Hard Drive Purchase

Well, I’ve spent literally almost every moment of today looking for a second hard drive for my G5 system, and am amazed at how little I know about modern hard drives.

As I had previously mentioned, I have never purchased a hard drive by itself, as I normally just got a new computer by the time I started thinking about more storage.  And I never sold hard drives, so they just never entered my realm of interest.

My goal was to get down to no more than $1 per Gigabyte, which was proving difficult to find in a name-brand SATA disk.  LaCie is always in your face if you own an Apple, and they are supposedly very good drives.  I have a severe problem with their price, and the fact that only their largest and most expensive ($500+) drives seem to have an 8MB buffer.  I guess they are made for network storage and backup, and not for things like media storage and retrieval.

I spent a few hours in town today trying to find a drive, but no one even carried SATA drives.  I was leaning again towards external, but couldn’t find anything with more than a 2MB buffer.  So I came home and began scouring deeper into online shopping.  Which led me to two of my old shopping sites that I had forgotten about, and for some reason, almost never come up with any of the price grabbing tools that I use.  I should mention that until I just typed that sentence, I have also forgotten about pricewatch.com.  At any rate, I’m talking about mwave.com and newegg.com.

Both stores had good deals on Maxtors and Western Digital drives.  Oddly, the larger drives (200-250GB) cost more per Gig at each place than the smaller drives did.  Then I started snooping for dimensions.  The G5 is very restrictive on space for the drive, and both manufacturers were a few tenths of a millimeter beyond what my manual said would work.  I definitely didn’t want any touching going on as there would be severe heat problems for sure.  In a last fit of brain activity, I was bright enough to look at the System Profiler and see exactly what drive was sitting inside my computer right now.  Lo and behold, a Maxtor 6Y160M0.  The very 160GB drive I was looking at previously at NewEgg, since it was 77.5 cents per Gig ($125), and would double my space.  So I bought it.

Now to decide if I want to use them in a RAID 0 configuration, or just let one be my media drive.  Either way, after a few jobs I will definitely need to look into a large capacity drive(s) to use for backing up my data.

Posted Tuesday February 24, 2004 in Real Life by Derek Jones

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Comments

Don’t run them as :RAID: 0 if it’s going to be the primary drive.  While it would double the space and—in most cases, at least—give you a bit better speed, you’d also be doubling the chance of having a HD crash since either one of them crashing would screw everything up.

RAID is definitely something to look into for the future, but I’d only suggest it as an additional storage medium beyond just the regular, primary OS hard drive.

Once you’ve got a better idea of exactly what it is you’re going to need (amount of storage, what type of files you’ll be storing, how often you’ll be accessing them, whether there will be lots of read/writes [i.e. will it really just be storage or will it also be a workspace])… once you know that sort of stuff I can ask my roommate for recommendations about it since he’s far more knowledgeable in that area.

By Chris Curtis on February 24, 2004 at 05:32pm link

Oh, and just FYI...NewEgg is definitely a great site.  Another one I’ve had good experience with in the past was GoogleGear, which is now ZipZoomFly.  I assume their service/reputation is still good, at least.

And for price comparisons, I usually use PriceGrabber or occasionally PriceScan.  Just in case that’s useful for anyone.

By Chris Curtis on February 24, 2004 at 05:35pm link

my fav is Comp-u-plus

Oh and you can do raid 0+1 its fast and ten times more reliable than raid 0.

no matter what the rig, i would get one of those maxtor one touch backups for the main drive… just to keep all your crap safe.

By Greg Ferrell on February 24, 2004 at 05:40pm link

Uh, that wouldn’t help at all if it’s the main drive, bro.  The one touch backup just grabs from *other* drives.  It’s not a magical backup for itself. wink

By Derek Jones on February 24, 2004 at 06:01pm link

And RAID 0 + 1 is definitely more than I’m willing to pay for storage at the present time.

By Derek Jones on February 24, 2004 at 06:02pm link

the one touch back up is a usb silly.... its an external drive with a huge button on it.

check it at maxtor… im to lazy to find it.

if a raid controller doesnt offer 0,1,0+1, and 0-1 its lame and behind the times.

By Greg Ferrell on February 24, 2004 at 06:04pm link

Dude, I know exactly what it is.  You suggested using it as my main drive.

By Derek Jones on February 24, 2004 at 06:23pm link

FOR the main drive..... not AS the main drive… rasberry

By Greg Ferrell on February 24, 2004 at 11:34pm link

Uh, ok, I see what you’re trying to say now, but that still doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Those things are pretty expensive compared to other hard drives of the same capacity.  Pushing a button on the front versus setting a schedule via software doesn’t sound very convenient.

Besides--ALL of the data is important.  I would lose just as much, if not more time if I lost scratch and capture files than if I had a system error and had to reinstall software.  If I choose a backup system, it’ll need to be able to get *everything*.

By Derek Jones on February 25, 2004 at 12:00am link

And how “convenient” that AnandTech published a hard drive Price Guide this morning.  Good news is that it looks like you only paid about $6 more than the lowest price for the Maxtor 160GB drive.

By Chris Curtis on February 25, 2004 at 08:39am link

Heh, how about that.  Oh well, I’ll consider that that $6 went towards the Secure Digital flash card that I got with my order.  256MB for $70 ($76 now, hehe), so I think NewEgg still worked out in my favor.

MWave had some OEM hard drives without any cabling.  I really wish that they had been cheaper, as the G5 doesn’t use the manufacturer’s cables at all.  It has two cables routed through the case already that just swing up into place into the SATA drive’s blade-connectors.  Nifty.

By Derek Jones on February 25, 2004 at 09:22am link

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