New Hard Drive

Associate
Joined
22 May 2009
Posts
36
Hello.

I have had a warning message of "PredFail" from SMART for my current systems hard drive a Hitachi 2TB drive so am looking for a new drive to clone this to and replace with.

Unfortunately the Hitachi is just out of the two year warranty as well. The only other drives I've had issues with in the past have been an IBM DeskStar and a Maxtor drive.

I'm thinking of getting a Western Digital drive now. I've had one WD internal drive in the past in an old computer that never had any issues. And I believe a Quantum one I had was pretty good too. I also have an external WD drive.

I know that the SE version of the internal Western Digital drives are designed for Enterprise use? but would it be okay to use this in a desktop system?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-446-WD&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=2270

I like that this has a lot of anti-vibration technology built in and a sensor. Their black drives seem pretty good and have some basic protection but I think for a similar price this seems to have more protection and has that 5 year warranty too.

Can you see any downside with using this in a desktop system?

The only other thing I was thinking of was looking at laptop drives as I believe its possible some of these may have better protection from vibrations etc? The only issue would be getting an adapter to put in to a desktop drive bay.

Thanks

John
 
Associate
Joined
22 Apr 2014
Posts
338
You can use the SE drive in a normal PC. it will not cause any issue. As for the 2.5" Laptop drives they tend to run at a lower RPM speeds so you might not get as quick as access speeds.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
22 May 2009
Posts
36
Good point on using raid.

I have the Asrock Z68 Ex4 Gen3 board. I will have to look into this to consider as an option. I believe it has two Sata3 raid controllers so would be able to have two drives in a raid setup.

I hear that it is always better to get a dedicated controller card though for raid? Would a two drive raid setup be adequate enough?

In a Raid 10 setup can you mix and match drives or is it still always good practice to get ones that are exactly the same?

I am guessing that you will get better performance in a raid array if you only partition 10% of the drive so it is using the outer edge of the disk where it will spin faster?

What are your thoughts on the Seagate hybrid drives that also have SSD built in? Do they still function as one drive with the OS and frequently used programs allocated to the SSD?
 
Associate
Joined
22 Jun 2009
Posts
133
Good point on using raid.

I have the Asrock Z68 Ex4 Gen3 board. I will have to look into this to consider as an option. I believe it has two Sata3 raid controllers so would be able to have two drives in a raid setup.

I hear that it is always better to get a dedicated controller card though for raid? Would a two drive raid setup be adequate enough?

In a Raid 10 setup can you mix and match drives or is it still always good practice to get ones that are exactly the same?

I am guessing that you will get better performance in a raid array if you only partition 10% of the drive so it is using the outer edge of the disk where it will spin faster?

What are your thoughts on the Seagate hybrid drives that also have SSD built in? Do they still function as one drive with the OS and frequently used programs allocated to the SSD?

It is better to use a dedicated hardware RAID controller. They usually have a RAID-On-Chip CPU and Onboard memory to process necessary calculations, improved performance by using the onboard cache, can protect data when using with backup battery etc. And mostly, they deploy automatic patrol reads and consistency checkes to ensure the drives and virtual disks are in working order so if you can, get a hardware RAID controller.

It is a good idea to use similar hard drives for RAID10, but you can mix and match hard drives of same capacity from different brand. The controller will create a virtual disk with a capacity that is available from all drives.

Example: 4 drives in RAID10 from different manufacturer. 2 of them is 400GB, 1 of them is 399GB and 1 of them is 390GB. The RAID10 will be a 390GB partition, leaving the excess space of the other hard drives unused as 390GB is the maximum that is available from all hard drives.

I have 4 x 4TB WD RE drives in RAID10, and 4 x 6TB WD RED in RAID10. The second RAID10 is now almost full, about 100GB free space left. But the performance hasn't been degraded so far.
 
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