Shining Arcanine

Most people would not be interested in this. The performance is worst than a mechanical hard drive: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/17

It would be nice if they told people using SSDs with TRIM that this software won't be able to recover their files.

I can say the same, although I had a much smaller number of them. I have only owned one Seagate hard drive and it died on me two days ago after only a little over 6 weeks of service. To be fair, I ran it 24x7 in my media center PC and stored a few experimental virtual machines on it, but still, I will never buy another Seagate hard drive so long as I live. I heard terrible things about Seagate and the only reason I was willing to take a chance was because it was so cheap. Thankfully, Newegg is giving me a full refund and is paying for return shipping.

The computer is a Windows Media Center system whose primary purpose is to record high definition television recordings for remote playback on a networked XBox 360. The array will basically be a huge pool of storage on which it can store its recordings. At the same time, my other systems use small SSDs, so I will likely shift data from my other systems onto it to make room for other things at some point. I might also store backups on it. I do not envision myself spending more than $500 on this. Other people in my house won't allow it.

I recently lost a 2TB hard drive after less than 2 months of operation. Newegg is giving me a full refund and is paying for return shipping, so I want to replace the 2TB drive with a RAID 5 configuration. The motherboard is a XFX GeForce 9300 mGPU, which claims to support RAID 5. I am not sure whether to go with the software RAID supported by my motherboard or a dedicated hardware raid card. Which I do comes down to the following points and I was hoping people here could help me fill in the blanks. Can I replace the drive and rebuild the array while the system is running? Does the RAID controller provide guarantees that a powerloss or system crash will not leave the drives in an inconsistent state? i.e. If you do two writes to the array, will there be at any point in time a state where some drives reflect write A, but not write B while other drives reflect write B, but not write A? If the controller should die or I should need to move the drives to another system, how easy would it be for me to connect the drives to another system and still be able to access my data? i.e. Is the striping and parity data done in a way that makes controllers interchangeable? If I want more storage in the future, will I be able to add drives to the array and then have the drives I added appear as unpartitioned space to the OS? Can that be done while the system is running? I am concerned about error recovery causing drives to fall out of the array. I know that Western Digital has a TLER feature that avoids that, but it is expensive. Is there any way that I can address that concern while keeping costs low? Also, I have read about an automatic head parking feature that is present in new drives that could cause them to fail prematurely. Is there any way to disable that feature on drives that have it or will I need to find drives that do not have it? Since I have not committed to using my motherboard to implement RAID 5, does anyone have any suggestions for dedicated RAID 5 controllers that address my concerns? I am not necessarily set on using SATA drives, so if there are any advantages to getting a controller for SCSI or SAS drives, I would consider possibly using those drives instead.

Get a Western Digital Caviar SE hard drive. They are extremely quiet, especially if you get one that has one platter.

You do not have to get an E6400. You could get a E6300 like I did, while getting better performance than the Athlon and the ability to play future games with only a video card upgrade. Do you have links to benchmarks that show the E6300 is faster than the A64 3800+? It depends on the application. I have an E6300 and I am getting much better performance from it than anyone can get from any single core Althon, as I run two instances of Folding@Home 24x7.

You do not have to get an E6400. You could get a E6300 like I did, while getting better performance than the Athlon and the ability to play future games with only a video card upgrade.

The typical rule of thumb is the hotter a hard drive is, the faster it will fail.

I think that the SATA II is the only difference. The WD4000YR is the RE2 model if I recall correctly. As for being faster, the WD4000KS is probably faster, but only during bursts.

As you can see in my thread, I am planning a similar NAS setup: http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=23831 You could probably use a Linksys NSLU2 as well. What I really like about it is that it is open source, so there is tweaked firmware for it on the internet to improve its reliability and give it additional features. http://www.nslu2-linux.org/ Although, from what I am reading, it appears that you would be restricted to 2 drives if you go with this approach until the firmware available for the Linksys NSLU2 improves: http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/FAQ/USBHubs

I have a WD3200KS, and I am very happy with it. Acoustically, it is hard to imagine a drive containing platters that spin at 7200 RPM be more perfect, and its seeks are so quiet and muted I did not have to enable AAM. I did, however, configure my BIOS to make sure that NCQ is enabled, which probably helps with seek operations by making sure that the drive head does not have to travel as much as it would otherwise. It operates suspended in my Antec P150 case, so your experience with it might vary from mine.

I originally posted about this on SilentPCReview.com's forums because I wanted advice on the acoustical side of things, but since I have not gotten any replies, I figure I better ask here, as the acoustical side of things will be unimportant if this does not work functionally as well; to avoid retyping everything, here is a blatant copy and paste of my original post: I can get the NSLU2 from buy.com for $68.40 thanks to the $20 off a purchase of $50 or more when you use Google Checkout as a payment processor special that they are currently running and I can get the BE750BB for $63.74 also from Buy.com thanks to the same special that they are running. I can buy the Vantec enclosure for $39.98 after shipping and handling from Newegg.com, so without considering the cost of Cat5 cable and plugs (the crimper I should be able to borrow from someone), this will all cost me about $172.12, which is pretty cheap, so I would like to decide on whether or not I am going to do this quickly, as I know that buy.com will not be running that $20 off a purchase of $50 or more special a week from now. That leads me to my question. Are there any problems that anyone can see with my plan?

My ears are 10 decibels more sensitive than normal according to one doctor I have visited. My computer has three sources of noise. The case fan, the CPU fan and the hard drive. The fans operate are designed for low noise operation and operate at low RPMs (the 92mm CPU fan at 875 RPM and the 120mm case fan at 1200 RPM). Tthe hard drive makes by far the most noise and I do not want another one of them in my computer. If I had another one, I would not be able to sleep. I have a 2.5" 100GB Hitachi drive in my laptop and it generates more noise than my desktop. Thankfully, it is a notebook so I do not need to have it run 24x7 like I do with my Media Center PC. I am thinking of getting one of these: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.as...243&language=en The street price is $302.52, but at the rate that hard drive prices are declining, I should be able to get one for $250 in four months. Does anyone know if these are able to appear as shared folders as if they were being shared over the network on another Windows PC or if these use a non-standard data storage method?

The Western Digital hard drives are also quieter than the Seagate hard drives, as many people at silentpcreview.com will tell you if you ask them. I have always purchased Western Digital hard drives and I have only had one malfunction on me of the several that I have used. It was throwing SMART errors, but it lasted long enough for me to recover all of my data from it and do a RMA (it was still working when I sent it back to Western Digital). My recommendation is to go with a Western Digital drive. If it is of any help, I have read that Western Digital has fewer RMAs other hard drive manufacturers each year.