Some advice on storage/game drives please!

Sumanji

Sumanji

Sumanji

Soldato
Joined
12 Mar 2003
Posts
8,357
Location
USA
Hey,

At the moment I have 2 x 74GB Raptors in RAID-0 for OS and games, and a 320GB WD Caviar for storage and backups. I've just bought a 64GB Crucial C300 SSD to replace the Raptors (which are >5 years old now!). So now I need a bigger secondary drive to put all my games and warez on.

I'm a bit confused as to what to buy! I want a good read speed for game loading times, and some redundancy would be nice as losing 1.5TB of data is never a good thing! So I think maybe two cheap 1.5TB drives in RAID-1 would be good?

I'm a bit of a WD fanboy, so Caviars preferred :p

Cheers,

Su
 
Right, i have three drives not raptors but they are all samsung 1TB F3's which are great because the drive is just two platters and are split inside the drive into two 500GB storage but read as one big 1TB, i mean they have fast speeds and pretty much everyone recomends them in the review section of the drive and also quiet.
 
Ok, so I was looking at the WD Green EARS drives, but supposedly they sometimes have issues running in RAID, and also have a less than stellar reliability rate.

I think I'm gonna go for 2 x 1TB drives, but I'm not sure which ones to get!

  • Samsung F3
  • WD Caviar Blue (EALS)
  • Hitachi 7K1000C

The first two seem to be neck and neck on speed, with the Samsung easier on the ears, and the WD supposedly more reliable. The Hitachi is slower but again a bit more reliable.

Come on guys, give me a hand! :D

Su
 
Google "Caviar Green TLER RAID" and you will get hundreds of links.

As to the reliability, it's a bit subjective I guess, but apparently all 1.5TB and higher capacity drives have a higher failure rate than <1TB drives. I guess owing to them using more platters & heads, so higher chance of failure?

I do secretly want the WD's but they are about £10 more per drive, and availability seems a bit scare compared to the F3's etc.

OOI, where are all these drives made?

Cheers,

Su


[edit] After a quick Google Image search, seems like: Samsung in Korea, Hitachi in China and WD in Thailand (?!). All 3 of my current WD drives are Malaysia... and if you GIS the current Enterprise drives (Raptors, RE etc), they are still made in Malaysia. Surprise, surprise.
 
Last edited:
I've always used Hitachi drives not because they're the quickest, they're by no means slow, but because they have class leading reliability.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom