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david1701

david1701

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David
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right I'm gonna use pairs of 1gb internal drives stored and filed as my backup solution, all sorted on how to collect and gather them

just looking at 4 different 1tb drives all 50 quid ball park. A 5400 western digital a 5400 samsung, a 7200 samsung and a 7200 seagate.

I know 7200 gives better performance but thats not the biggest issue in the world, does 5200 offer an advantage other than power (a complete non issue). I'm leaning towards the seagate because its a name I know but I thought I'd ask some of the IT guys on here who know a lot more than me about what drives fail ect
 
as an advantage....

I would imagine 5200 = Less heat ?

Hence longevity/reliability ?
 
I use a similar set-up myself, two internal 1TB drives. One is my primary photo colection, the second a mirror of it. I use Microsoft's SyncToy to synchronise one to the other frequently.

This is also synced to a second pc (over LAN), slighlty less frequently. Again using SyncToy.

Personally, I've used nothing but SAMSUNG in the last few years and have never had a problem. I have 4x F1's (1TB), 1x F3 (1TB) and 1x F2 (1.5TB).

IMO, for what you are using them for you'll see very little (if any) difference between a 5200 and a 7200 drive speed wise.

I do sort of have a policy though that once a drive is a couple of years old, it gets replaced regardless with a new one. (The old one being deployed to none-critical duties). This keeps up with increasing storage needs too.
 
backup solution is everything on the go is on the lappy drive, everything else is kept (along with on the go) on a 1tb internal drive in an esata caddy on my desk, which gets filed when its full with a list of whats on it.

A second 1tb drive is mirrored from it daily/weekly and lives in the workshop.

Long term is to build a NAS for on the go/current stuff (as in like 2 years) and keep filed copies of that. Maybe a second NAS in my offsite (but when I fix the wireless link still on network)


epic whats with the samsung over the seagate or are they just making good drives at the moment?
 
ChrisJ_SLH said:
IMO, for what you are using them for you'll see very little (if any) difference between a 5200 and a 7200 drive speed wise.

I do sort of have a policy though that once a drive is a couple of years old, it gets replaced regardless with a new one. (The old one being deployed to none-critical duties). This keeps up with increasing storage needs too.
Click to expand...

they're all 50 quid +- 2 quid

thats a very sensible strategy ;)
 
I mostly want a server so it can take running orb from the office pc + I have a ****** old desktop.

ebuyer did have a 4tb NAS in a shuttle case that looked niiiiccceee for 400 quid though :p
 
See just goes to show the wonderful I.T. world we live in.

I have had 2 samsung drives fail in the last 12 months.
 
PsiFox said:
See just goes to show the wonderful I.T. world we live in.

I have had 2 samsung drives fail in the last 12 months.
Click to expand...

The majority of brands are so reliable now that the average punter will be very unlucky to see enough failures in one particular brand to establish a trend. It's only when you are deploying/using very large numbers of drives that you'll be able to draw any conclusions.

If any of the big brands had real issues there reputation would be quickly damaged, as happened with IBM years ago with the Deskstar drives.

As I said, I uses Samsung, purely because I have had good results with them in the past. (Although I did have one dead on arrival, a component had fallen of the control board). I guess most people are the same, they stick with something out of brand royalty and reputation rather than deep study of failure modes and reliability data.

I'm sure that as soon as I have one fail that loses me critical data I'll declare them the most unreliable, must avoid at all costs, brand in an emotional knee-jerk reaction. ;)
 
Wouldn't touch Samsung with a greasy bargepole. I'm an IT engineer and have seen far too many die in the last year, mainly 500mb and 1tb drives.

All seagates in my machines, although their old 40gb drives where truly crap.

I do make sure that all my machines have an extra fan directed onto the drives so they run cool.

Maxtor used to be good but they have gone down the pan the lst few years.

Seems a lot of the time that one manufacturer does okay for a while and then goes crap, then another .........


IBM Deskstars that brings back memories of the wrong grease, unlike the wrong trousers :D
 
Neil your not wrong mate, just like the numerous arguments I've had about Dell GX series desktops. My old company nearly sued them for the crap they turned out.

One thing as I mentioned is that it's always worth a few bob to stick a big fan blowing cold air on your drives. The cooler they run the longer they will last.

I use a 120mm golfball fan ( Dimples in the blades, run silent ) to shift air over the 5 in my machine ( various makes no Samsung ) so they run cold. Never had a drive fail except the above mentioned.

I'm sure if they had a specific model they would sort it asap to save face.

:D
 
Western Digital get my vote. Always used them, run them in my RAID 5 24/7 on my backup server. :)
 
ChrisH said:
IBM Deskstars that brings back memories of the wrong grease, unlike the wrong trousers :D
Click to expand...

Many years ago (mid 90's) in my last job we had a lot of machines with Western Digital Caviar drives in them. These had an annoying habit of randomly refusing to boot. When it happened we would call one of the two IT blokes down on the 2nd floor and report the fault. One of them would duly appear at our office on the 5th and remove the drive and disappear with it for 20 minutes. He would then return, re-install it and the machine would boot-up fine and be happy.

After several occurrences of this on different pc's, we got curious as to what they were doing with them to sort them out. We asked and they were a bit coy. So we followed them discretely one day during on of these episodes.

Their repair procedure was thus:
1. Remove drive.
2. Run vigorously down the 6 flights of stairs between the 5th and the 2nd shaking the drive above their heads.
3. Return to there lab and have a coffee.
4. Run vigorously back up the stairs shaking the drive again.
5. Re-install drive.

Turned out this particular batch of drives had overly sticky grease that when cold could sometimes stop the heads from getting off the park position.

Repair bill:
- removal of drive, shaking of drive, re-installation of drive: Free of charge
- knowing that the drive needed a shake: Priceless...
 
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