Best Drive setup for a new computer?
 

What the best internal drive these days? 1 terrabyte with 32mb cache? If you were setting up a new computer and wanted to spend say $400 - $450 on drives, what would you get?

Consider mirroring, just about any motherboard besides the low end "all in one" support RAID0, RAID1 and RAID5 these days.

RAID is not a replacement for regular backups, but if a drive fails RAID will (a) allow you to do a quick intermediate backup to save your files changed since the last backup, which you would have otherwise lost and (b) continue working.

Hard drives are mechanical devices and it's not a question of "if" but more "when" they will fail. You could be lucky and the drive could still be going fine when you retire it in 5 years time... or it could fail a week after you install it. Don't leave things to chance!

BTW $400 should get you more than a single TB drive

And in case you think "it will never happen to me"

I've had about 40-45 HDs go through this office in the past couple of years, and 9 have failed prematurely.

I backup all of my drives. I currently have 6 drives with stuff and 6 as backups. I've only had4 drive failures in the past the decade and they'll all been Lacie. 100% failure rate on those things.

Well, I did have 2 Maxtor 80G drives finally go out but they were 7 years old.

1T is expensive and you can probably get 2 750s for the same price. Listen to Rowan and make sure that you have some redundancy for when one of the drives fails.

That depends on what you need. Storage with decent speed? Samsung spinpoint 1tb with 32mb look decent and are nicely priced.

Speed and some storage? The new velociraptor 300gb drives are benchmarking quite well for me.

You also have SAS and SSD drives on the market now... prices are finally getting down to reality too.

Looking at solid state with RAID 1.

Aren't they just a pretty case with an OEM drive in them? :)

The difference isn't that great. :) Based on today's price list of my local retailer (in AUD, but it may as well be USD) the cost per gig of a WD SATA 750GB is 18c; a WD 1TB SATA is 19.5c. This is for OEM 3.5" drives in an anti static bag, no external case or retail box.

To the OP: if capacity is important then it might be worth waiting for drives larger than 1TB. I've seen a couple of articles that say they're not that far off being released.

well I'm on a mac, and I just got the latest 8 core tower, usually I just do 2 internals having a program mirror the other drive every week so I can boot off either one, and then I have apple's built in time machine do their file recovery backups on an external drive.

So what I'm hearing is do the 2 1-tb internals as a mirror raid instead?

I was actually trying to figure out what brand/model drive to get, you think those 32mb cache 1tb drives are worth the money? Why the fuck don't they just stick a gig cache on them and charge $20 more? Thought memory was pretty cheap these days lol.

my experience with lacie is drives is the same as sirmoby's- 100% failure, i've had 3 1 tb lacie drives and 2 2 tb drives from them that i just threw away. the 3 1 tb drives actually failed 2x each, sent them to lacie for repair the st time they all crashed.

my current drive config consists of 2 150g seagate raid0 with just the os and programs on that config with 2 1 tb seagate sata drives, ~$170 each at fry's, for storage.

i back those up on multiple 300g seagate externals that stay offline

raid 5 with three discs

as i said, three discs with raid 5 will be faster and more reliable.

I've got 5 1TB 32MB cache Seagate drives. They are fast and I've had no problems with them to date.

I've been a Western Digital user for years but decided to try the Seagate drives because of the additional buffer size and I think they were also about $50 per drive less.