500 GB drives, yay or nay?

I've read a few customer reviews on that drive. Off the top of my head, the main thing people said about it was that you had to use some dos utility to make it be sata 300 instead of sata 150. Can't remember much else. but check it out on newegg, that is where I read the reviews, i think. I think it is also cheaper on newegg
Jason
 
pmgmedia said:
I just saw CompUSA selling a 750GB SATA drive for $280 (after rebate). That means you could put a 1.5 Terrabyte RAID 0 array in a new G5 tower for under $600. That's lots of real estate.. Anyone think that is a good idea?

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?pfp=SEARCH&Ntt=750GB&N=0&Dx=mode+matchall&Nty=1&D=750GB&Ntk=All&product_code=341415&Pn=750GB_Hard_Drive
Click to expand...

that's pretty amazing, but I'm confused. you said "selling a 750 GB SATA drive"...
and the link is for a 750 ATA, internal. these are two different types of connections, right?

still 750..Huge. I'm not into RAIDs yet, so no comment on that.
 
Ramjet1979 said:
I've read a few customer reviews on that drive. Off the top of my head, the main thing people said about it was that you had to use some dos utility to make it be sata 300 instead of sata 150. Can't remember much else. but check it out on newegg, that is where I read the reviews, i think. I think it is also cheaper on newegg
Jason
Click to expand...

thanks- I'll check. zipzoomfly has amazing delivery results, though. like next day for me, for free.
 
Alexa I would seriously consider a wade in the RAID waters, the performance increases are worth the hassle in the long term.
 
Alternatively, you could buy 2 320gb drives. Not sure about in the US but where I'm at (singapore), 2 320gb drives are actualyl cheaper than a single 500gb drive!
 
MalcolmOng said:
Alternatively, you could buy 2 320gb drives. Not sure about in the US but where I'm at (singapore), 2 320gb drives are actualyl cheaper than a single 500gb drive!
Click to expand...

I was going to suggest the same thing. I just bought 3 300 gig Seagate SATASs for $79.00 each at Frys. (I think the deal is done, though. Right now they have the same price for the 300gb ATA.) They have 300 gig SATA Maxtors for $79, though I wouldn't personally go that route, even though Seagate bought Maxtor.

FYI, http://shop3.outpost.com/product/4116853
 
I wouldl suggest if you can get that much realestate for so little money you consider mirror raid setups. I would not want to loose 500 gigs of media due to a faulty drive. When you staart getting ito that kind of volume you are looking at major time if it craps out. If you mirror(like most post houses) you have a back up if one drive dies. just my two cents.
 
What Brian is saying is too true. You don't want to run something that large unless it is some sort of temp drive and it doesn't matter if it dies. Otherwise I'd mirror it and run it that way. You get the security of the backup, though at the expense of your cash. :D Guess it just depends on the priority. Either way, moving to a SATA drive (and preferrably a RAID array) is the way to go.
 
Thanks, all. Good advice. I see a RAID in my future. I've just been having a totally separate backup drive to match the current project in progress all the time, not that efficient.
 
I'm going to throw another opinion in here.

I work as a Network Manager for a bank. In my job I've used a number of external hard drives and haven't found one yet that didn't fail and fail soon. Here's an example:

Last year, we had a project where the powers that be asked me to backup about 2 1/2 million pages of documents from about five separate sources in different locations and compile them onto one machine. To do that, we used 500GB Maxtor OneTouch III FireWire drives - one for each location - then brought them to the main location. The theory was that we would plug one in to the central machine and copy the data over, then plug the next one in and copy the data, etc. In the middle of copying from the second drive, it stopped responding. Upon restarting it, we had what appeared to be a dead drive. After dealing with Maxtor support, it was determined that the power supply on the enclosure was bad. We went round and round but eventually they gave us special authorization to open up the enclosure to perform data recovery (without that authorization we would have voided the warranty). Once it was opened and we had the drive out, data recovery was performed and all was well. On the third drive, the same thing happened. Same round and round with Maxtor support only this time, once we got the drive out, the drive too was toast. All of the data on that drive was gone. This happened on the last drive in that set as well.

I'd like to be able to chalk that up to Maxtor having done a bad job on those drives but we've experienced all sorts of similar problem resulting in either loss of productivity or loss of data using systems from LaCie, Buffalo and Quantum/Snap too.

If you do decide to do this, you definitely want something that will give you a RAID solution but here's the thing: You want good performance, right? So RAID 0. Oh, wait. No fault tolerance. RAID 3 or even 5 would be better. You'll definitely get the fault tolerance there but you're going to need a unit that takes at least three drives. More than that is almost a must. You know, ideally you want RAID 10 or even RAID 100. Ever administered one of those? Know anyone who has?

Even if you get the perfect RAID setup that really only helps you out when things go horribly wrong - and you will need this because you will find that things WILL go horribly wrong. Just ask around and you will find plenty of people who've suffered data loss. They always say, "well, at least we had good backups" which, yeah, that's great but wouldn't it have been better to not have had needed backups in the first place?

Don't get me wrong, I want to go tapeless in the worst way. I'd love to get rid of tapes for good but I'm not willing to take that risk with a film.

Work? Sure but not a film.
 
I'm just in the process of specing an editing machine. (For Adobe CS3).
And the HD options are a major question.

We've prety much settled on a RAID 5 using 3 x 400GB drives and a controller with a dedicated hardware Parity processor. This should give us 800GB of zipping fast storage, with the ability too loose one drive without consequence. Does that sound like a reasonable solution?

We also run an weekly backup to an external drive.

This setup is not for archival, just for in-and-out production. Camera tapes and edit master print tapes are used for media archival.


- Mikko ... fears for the RAID 0 drives in the 7 year old current editing computer every day. :shocked:
 
I'd go for 4 or even better 5 drives. If you lose one of those drives in the middle of a shoot, yes you will be able to continue and not lose any data but you will take a performance hit. Having the extra drives will allow you to maintain a better rate of transfer between the camera and the drive.

Are you going to be using hot swap drives? If so, you could consider a system that only has three drives installed and keeping a fourth drive on hand. That way, in the event of drive failure, you can pull out the offending drive and pop a new one in. That would shorten the length of your period of hassle.

Just out of curiosity, how are you doing your disk-to-disk backup? Are you using backup software or are you just copying the data from one drive to the other
 
We can deal with performance hits if necesarry. We are, as always, on a tight budget. It's more of a disaster prevention measure than ensuring continued productivity. So at that point, a 4th active drive becomes cost prohibative.

System will not be using Hot swap. In our application, the 10 mintues to open the box and perform a switcharoo is not worth the added cost.
We are however considering having a 4th drive on hand to allow for a fast swap if it ever becomes necesarry.

Disc-to-dic backup is performed by drive Syncronisation software.


Problem in the application I'm dealing with is that the financial deciders haven't ever had to deal with a loss of data and had to rely on a backup, so they don't properly understand the need. If they had their way, and we told them it was an option, it would be RAID 0 for cheapest performace.


So from a backup/security point of view, I think this should be adequate - though I think we will take your sugestion of having that extra drive on hand.

- Mikko
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top