Hitachi 1TB Hard Drive (and RAID discussion)

I'm beginning research to buy a 1 TB disk drive for archiving and was wondering if anyone here has any experience (good, bad or indifferent) with any particualr makes or models working on a G5 Mac.

I'm finding several models available including Hitachi 1TB Ultrastar (internal), Western Digital MyBook Pro, 1TB Lacie Big Disk Extreme Plus. Any others that you might know of?

Thanks in advance for your response.

Bonnie

Hi Bonnie,

Good question - I know a few people who are also purchasing 1TB drives now. The cost for a bare drive is around $300 (approx) on newegg for the Hitachi drives.

Be careful of the external drives that are actually 2 x 500gig drives if that's not what you're looking for.

Sorry I don't have any direct experience, although I'm following w/ interest.

Cheers

James

Do you really want to put all your fish in one bowl as it were? If it has a major failure you've potentially lost a lot of files.

I'll bet Bonnie knows that she should NEVER rely on just one disk for reliable data storage. She's probably looking to buy 4 - or at least 2 :-)

Cheers

James

Do you really want to put all your fish in one bowl as it were? If it has a major failure you've potentially lost a lot of files.

That's really a very good point for those who are not in the practice of archiving in multiple places.

Unfortunately I'll need at least a couple of these drives to archive my entire collection plus back up my website archives and their creation files as I should (over 110 sites now). I store my originals on DVD, but also keep a copy with my processed files which are archived in tiff format. I have a bad habit of saving even bad originals since I often use them as examples of what not to do when giving presentations at my workshops, so I need to be able to find them fast. The storage space sure does add up fast. I'm hoping to avoid major catastrophes by studying up this time. Last time I bought a 200 Gb external Maxtor drive and it failed. Fortunately I lost only a couple of files, but needless to say...lesson learned. This time I'll ask the masses first and shop for more than just a cheap price tag.

Western digital makes a 2TB drive. (two 1TB drives in a RAID 0 configuration which means fast and high capacity because the data is stripped across both drives)

But, the cool thing is you can also configure it to RAID 1 (mirrored) which means the drive appears to your computer as a 1TB drive and any data written to the drive is actually written to each drive in the RAID 1. (built-in backup; the only way to lose data is if _both_ hard drives fail _or_ something totally hoses the drives logical data structure.)

Also, _please_ keep at least one copy of your backed up data _offsite_. (backups aren't secure against fire, natural disaster, theft, etc.)

Take Care,

Chris

Im currently using 1TB drives to create a 2TB filesystem in a lacie housing (Lacie 2BIG). Works fine, and has eSATA too. No more slow USB or Firewire

Cor

I just ordered 3 1TB drives (Enterprise-class Hitachi drives. I wanted Seagate but can't wait until December).

I currently have 2TB inside my main machine, with 1.5TB attached as local backup, and it's just about filling up. Everything also backs up over the network to a couple 2TB NAS boxes (1.5TB accessible, each, in RAID 5). I also have a server with 8 x 300GB in RAID 5.

After this upgrade, I'll have 3.5TB in my main machine, and a port-multiplied eSATA JBOD enclosure where I can stick SATA disks in like normal disks for both onsite and offsite backups.

tray free!

This data stuff is a pain in the ass!

Thanks for the tip Eric - that looks sweet. Their price for the bare enclosure is $929 ouch. Wonder why it's so expensive?

Cheers

James

Just curious if anyone has bought these drives? I am very interested since my 500gb drives are getting full.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120279-page,1/article.html

I merged a redundant post from Chris into this thread but the title changed. Sorry Bonnie.

Chris - before starting a new topic, have a look to see if it's being discussed already. Thx.

Cheers

James

Thanks James. Sorry bout that.

After this upgrade, I'll have 3.5TB in my main machine, and a port-multiplied eSATA JBOD enclosure where I can stick SATA disks in like normal disks for both onsite and offsite backups.

 

tray free!

 

This data stuff is a pain in the ass!

How loud is the enclosure? My holy grail is a (relatively) quiet tower. I have many SATA drives in the single bay wiebetechs and others, plus some dual housings from a couple of places.

2 of these 1tb would certainly work on Raid 0?

Just got one of these and it really smokes!!

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satakits.php

4 Drive SATA Case Kits

And one of these cards..

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/lycesata4.php

Ask for Brian.. He was or is a Photographer..

Joe

I just use my old PC cases with 2 added fans. a cheap digital thermometer and 2 of these port multiplier controllers to handle storage/backup. I have 8 hdd sitting in this BACKUP "array". You do have to mod the power supply to make it think a computer is attached. I have it as a software RAID 1. Thermometer is linked to the middle drive where airflow is lowest. And this is run as a server through my old laptop into a gigabit ethernet network so I can plug in to the drives whenever. It's not the fastest setup but it recycles what I have and minimizes waste.

I also have a new 3TB(6x500GB) RAID 0 run by an ATTO Tech RAID card (4 int/2ext). The externals use an old Firmtek enclosure.

Eric, you can fit another 2 drives in your Mac Pro in the 2nd optical drive slot.

Check this out.

That drive adapter for the Mac Pro is very cool. I now have some work to do!

Opps sorry left the wrong link for the mac pro optical drive install:

Here it is:

mac Pro extra drives install

WHOAH. That is awesome.

Next week, I'll be replacing my internal drives with 1TB drives (4 of them). Being able to have 6 in there would be crazy, and could lead to some interesting RAIDing. I'd probably run a small striped partition for swap, and the rest of it as RAID 1+0 (per this suggestion).

1T drives..funny...

Down the road here at the Solar Observation building run by the yanks was/is a box I spotted a few years ago about 75 cm high.

It's a was old 1960 model / 600 meg hard dirve..ha ha ...state of the art back then..