Hard drive speed, a worry or a red herring?

[ChrisNH]

Hi,

I am currently using a 7200 RPM SATA 640GB drive for my sage drive.. formatted 64k blocks.. its been fine since I upgraded to a dual core processor (2.4 GHz Athlon 64 replaced a single core 2.0 Ghz..)

I am thinking to replace this with a 1.5 TB drive since it has proven to be a bit too small. I can't figure out how we got by with the teeny cable one in the old days. The current 640GB drive will go in another computer to do video editing.

Do I really need to be too concerned about how fast a drive I get? Now there are a lot of "green" drives which is a nice way to market "slow". There are more 5400 and 6900 RPM drives out there. I want to get something relatively cheap.. but not so much so that it impacts recording of up to 2 HD streams and 1 analog stream while watching one stream.. my theoretical max that rarely if ever gets tested.

Thanks,

Chris

[Skirge01]

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Most likely, no. I run WHS and have 10 1TB drives. I believe 4 of them are 7200 Samsung F1's and the others are 5400 WD Green drives. I very rarely have "hangs" due to hard drive speed. I have never had a hang due to the number of HD streams (up to 5 on my setup) recording simultaneously.

[ChrisNH]

Thanks.. I will focus more on getting more size for the price and worry a little less on speed.

[Skirge01]

Something else I didn't think to mention... if you are being mindful of heat, my WD Green drives (WD10EACS) run about 7 degrees warmer than the faster Samsungs (HD103UJ) I have. My case is huge, so I don't worry about heat build-up, but you might need to take that into consideration in a rack-mount case.

[ChrisNH]

Heat is not an issue.. I have a HTPC case with big fans... and only two drives (one OS, one dedicated to Sage..)

Do you like the Samsungs? They seem to be inexpensive but I have never owned one.

I am a little concerned about the WD green drives, did their going into a sleep mode ever pose a problem for Sage?

Chris

[Skirge01]

Love the Samsungs. I've had WDs fail or be DOA, but I've been lucky with the Samsungs thus far. Granted, I have more WDs versus Samsungs, so the failure rate is probably on par. Also, and this is directly related to the heat I mentioned, the WDs have 4 platters, whereas the Samsungs have 3. For heat, noise and failure prevention (not that I think either model drive has a rate which is above average in any of these areas), I've personally decided against anything over 2 platters for future purchases in my WHS.

[malbec]

Have the WD Green ... really wish I had the WD Blacks or something else faster. The energy savings are a pittance relative to the time wasted waiting for the machine. I bought intot he "go green" marketing macine more than I shoudl have.

Optimal solution from my experience ... get a nice fast drive for your system partitionand use the Green drives as nothing more than media storage drives.

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by malbec

Have the WD Green ... really wish I had the WD Blacks or something else faster. The energy savings are a pittance relative to the time wasted waiting for the machine. I bought intot he "go green" marketing macine more than I shoudl have.

Optimal solution from my experience ... get a nice fast drive for your system partitionand use the Green drives as nothing more than media storage drives.

That's a valid point. However, when the OP wrote:

I am currently using a 7200 RPM SATA 640GB drive for my sage drive.. formatted 64k blocks

I took that to mean "recording drive" since there's no reason to mention the 64k blocks on the OS drive. That said--and in case I was mistaken with my understanding of the OP--I do agree that the OS drive should not be one of the green drives.

[ChrisNH]

I have another 7200 RPM drive for the OS. This drive is only for use with Sage.

I was concerned that the power-down of "green" drives may be a problem with Sage.. if it has to wait for the drive to spin up when it needs to start streaming some HD Media for instance..

I am less concerned with some minimal power savings as I am just finding cheap reliable space. It happens that these slower drives have a nice cost/space ratio.

Thanks for all the feedback! I am currently hoping to get a 1.5 TB Samsung from Newegg in the near future.

Chris

[Skirge01]

I don't believe my drives ever spin down in WHS, but I could be mistaken. To that end, I don't know if having to spin up the drive would cause any issues with Sage. I'll need to defer to someone else for that.