Joel Wilcox wrote:
> Forgive the OT on hard drives. It looks like 1 TB hard drives have become
> fixed around $99 in a lot of places. I noticed my local brick and mortar
> Best Buy had a 1.5 TB drive for $139 that I thought I might spring for. It's
> a Seagate "Barracuda" and I wondered if anyone has had any problems with
> latest generation Seagate HDs. I'm looking for an additional internal drive,
> not an external backup per se. Thanks.
>
I have two of those 1.5TB Seagate Barracudas. One is internal and one is
external, to BU the internal one.
There have been reports of troubles with using them in various sorts of
high capacity arrays and perhaps with Macs or certian versions of the
Mac OS. Seagate has made firmware revisions available for those who have
those troubles. As far as I know, there have been no reports of trouble
with Windoze.
I think all the troubles are related to spin down for energy efficiency.
Apparently the timing can crash into data array OSs. I have noticed that
sometimes when I do something that accesses my internal one that there
is a couple of seconds (seems like forever ... ) delay as it spins up.
When using it for it's primary function, image storage, as when
processing images, using PS, etc., I never seem to have any delays.
Apparently the time delay before spin down is longer than the time
between uses when I'm doing that stuff.
As to reliability, I've had lots of Barracudas of various sorts over the
years, several WDs and a couple of Maxtors. The only failure I've had
was a WD that died during initial formatting. I suspect they are all
pretty much the same in likelihood of failure.
I'm with Chuck on the strategy of using cheap consumer drives and
backing up regularly. They tend to become obsolete either operationally,
as capacities and file sizes increase, or functionally, as interfaces
change, before they fail. My backup 1.5TB is inserted in the 'toaster'
when I'm backing up that drive and the toaster is turned off when not in
use. So the backup drive is only ever on for a few minutes at a time and
will never accumulate any significant number of operating hours. Same
thing with the other, smaller backup drives.
Moose
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