Phoenix1997

I'm running Windows Server 2003, and I have the results for 2 10's and a 5000: http://bravo.made2own.com/~eiiisol/drives.txt It looks like the two WD10EACS are not parking their heads, while the 5000 is. However, at the rate the 5000 is, the drive should last about 7 years.

Would the two drives happen to have "Moduslnk" or something as the vendor when they show up, with nothing shown as the model number? If so I read somewhere that some SCSI RAID controllers don't like that and won't create a RAID with them, whereas non-RAID controllers don't seem to care: I have a 29160 with two "Moduslnk" drives, one a MAS3367NC and the other a MAP3147NC, without problems.

How does it perform against an MBA3 or 15K.6?

I could find a good home for 2 or 3 of those.

Sweet, thanks!

I have a machine that's running 24/7 performing the following tasks: Prime95 BitTorrent (Linux ISOs and stuff ) File Server via shared drives I was wondering whether to use the 18GB 10K SCSI drive that's being used as the OS drive now, or to put the OS on a 750GB SATA drive that'll be arriving shortly on a small partition, and use the rest of the drive for data storage. The reason I ask is an older 3GB drive I had the OS on previously, failed after about a year of 24/7 operation. It started off with parity errors on the controller which progressively got worse and worse. The drive isn't going to be hammered unless I'm doing a backup onto DVD-R; 99.9% of the time the highest load the drive will see is maybe 2MB/sec, sequential. Would the 10K that hasn't failed me yet be more reliable than a new 750GB SATA drive?

Check the BIOS settings of your motherboard and increase the PCI Latency Timer, if you can find this setting. Some Gigabyte boards require you to hit Ctrl+F1 in the main BIOS menu in order to find this.

I see a few MBAs in a handful of stores now, though I can't say the same for the 15K.6's.

Does your HDTune look something like this? I know I'm posting a HDTach graph, but they should be similar: What HDTune is telling you is that the two drives will do a sequential read faster than the SCSI drive. If you're doing something like video editing, video capture, or transferring large contiguous files, the two drives will be faster. The advantage the SCSI drive has is random access time. The random access time for this drive (which is 15,000 RPM) is about 5.6 ms, while the access time for an average 7200 RPM drive is going to be about 13 ms. You're going to see things like OS loads, program loads, perhaps even game loads too be faster. Suppose you want to read 100 files, randomly located on the drive, of size 32KB or smaller. For the SCSI drive: 100*5.6ms + 100*32KB/(75MB/sec) = 560ms + 43ms = 603 ms. For the 2 drives: 100*13ms + 100*32KB/(75MB/sec) = 1300ms + 32ms = 1332 ms. As you can see, in cases where you're working with many smaller files, the access time would be the biggest contributor to the total time. Flash-based drives would be at a great advantage here.

The first thing to look at with these drives is to see if they have a fluid-dynamic bearing (FDB) motor. If they don't, they'll likely be too noisy for desktop use. Ones that do have an FDB are: MBA3 series MAX series MAU series MAS series MAT series MAP 147GB MAM series (some of them) Ones that don't have an FDB are: MAP series (models other than 147GB) MAM series (some of them) I've had a 147GB MAP running daily since May 07 without problems. With an FDB MAM though (36GB) which was also brought into regular use in May 07, recently I've had to unplug the drive as I believe the motor was getting louder and quieter, whining or something, every so often. As the motor was turned off, this whine would sound as if it were slowing down. Otherwise, the drive didn't show any noticable performance hits or errors. I was able to move the data off of it safely.

I have a Megaraid 500 Express and I can't seem to get much more than 78MB/sec, regardless of what I try.

That should do fine, the terminator's in the right place. Typically, one end of the cable should be terminated, the other end connected to the SCSI controller. Whether the connectors in the middle are connected to drives or not, really doesn't matter. The jumpers labelled ID3 to ID0 specify the SCSI ID, in binary, with ID3 being the MSB, and ID0 being the LSB. With no jumpers on those pins, the ID of the drive will be 0.

Has anyone seen any reviews of, or worked with, any of the new MBA3 series of drives by Fujitsu, or the 15K.6 series from Seagate? It seems the MBA3 series is sold by span.com (I can't really find it anywhere else), but it has a 28 day lead time.

With a good controller card in a regular PCI slot, you'll get a maximum burst transfer rate (BTR) of 120MB/sec or so. Few hard drives have a sequential transfer rate (STR) above this, I think only the 15K.5 and 15K.6 do. I don't know about the new Fujitsu MBA3 series though. If the BTR is greater than the STR, then it won't be a limiting factor. BTR probably won't matter much in a web or fileserver setting, unless the same data's being requested over and over again, and the drive's smart enough to cache it. If it's big enough to fit in the drive's cache, the OS will probably cache the data anyway.

If you can have multiple hard drives where you spread out applications that typically load up at the same time across multiple drives, it'll help.