VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

[todd ellis]

at tigerdirect
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"i know philip banks": todd ellis
who's/on/1st?

[Bruce]

Holy (insert Icelandic word)!

My only question is tech peeps, as these things grow almost exponentially in size, are the reading mechanisms in these things being modified to grow in their speed to read? I'm guessing they are, but with so much data to search through I just wonder if data retrieval could get a bit slower from a full mega-disc.

Only had one cup of Java so far, so if this is too.... I'm gonna get a 2nd cup....

B
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VO-BB Member #31 Enlisted June, 2005

I'm not a Zoo, but over the years I've played one on radio/TV. .

[Bish]

Now that's a deal!!! I'm thinking of implementing another Drobo (I've already got a 4 x 1TB unit) and this may be a good way to populate it.

As far as the performance of the large drives are concerned, in very simplistic term you have to look at the overall chain. Working as an internal drive with the 3GB/s SATA transfer rate, there may well be instances where the access time becomes a factor. If you were editing a large, fragmented, video file, you may run into some problems if the file wasn't cached in memory or on a scratch disk. For general use (high bandwidth) applications like streaming HD video, you're in good shape. In real terms, the most restricting factor is the bus transfer speed (when in use as an external drive)... the actual HD performance exceeds the capabilities of the bus and you'll be limited by the USB/Firewire/whatever interface before the drive becomes a factor. Spin speed is the biggest problem with mechanical drives... cheap (laptop) drives will trundle around at 5400rpm, and are markedly slower than the industry standard 7200rpm drives. Speed demons will opt for expensive raptor drives which spin at 10,000rpm... and even slap them together in a RAID 0 configuration to boost performance even more!

These drives are great for "normal" people where the actual drive seek/access times outperform the rest of the system.
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Bish a.k.a. Bish
Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast.
I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls.

[Tom Test]

It's a great deal, but do your due diligence. Seagate has sullied its reputation in the past few years with some drives that have less than rock-solid. I would recommend a visit to www.newegg.com and check out the 1.5 TB drives from Seagate and see what the many users think of them.
*****

Okay, I just looked myself. Based on what I see, I would NOT recommend this particular hard drive from Seagate (an I have used several of their drives over the years and been pleased, but these new ones seem to have issues).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014%20103530090%201035324341&name=1.5TB

You'll see that the 1.5 TB drives from Seagate get an average of 3 out of 5 stars. Sorry, but if you need your HD to be dead reliable, that is nowhere near good enough for me. I would definitely PASS on this deal!
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Best regards,
Tom Test
"The Voice You Trust"
www.tomtest.com

[scottreyns]

I think when it comes to picking up drives, beyond particulars like RAID or not (which is an issue with my setup for instance which moreover favors external drives), probably one of the biggest things to keep in mind is whether one fundamentally needs a production vs. a storage unit.

I've taken to segmenting drives by purpose like that, because generally as drives over the years have gotten bigger and faster their failure rates have also increased. All drives fail eventually but older drives tend to be more stable... My main production (i.e. recording) drive is one I've used for years and it has a measly 80 GB capacity. Conversely, I have others that are comparatively huge (hundreds of GBs up into the TBs) that seem to invariably have errors, also require maintenance like defragmentation, more often.

So it comes down to what the application is. If one needs something to record to, I'd rather go with a little old tank that meets the basic requirements and just never made it off the shelves back in the day when it was new inventory, compared to a newer type of drive that's much bigger and faster. As long as it's not so old that it keeps one's whole DAW held back in literally the last century (like an older-generation Firewire, USB or SCSI drive even), that's probably the better way to go for on-demand reliability.

Has anybody else had a similar experience?
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Scott Reyns, voice talent serving major metros (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York) and beyond

[Tom Test]