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Replacing hard drives close to failing

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I'm looking for opinion and your advice to help me decide what to replace my current hard drives with.

At the moment, I have 5 hard drives that I've had for the past 4 or 5 years, and they are coming to the end of the line.

My main system drive is a WD VelociRaptor 300Gb, I mainly play games and need the speed. But I also do audio, video and photoeditting, so the speed is needed in my case.

as for the other 4 hard drives, they too are close to failing. (my fifth hard drive has already failed, luckily I had just backed it up the night before)

speed isn't really needed for the replacement as they only serve as backup and storage drives.

I've never been fond of Seagate or Maxtor (iirc seagate has bought Maxtor sometime in the past) So I'd rather not use seagate for replacements.

The 4 hard drives has a total capacity of ~2.8TB, with 2.25Tb used

What would you recommend for replacements?

My system specs:

Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz (OC'ed to 3.8Ghz Liquid Cooled)
EVGA X58 SLI Motherboard
24GB Corsair DDR3 1600Mhz
Triple EVGA GTX 260's 216 Core Super-Clocked in SLI
300GB WD VelociRaptor 10,000 RPM HDD
Bluray Burner
BluRay Reader
Dual Ultra X4 1050 Watt PSU (2 needed to power the 3 Graphic cards)
Windows 7 Ulitmate 64-bit
Cooler Master 932 HAF case

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Hi there,
Just a few questions:
What is your price range?
Do you have any etimates for growth?
Any special needs for backing up and securing your data?

Nice rig you have there.

eloric said:
Hi there,
Just a few questions:
What is your price range?
Do you have any etimates for growth?
Any special needs for backing up and securing your data?

Nice rig you have there.


Thank you!

At this time, I can only spend around another usd$200 on drives, I know its not much. But until I can find a job again its all I can spend. (Full Time University student)

for the growth/backup/securing aspect, not much for growth. If/when the time comes I can get a Sata expansion card with internal and eSata and build a small storage server. I tend to backup to dvd/blu-ray once every few months, just to clean up older data. For security I use various methods for, both, HDD's and optical disks.

Thank you, I love the machine, just need to RMA this memory. When I hit a certain percentage, and at random times, the system likes to reset on its own. Have a friend with the same memory (after I got mine) and he too had the same issue, contacted Corsair and had to run different test, each giving the same error (can't recall what he told me).

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buwish said:
You have a similar set up to mine. I'd recommend may be looking at Western Digital, as they make some decent drives, even though I only have one in my system.



I tend to stay with WD.. But I'm looking more for specific types of drives, the capacity. Also I'm trying to stay away from known hard drives that may have issues or anything.

I can't afford to spend 100+ on a drive and have it go out within a year. I need them to take the abuse that I give them and last for the next 4-5 years... My 4 current drives, I have moved, literally 100's of TB of data between them and I've had them since 320GB sataII drives first came out. (my first drive that failed was a 160 sata I drive had that since they first came out)

harrisjohne said:
I tend to stay with WD.. But I'm looking more for specific types of drives, the capacity. Also I'm trying to stay away from known hard drives that may have issues or anything.

I can't afford to spend 100+ on a drive and have it go out within a year. I need them to take the abuse that I give them and last for the next 4-5 years... My 4 current drives, I have moved, literally 100's of TB of data between them and I've had them since 320GB sataII drives first came out. (my first drive that failed was a 160 sata I drive had that since they first came out)



$200 is a tight budget, especially for performance. Pretty much rules out SSD at least for the near future until prices come down. (Hopefully, you will be gainfully employed by then!) I have Samsung, and really like mine, as many readers here will agree. This drive has a price per GB of less than 7 cents: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Buy two of these drives and you will have 200 GB greater capacity, and still meet your $200 budget.


For better performance, and a compromise on space, WD Caviar Black is ofter the preferrable way to go, : Here is a 750 GB version for that comes in close to 10 cents a GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

For $180, buy one of the WD Caviar Blacks and a Samsung 1.5 TB. This gives you 2.25 TB of new storage space. May have to keep some of your older drives to leave some excess capacity, although your mobo does have plenty of ports if I recall.

Here is one more option to consider; RAID-0 array will beat any single drive. Each of these $55 Samsung Spinpoint F3 500 GB drives alone are comparable in speed to your current raptor: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Buy two of the Spinpoint F3s, added to the 1.5 TB drive above, and now you have nearly 2.5 TB total, only $10 over budget and way better performance than you now have!

Hope this answers your question. If you want to do some additional research on your own, here is a great Schmid and Roos article: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430.h.... Can't thank these guys enough for their work.

eloric said:
$200 is a tight budget, especially for performance. Pretty much rules out SSD at least for the near future until prices come down. (Hopefully, you will be gainfully employed by then!) I have Samsung, and really like mine, as many readers here will agree. This drive has a price per GB of less than 7 cents: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Buy two of these drives and you will have 200 GB greater capacity, and still meet your $200 budget.

I had thought about SSD's but until the price per GB drops, I won't be able to do them. Though I would like to though.

Not bad, and the pricing is pretty good too.

-------

For better performance, and a compromise on space, WD Caviar Black is ofter the preferrable way to go, : Here is a 750 GB version for that comes in close to 10 cents a GB: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

For $180, buy one of the WD Caviar Blacks and a Samsung 1.5 TB. This gives you 2.25 TB of new storage space. May have to keep some of your older drives to leave some excess capacity, although your mobo does have plenty of ports if I recall.

I won't be able to keep the old drives, like I said they will all fail soon.

As far as performance goes, It really doesn't matter for the storage drives. As long as they have atleast a 80mb/s rate, I'm happy (not picky really) lol

-------

Here is one more option to consider; RAID-0 array will beat any single drive. Each of these $55 Samsung Spinpoint F3 500 GB drives alone are comparable in speed to your current raptor: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Buy two of the Spinpoint F3s, added to the 1.5 TB drive above, and now you have nearly 2.5 TB total, only $10 over budget and way better performance than you now have!


I've thought about raid 0, but never have tried it. Read up on it and all, but I don't know. Maybe in the future when I understand the Raid arrays better I can give it a go

-------

Hope this answers your question. If you want to do some additional research on your own, here is a great Schmid and Roos article: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430.h.... Can't thank these guys enough for their work.


that link seems to be missing :/ 

It has helped me alot
Thank you very much for taking your time on this :) 

My apologies, I did not realize you were from the UK. I did a search, and the numbers are a bit higher accross the pond. Drat that VAT!

Here is a TB of caviar green for £58.74:

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/West...

Can't vouch for the seller though.

As for the link, the article appears to have been updated. Try this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/HDD-6Gbit,2528.html

The article was a Schmid and Roos comparison of the WD Caviar black and Samsung Spinpoint F3, as they relate to the WD Velociraptor. This one also includes discussion on Hitachi, which also seem to be reasonably priced.

Good luck, and wish I could be more help for your overseas efforts.

harrisjohne said:
actually I'm from the US. I don't know how it's showing that I'm from the UK :lol: 

anyway, I ordered two of the Samsung F2 1.5Gb drives

Thank you for all the help.



Well, LOL! You are Welcome.
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