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1.5 tb drives what brand?

ChrisDauer

Workshop Member
I know this isn't what you're looking for; but I just picked up a 1.0 TB Green Drive from Western Digital. It got great reviews on NewEgg.com

It's an internal drive and they recently had a sale on them for ~$90 each + free shipping. It's also up for a customer reliability award or some such because of the # of positive reviews on it (which is really the only reason I'm posting here).
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
AFAIK, the only 1.5TB drives at present are Seagate and the WD Green...

And do you want speed over quiet over heat -- or a balance?

WD greens are *supposed* to throttle speed-wise at 5400 to 7200 depending on performance demand. However, several tests have revealed that no matter how they were being utilized, they never got them to spin faster than 5400... The upside is they are very quiet, cool running and energy efficient.

The Seagates have clocked some impressive I/O performance specs as they have high-density platters spinning at 7200, but they seem to have a reliability issue if used in RAID devices. (Including the DROBO, which runs much slower than the WD Green to begin with, so IF I were filling my DROBO today, I would use 4 of the WD green 1 or 1.5TB drives.)

Note that WD now has a few 2TB drives on the market too, which may be worth investigating.

All that said, to my thinking the current prices for 1TB drives make them pretty compelling price/performance choices.

Cheers,
 

Lars

Active member
A friend of mine who runs a server hall swears by the Seagate RE/RE2 series. He has about a hundred of them running and over two years very few have failed. They are more expensive and largest size is 1TB though.
 

fotografz

Well-known member
One thing to watch out for IF filling a Drobo is compatability issues. Apparently, only certain serial numbers of the WD 1.5TB drive will work. Even the ones being sold at the Drobo store are no guarantee they'll work in their own machines. That was about a month ago, so maybe it's been dealt with ... if not. I strongly suggest sticking with 1TB.
 

LJL

New member
Ben,
Not sure what you mean here. If you are talking about using 3x500GB drives to store the 1.5TB of files, using three drives only takes up 3x as much physical storage space. It also increases the opportunity for failure by 3x. You may jeopardize ALL the image data at once, as would be the case on a 1.5TB drive if there was catastrophic failure or something, but all drives will fail at some point.

If you were talking about spreading the data out over 3x500GB using a RAID 0 (striped RAID) configuration, thus "spanning" the drives, you significantly increase your chances (by 3x) of possibly losing all the data should any one drive fail. This is why having at least one other copy of the data as an archive is so terribly important, and more so if using RAID 0.

In the end, the larger drives are not any less secure than the smaller drives, if the read/write heads and stuff are good, stay aligned, etc., as the data density is higher on the larger capacity drives, so any variation can be more problematic. As Marc mentions, there are some drives that are not as compatible with some devices, like the DROBO, and that should definitely be taken in to account. While things like the DROBO and other RAID 5 devices are nice, and can be helpful, it is still important to keep all the data onto another HD that can be stored offsite in case of failure of the first drives. This is where the larger capacity drives really help, and most would not need ultimate speed, etc., just solid access reliability. Just some thoughts.

LJ
 

Ben Rubinstein

Active member
I hadn't realised that spanned disks had no fault tolerance, i.e. if one disk goes then the whole lot is screwed up. I had thought that they acted as two seperate disks, just that the OS showed them as one. Ouch. Backed up of course but still...

Have to work out a way to change my main working disk back to non spanned!

Let me know if I'm wrong about this.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Ben:

I use a RAID-0 span on two disks for my OS. The benefit to this is a pair of RAID-0 spanned drives are nearly twice as fast on reads and writes as a single drive, the downside is the entire OS will go belly up in the event of EITHER drive failing.

Thus, with any RAID-0 set up, you need appropriate back-up. In my case I clone my OS off to partitions on other drives that allow me to boot my computer directly from them in the event my OS span goes down, and then it's a relatively simply matter to clone a duplicate OS copy back to a new or repaired RAID-0 array.

Cheers,
 
O

Oxide Blu

Guest
Ben:

I use a RAID-0 span on two disks for my OS.

Why? Are you doing significant read/write to/from your OS?

I can see RAID 0 for data/photo files, but not for an OS. I set up RAID 1 (mirrored) for my OS -- the redundancy allows me to start from either drive, and RAID 0 (striped) for the application data (photos and video) directories -- speed for reading and writing.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
I use my desktop as a repository for processed files sometimes, so I like it both big and fast. Plus I am impatient and stuff launches even faster :D
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
I've posted this elsewhere but let me explain more thoroughly.

1) I have 6 total drives in my Mac Pro. There are 4 main drive slide out bays and the MB has two additional free SATA2 ports on it. So without any added SATA card you can attach another 2 SATA2 drives for 6 total. This device replaces the stock optical bay and allows the two added drives to sit in the lower optical bay while maintaining a single optical drive up top. Note you cannot use this device if you want/need two *internal* optical drives: http://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cf...;Product_ID=158

2) So, now that is cleared up, I have the 2 drives in the lower optical bay in RAID-0 for a 2-drive stripe. These are WD 640G Caviar black drives, very fast dual-platter high density drives with 32MB buffers each, but very affordable for that performance at roughly $75 each. In RAID-0 they act as a very fast 1.25TB OS drive with a huge space reserve for temporary storage of files on the desktop.

3) Now that leaves the 4 drives in the regular drive bays. Here I have 4 WD 640G Caviar Blue drives -- as fast as the black version, but only 16MB buffers and $10 per drive cheaper, so this gives me 2.5 TB of relatively cheap, but screaming fast drive storage. Here I partition off a thin 30G stripe on the fastest outer rim of each drive in the array and use this as dedicated screaming fast 4x30G or 120G RAID-0 scratch drive.

3a) That leaves 600G on each remaining drive. Here I partition off 450G on each drive, so 4x450G for 1.8TB RAID-0 of screaming fast data storage; where I store my working image files and how I get the super read/write performance when working on my images.

3b) The last 150G, or slowest part of each drive is left non-RAID as simple, single drive data storage. Here I use 3 of those for spare bootable copies of my OS. My OS gets cloned over and updated to these 3 partitions a few different times each week, automatically scheduled and run using Carbon Copy Cloner. The last partition is used for Leopard's Time Machine for a different type of back-up and 150G is arguably smallish for that purpose, but the fact is given my particular back-up routine, I don't really need TM at all. Anyway, having these redundant bootable OS partitions allows me to re-boot my machine and re-build my OS instantly in case of a failure on my main OS RAID-0 array per #1.

4) Important: RAID-0 is done for performance only and has reduced reliability over any single drive installation. As such, it is imperative you maintain bootable copies of your OS and redundant copies of all your images as a mandatory practice if you choose to go this route for performance!

5) Note that it takes about 30 minutes total to clone over a full image of my OS including all loaded software, programs and files from any of the slow single partitions, so I can totally rebuild my system in less than an hour AND can keep working the entire time it is rebuilding!

6) All of my images are then backed up onsite to a FW800 DROBO, basically an automated 4-drive RAID-5 array for mass storage. This is not a particularly fast device, but it is reliable and has single drive failure protection with the RAID-5 configuration. If the image array goes down, it would take several hours, or basically overnight, to rebuild it reading from a DROBO, but the images (and other data) do remain accessible from the DROBO while that is going on.

7) In case the DROBO fails at the same time as my main box (like in the event of a fire at my studio), I have all my image files further backed up to single bare drives and stored offsite for maximum security.

Just thought it worth repeating here for posterity ;),
 

cjlacz

Member
The Seagate 1.5TB drives have had a lot of issues in the past. I know there have been a few firmware updates that *should* have fixed things. If you do buy them be sure to update them if needed. I really like the WD green drives.
 

Lars

Active member
Why? Are you doing significant read/write to/from your OS?

I can see RAID 0 for data/photo files, but not for an OS. I set up RAID 1 (mirrored) for my OS -- the redundancy allows me to start from either drive, and RAID 0 (striped) for the application data (photos and video) directories -- speed for reading and writing.
I have my desktop set up the same way (albeit with a slightly different OS). Dual 74GB Raptors (which were the fastest drives when I got them three years ago) makes the OS fast. Nothing important goes on those drives, only redundant stuff like OS, software and scratch areas. Data is stored on a separate drive, which in turn is synced to a NAS daily.
 

Lars

Active member
Is it not better to have scratch on a HD not being used for other stuff like the OS?
There's no absolute answer to that question. Conventional wisdom says OS virtual memory swap file and scratch should be on separate physical drives for best performance, however with a 64-bit OS and cheap RAM the need for using virtual memory swap diminishes. Running Vista 64-bit I have enough RAM not to need to use swap.

What I have noticed when using Photoshop is that when opening very large files (1.8 GB tiffs from my 8x10 scans) it's more important that the image file and scratch are on separate drives.
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
The question I have what about when using SSD drives. This week my new MPB comes in and all of you wondering what my selloff was for this is it a 15 inch 2.93 /6gb of Ram and two SSD drives running Raid O internally and ripping out the optical bay. Now since there is no spinning drives. Do I really need a scratch drive. My thoughts are no but I could partition a 20gb scratch off the SSD but see no point. I will try a scratch just for giggles on a external 7200 drive on Firewire 800 to see if pushing a LARGE file would benefit from it or I could even pull a 10k out of the desktop and try that. In the end I am actually thinking of selling my desktop. If I can get close to the same processing times i may just do that. I have to see how this all plays out
 

Lars

Active member
The question I have what about when using SSD drives. This week my new MPB comes in and all of you wondering what my selloff was for this is it a 15 inch 2.93 /6gb of Ram and two SSD drives running Raid O internally and ripping out the optical bay. Now since there is no spinning drives. Do I really need a scratch drive. My thoughts are no but I could partition a 20gb scratch off the SSD but see no point since. I will try a scratch just for giggles on a external 7200 drive on Firewire 800 to see if pushing a LARGE file would benefit from it or I could even pull a 10k out of the desktop and try that. In the end I am actually thinking of selling my desktop. If I can get close to the same processing times i may just do that. I have to see how this all plays out
A reason to have a separate scratch partition is to avoid fragmentation of the scratch file(s) and the accompanying performance decrease but that shouldn't be a problem with an SSD since seek time is almost zero. I would just use the system partition for scratch if I were you.
 
O

Oxide Blu

Guest
My thoughts are no but I could partition a 20gb scratch off the SSD but see no point.

I don't know if SSD partitions work that way, e.g. if it maps out and uses the same physical bits to define a directory. Flash memory has a finite number of 'writes' to a memory cell, then that cell is toast. SSDs have a random write feature to splatter data all over the place to keep the bits "equalized" to extend the memory's life. It could be when you define a directory the SSD is just tagging a header on the files until to collects enough files to reach the directory size you specify -- I don't know?!?
 
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