First I'd suggest reading the Hard Drive section of the forum. These issues have been covered in detail several times in the last few days alone. You'll see many Chevy is better, Dodge is better, Ford is better type arguments but many posts include significant sources to support their opinions and the weight you apply to each post should be judged accordingly. First question I'd ask is about your "small business". Is it just you ? Does your wife have a machine and will be helping you ? Will you have a 2nd machine for yaself ? A laptop ? Any employees ?
In SoHo shops < 10 puters, it's hard to beat an NAS for data storage of critical files. It makes one hell of a fine media server also. Right now, IMO, the two most attractive options come from Netgear who grabbed the technology when they bought Infrant this past summer.
1. Four Drive (X-RAID) Unit - Start out with two drives and add up to two additional later. RAID 1 provides protection from a failed drive and the unit comes with network backup software and 5 client licenses with a 5 year warranty. Great Forum support. Netgear NV+ will cost ya $999 w/ two Seagate 500 GB drives.
http://www.netgear.com/Products/Storage/ReadyNASNVPlus.aspx
2. Two Drive (X-RAID) Unit - Start out with one drive and add the second when you're ready. X-RAID gives you hot swap capability and the ability to auto rebuild the array without data loss even when you add drives that aren't the same size. Expected to arrive in stores later this month at a cost of about $450 w/ 1 drive.
Both have built in media (iTunes) server)
Now if you just starting out as a 1 box shop, the NAS options might be a bit premature. But the Raptor is yesterday's performance HD. The Samsung F1, Hitachi 7k and Seagate 7200.1 all have bounced it off its perch.
Here's some TomsHardware review comments taken from another thread here on the forum. Again, you will get a great deal of info just reading the various forum posts as you will find many others with similar issues that have already been addressed.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] page9.html
Hitachi and Seagate battle head to head when it comes to winning the heart of the enthusiast who wants as much performance as possible. The Deskstar 7K1000 still does okay in the access time and I/O performance tests, but it loses ground when it comes to transfer rates.
The Barracuda 7200.11 offers the best low-level benchmark results, jumping over 100 MB/s read or write transfer rates and accessing data in an average of 12.7 ms. With the exception of access time and I/O benchmarks, it also clearly beats Western Digital's 10,000 RPM Raptor, and sets the new standard for desktop hard drives. (It's about time for Western Digital to come up with a new Raptor drive. Based on current technology, it should be able to regain everything that has been lost to Seagate right now.)
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] page7.html
The
WD5000AAKS is a Caviar SE16 drive with 16 MB cache, Serial ATA/300 and a 7,200 RPM spindle speed. Though it
cannot compete with the latest hard drive generation (Samsung Spinpoint F1 or Seagate Barracuda 7200.11), it is a solid performer and a reliable workhorse. Thanks to its under $120 price tag, this model offers an exceptional price/performance value.
The 7200.11 is $119 ....th WD5000AAKS is now discounted down to $104
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] age11.html
[The F1] beat Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital when it comes to performance. Hitachi and Seagate still offer better access times, which is why Samsung does not dominate the I/O benchmarks, but only the Barracuda 7200.11's access time is noticeably quicker. The maximum throughput of 118 MB/s is up to 18% faster than Seagate's 100 MB/s maximum, and the average and minimum throughput when reading and writing also dominate the benchmark results. When compared to WD's Caviar GP, the new Spinpoint F1 by Samsung offers roughly a third more throughput, which is very respectable."
Now let's look at the reliability comments covering past performance reliability of each vendor's offerings. Here's some data pulled from another thread on reliability:
"According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, a predecessor of the Seagate Cheetah 15K.5, the
Seagate Cheetah 15K.3 , is more reliable than 100% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation.
According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, a predecessor of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9, the
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 , is more reliable than 49% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation.
According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, the Western Digital
Raptor WD1500 is more reliable than 12% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation."
Just using those two as an example (reliability data BTW is from storagereview.com) , the reliability of the Seagate models is between 4 and 8 times that of the Raptor. If ya want another take on reliability, look at what HD's the high end NAS vendors are supplying in their NAS's.
MTBF is a meaningless statistic not meant to suggest that a HD has any chance of lasting 100 years. If you have 5 machines in your office, it's a pretty safe bet that 1 or 2 will fail before the warranty period ends. I have a P2P server here serving a small SOHO and I have replaced it's hard drives (under warranty) twice. They have 5 year warrantees BTW. I have built 68 boxes and replaced HD's on at least half of them before they got retired....and we don't keep machines even for print server duty after 4-5 years at most. Temperature plays a large role in HD life. IBM's white paper showed that a mere 10 degree temperature increase cut HD life in half. All of our boxes are built here, stuffed with as many fans as the case will fit and all have HD coolers or are mounted in vented cages with fans blowing thru them.
If money is tight, I'd just build a box with one HD. I'd make it a Samsung F1 or Seagate 7200.11
I'd partition it as follows (BootIt NG is free for 30 daya BTW):
1. C:\ OS and OS utilities - Not sure what I'd do for Vista as yet I have never considered it for a build. Still looking for a reason to look away from it's "anything you can do, I can do slower" singsong. Until hybrid drives start approaching the performance of non hybrid drives, it lacks a reason to consider unless you must have Aero or play Halo 3. But if it was XP, I'd make a NTFS partition of 16 GB size and throw the OS on it, OS utilities like backup program and partitioning utility and that's it.
2. D:\ Page file and temp file partition - I make these 8 gigs and FAT32 since we don't need the file protections offered by NTFS, we might as well free ourselves from it's overhead. Other threads explain how to do this. Your Seagate / Samsung HD can rip data off at about 100 MB'sec here......this will be the most used portion of ya HD. Ya can have it at the outside of ya drive (100 MB/sec) or at the inside (60 MB/s). Since 100 is a lot bigger than 60, me choosie outside.
3. E:\ ..... etc - OK at this point what is more important to ya.....where do ya need ya speed. Obviously I'm talking games or programs. From this point on it's pretty personal....do what works for you. Consider a partition for a "maintenance copy" of your OS. Consider a partition for backups. Consider a partition for media files. Pick the number of cabinets (partitions) ya want and then arrange them from fastest to slowest needs. The stuff ya want to go fast gets the lower letters (outside of the HD platters), the stuff ya don't mind going slow, gets the inside (higher letters).
If you want to go a step further.....a 2nd drive is the next step.....If you built the box as above and are coming back later to add that second drive, it is very easy. Let's say you went partition wild on ya original build and had:
C:\OS
D:\ Swap & temp files
E:\Programs
F:\Games
G:\Office Data
H:\Personal Stuff
I:\Backups
At this point, I'd create a new swap / temp file drive at the front of the second drive. I'd rename old D to say M and then call that new swap drive D:\ From then on ya might wanna move things around but remember you can change letter designations.
But again, before messing with RAID, I'd build with just one drive and see how it performs.....if you or not waiting for anything nor running outta room, it's hard to justify messing with RAID or multiple drives.
When ya have some cashola available consider which NAS solution makes the most sense for your long term goals.
I am running a 9 box SOHO network....most of the boxes, including the laptops, have single 7200 rpm drives. We run AutoCAD, Photoshop, GoLive, and lotsa games and have no speed issues. We used to use all 15k SCSI drives on every single box but storage I/O is no longer the AutoCAD bottleneck it once was so we haven't been able to justify the additional cost. All office data (SO side of SOHO) is stored on various NAS volumes the NAS (Infrant NV+ w/ twin 500 GB Seagates). Another volume (for the HO side of SOHO) includes an iTunes and media server.
BTW, another thing to consider is warranty policies. What do you do when ya HD dies ? Will manufacturer cross ship w/ credit card or will they require you to get an RMA, ship in the old one, let them take up to 2 weeks to examine it, and then ... if they think it's defective...send you a new one....UPS ground....Can you wait 3 weeks to rebuild your machine ?
That's why I try and stick with vendors who will cross ship. It's also why I like NAS's as I can always access my data from any other box on the network....and even if I don't have a 2nd box, a borrowed laptop can easily get needed files.
) I'm sure there will be some different opinions.
).
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