Reccomended large hard drives

[Zumi]

I was thinking about getting one of these Seagate 1.5TB hard drive. Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (bare drive) - Internal Hard Drives

But it seems to have its share of bad reviews. I could go for a Western Digital 1TB one but they seem about the same price as the 1.5TB seagate one. Any advice?

[Kohan]

How much physical space do you have in your tower? I would personally recommend purchasing a couple smaller HDDs (e.g., two 640GB units), and using a RAID configuration, in place of buying a single large one.

[Kerberoz]

RAID for a big drive? Wouldn't it be better to keep your storage drive(s) by themselves and use a separate SSD or 10k rpm HDD for your OS?

[Zumi]

I have a 320gb and 500gb, I have room for 2 more. This is going to be storage only no programs or anything running off of it.

[Kohan]

RAID for a big drive? Wouldn't it be better to keep your storage drive(s) by themselves and use a separate SSD or 10k rpm HDD for your OS?

The funny thing about you mentioning that is that I suggested the two 640GB HDDs as small drives, not big ones. Not like I have that much storage myself.

Anyway, especially if you're going to use it for storage, I wouldn't recommend just getting a single huge one. Isn't preserving that more important to you than your programs?

[Isiolia]

It depends on the RAID configuration you mean >_>

RAID0 would take two smaller drives and make them into one larger "drive". However, this provides no data protection...really, it's worse than just manually splitting data between them because if one drive dies, the fragments of data on the other become useless.

RAID1 would mirror the two drives. So you'd still have the smaller disk size, but it'd be less likely that you'd lose the data that does fit on it due to a failure.

Personally, I'm looking at getting a couple of the WD Black series 1TB drives to use in a RAID1 setup for data storage. I generally like Seagate as well, and haven't personally had bad experiences with them...but bad batches do ship from every manufacturer from time to time. If people are having bad luck with those particular ones, then look elsewhere.

[Bagel]

Isn't preserving that more important to you than your programs?

I'm in the same boat, gonna buy another HD soon, personally nothing I'm storing is anything that couldn't be downloaded again.

[kareface]

Go with a 3 drive raid 5. Instead of losing 50%, you'd only lose about 30% of the drive space to parity.

Also: Get WD drives if you are going 1tb or higher. All the other bands are slower or buggy. I love seagate, but their 1 & 1.5tb drives are shit. The other companies that have 1tb drives have slow read times compared to the WD's.

[Kohan]

Go with a 3 drive raid 5. Instead of losing 50%, you'd only lose about 30% of the drive space to parity.

Also: Get WD drives if you are going 1tb or higher. All the other bands are slower or buggy. I love seagate, but their 1 & 1.5tb drives are shit. The other companies that have 1tb drives have slow read times compared to the WD's.

I'd say this would probably be the better option, but also potentially the most expensive.

I mainly recommended the smaller drives to try to make everything come to the same cost, as two 640GBs is about equal to a 1 to 1.5TB of reasonable quality. However, if they're non-essential files you could live without losing (such as in Bagel's case), then it probably doesn't matter what size you get.

When it comes to my own file storage, I prefer RAID1.

[Takedown3]

get a couple of mybooks or just one i think they are pumping out a 1.5tb

[Bagel]

Last HD I purchased (750gig) is a WD that is somewhat crapping out on me, so just to reiterate, hard drives are sort of a crapshoot no matter what brand you go for.