it means I can leave my laptop backup going overnight.

Speed isn't too important but SATAII would be preferable. The snapshot would be of the laptops 120GB SSD.

I'm leaning towards Samsung's Egogreen 1.5TB but the Hitachi Deskstar special offer with 2TB is tempting.

Any thoughts or experience of these drives?

 

[TheTard]

Id probs go for two samsung F3's because they are great hard drives, but if you need one hdd then go for either the 1.5TB F2 or a 1.5TB Caviar green. The Hitachi is meant to be quite noisy from the reviews i've read

 

[NickK]

I went with the Samsung Ecogreen 5,400rpm 1.5TB drive. Should arrive today.

It's also just occurred to me that the 1.5TB is going to take ages to perform the first full format to check the drive is fine (reviews indicate 5 hours!). Then another age to duplicate everything!

 

[derkaderka]

I got 4 of those drives 2 weeks ago for my Raid5 Nas
Took 24 hours to build the array!
I will say tho these drives are well slow compared to the WD's they replaced tho

 

[NickK]

The old 200GB drives were SATAI and I used to have 6 of them in a RAID5 array running EVMS under SuSE 9. Took a good 10-12 hours for the array to build and recover from degraded state!

Once the 1.5TB drive is formatted and loaded then all the rest of the time will be small incremental writes and reads so it should be ok.

Edit@16:06: 55% through first format.. *yawn*
Edit@17:55: 90%.. Zzzz
Edit@18:34: 100%.. finally the format is completed!