Hard disc confusopoly

[fivemack]

I have run out of disc space; I have a spare hot-swap disc bay in my computer; I'd like to put a 1TB disc in it.

www.scan.co.uk list thirteen models of 1TB SATA hard disc, ranging in price from £77 to £165, with no idea as to what differentiates them. I currently have three Seagate drives and a WD drive, so diversification suggests the cheaper Hitachi one, but that's a justification not much better than writing down the list and using a pin.

Given my curse, I wonder if I should buy two 1TB drives from different manufacturers and keep them as a RAID1.

Comments

[dave [earth.li] (from livejournal.com)]

Wot, no 1.5TB drive :)

The WD Green Power ones will save you 2-3 quid/year in electricity costs I think. They definitely use less, and when you have half a dozen in a server it's a noticeable change.

Shame they don't do 1.5TB yet.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

1.5T is a good deal more expensive per T than the cheaper of the 1T drives, and 1T is already a very generous amount of disc space (significantly more than the total I have already), but otherwise it's quite tempting.

[(Anonymous)]

It's not a good deal more. Dabs do 1.5TB drives for 130 inc vat, which is less than 87 quid/G. If you're starting at 77 inc vat for a 1TB drive. Then it isn't a significant change.

I've bought 46 of the 1.5TB drives to store the work MP3 collection. We have to consider the overhead of one server for every 4 drives, so the price difference is totally negligible. Anyway, that's a totally different situation than yours.

[dave [earth.li] (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, I appear to have been signed out, that was me.

[arnhem.livejournal.com]

Seagate (and probably the others) now differentiate between their usual range of disks, and their "server" models (usually about 10% more expensive) which are allegedly designed for continuous uptime.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Speed, physical size, reliability. Some drives automatically recalibrate themselves at inconvenient moments and interfere with video editing. Look for "media capable" or similar phrases if this is an issue. Some drives have IBM's SMART failure early-warning system. Depends what you're doing with the drive.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

It seems that the Samsung drive is the highest-tech (334GB platters) and also the cheapest, but there are a lot of complaints on the Internet about its reliability. The Hitachi is the first one that came out, and has five platters (in the tradition of largest-capacity Deskstars) where many of the competitors have four. The Maxtor looks quite promising.

I'm a bit surprised that none of the usual-suspects hardware sites have done a round-up review of terabyte discs.

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

One thing worth considering is the amount of warranty each comes with.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Fast as memory technology develops, it's continually outstripped by our ability to fill computers full of data. It's a new spin on Parkinson's Law.