CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5320

MikeEby · Joined: 24 Jun 2007 Posts: 5237 Location: Osceola, Indiana

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5320

Ok, let's revise the post to "How many TB in one computer??"

My most is 2TB. I can't imagine putting all 10TB in one box!!! It is spread out over three computers, NAS, and external HDD's.

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 933 Location: Michigan

Greg,
> Everything I have seen the 1TB is best for $/GB...best I have done is $65/TB. <

I normally pay $100 for a 1.5 TB, though I've gotten a fair number at $85-90 (about 10 or so), in the last few months. Even if the 1 TB drives were under 60 bucks (which I don't recall seeing yet), they still would be less desirable from a storage density standpoint.

> Ok, let's revise the post to "How many TB in one computer??" <

Naaah. The last thing I'd want to do is put a boatload of TB inside a computer. That just makes it hot and noisy. Plus then they're also tied down to one machine. The highest density I have is 6 TB in a small eSata box (Sans Digital), that I picked up when they were on sale for $100. And those 4 drive bays are hot-swappable, with no trays required.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

nombz · Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 119 Location: Stockholm, Sweden

I have more than 10TB. 10TB (10 x 1TB) disks and 200GB system disk, all in one box.
Since it is RAID5, it doesnt give me more than just above 9TB of usable disk so that is the option I choose in the poll.

I wasnt happy with the noise level and layout (also the prices of the really good ones) of the boxes on the market so I built one in MDF.

In the picture, it is not fully equipped yet so only 8TB there. I have room for 12 physical disks so I have some more space.
It was a succesfull project, I now have a central storage point for all the families computers and it is pretty safe too (being raided). I love the possibility to just add another disk and grow the raid without data loss, very flexible.

If I need all the space? Probably not, but it tends to fill up anyway (mkv, and full blu-rays) and it was definitiely a fun project. Smile

Didnt cost me much more than the price of the disks either.

WanMan · Joined: 19 Mar 2006 Posts: 10270

nuttall_chris · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 2:36 pm Post subject:

Here is a pic of my "server" All drives are in the one case, 11TB. 10 in the hot swap rack and 2 in the main chassis. My mobo only has 4 sata ports but I added 2 of these PCI to sata cards to add 8 more ports. It's noisy but the massive fans keep it all nice and cool.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=33441&vpn=SD-SATA-4P&manufacture=Syba

Chris.

nuttall_chris · Posted: Sat Jan 02, 2010 2:45 pm Post subject:

nombz · Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 119 Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Spanky Ham · Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5643 Location: Comedy Central

I put in less than 500gb. I will probably buy a 1.5tb drive soon. I am not sure how high I will go, as I am not sure how many movies I really care to have archived. No offense to any of you guys with mega storage, but how many of those movies have you watched more than once? Even at current prices, it is still around $1.50 per movie.

As for pricing, you can usually find deals on the 1.5tb drives for under $100. I have seen Frys have them for as low as $69. It was a no-name brand (at least in the ad), but I have seen the WDs for $79. I usually go to slickdeals for this.
http://slickdeals.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9&sort=lastpost&order=desc&icon=41

nombz,
I like the case. I have thought about making one like yours, but a little wider. I was thinking of putting 2" acoustic foam on the swing out panel to drastically reduce the noise.

Tim,
You may have mentioned it before, but how do you burn-in your drives?

greg_mitch · Joined: 03 May 2006 Posts: 5320

I agree with you to an extent spanky...mostly it is the desire to collect things for me. I like to have them handy and I regularly watch parts of movies (much to the annoyance of my wife I'm sure).

It is great to have some movies, in high quality audio and video, on the ready.

My ever growing home HD videos are starting to take up just as much space though, and having multiple backed up versions for safety sakes begins to take up a bunch of space.

emdawgz1 · Joined: 14 Mar 2006 Posts: 7949

nombz · Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 119 Location: Stockholm, Sweden

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 933 Location: Michigan

Spanky Ham asked:
> You may have mentioned it before, but how do you burn-in your drives? <

I use a tool from Western Digital, called Data Lifeguard Diagnostics (DLGDIAG for Windows). It's a free download on their website, and works with drives from all vendors. (I've tested Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and Maxtor with it.)

The key is not to do a Quick Test, which takes just ~1 minute, and samples the entire extent. Nor to do an Extended Test, which takes a long time and reads the whole thing. Rather, do a Write Zeroes test, which writes and reads every sector on the disk, one track at a time. If there's a problem with the disk, it will find it. I've used it to weed out ~5 bad apples out of about 100 drives. It takes ~16 hours to qualify a 1.5TB drive.

Surprisingly enough, a full disk read of every sector will NOT expose all potential drive issues. I learned that lesson the hard way a number of years ago, after having decided a new 500G drive was clean, and then finding fatal flaws about 350G in while writing. The ReadTest didn't find the problem, but the WriteZeroes test did.

Lots of folks I've talked to have the impression that manufacturers actually test their "brand new" drives before shipping them, and while I'm sure they do perform random sampling, with current prices there is no possible way they could actually test the enitre surface(s) for write/read functionality. (They rely on the built-in error recovery mechanism to deal with it. The problem is that some drives hit a patch where the error density is so high it can't cope with it.) Since they don't test fully, I do... and about 100 drives later, I'm pretty satisfied with the results.

When I buy new drives, I always test them immediately, and RMA those back that fail. If everyone did that, there'd be a lot less negative ratings on Newegg. As it is, every time someone draws the short straw and gets a defective drive, up goes the negative review, along with a comment that they're never going to buy brand XYZ again, and will stick with brand ABC. Of course, you can find the same "evaluations" with ABC and XYZ reversed, from other posters.

The funny thing is that people will buy drives and put them in service, thinking that since they're brand new, they're just fine. A couple months down the road (or a few weeks, or a year later!) they finally use enough of the disk to find the problem area, and conclude "it went bad on them", when in fact, it was bad the day it arrived!

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 933 Location: Michigan

WARNING: Read that data, periodically!

This might be a good place to point out to those who are using high capacity hard drives as archival storage mechanisms (like myself), that engineers from several major drive manufacturers have admitted that filling a drive then putting it on the shelf for years is not a good idea. The newer drives were never designed with that in mind, and expect that the drive surfaces will be read periodically, on a fairly regular basis. That will give it a chance to detect that the read signal level is deteriorating, and rewrite the affected blocks. (In place... most of the time, when possible, or relocated, if necessary.)

The problem is that the magnetic field imposed on the medium tends to self-demagnetize over long periods of time, so if you pull out a drive after 5 years that you filled once, which was 100% perfect when written, there's a good possibility that not everything will be readable. There will be a certain percentage of data loss... just from sitting on the shelf. This is something that the LOC and others who archive large volumes of magnetic data over long periods need to be aware of.

The good news is that all it takes to avoid this problem is simply to do a full surface read on each drive, once every 2 years (1 year, if you're really paranoid). In the process of doing so, any deteriorating data will be detected and refreshed automatically, before it degrades to the point that it becomes irretrievable.

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 933 Location: Michigan

Spanky Ham commented:
> ...you can usually find deals on the 1.5tb drives for under $100. ...I have seen the WDs for $79. I usually go to slickdeals for this. <

Wow! I've totally missed those. At $79 for a 1.5TB WD, I'd grab 10 or 20, to fill out my MediaServer array. I guess I need to keep my eye on SlickDeals.

BTW, for a peek at a compact 1800 TB storage system, take a look at the scene in the movie "Eagle Eye", where the central drive array in the ARIA supercomputer is arranged in a circular column. There are 10 floor-to-ceiling columns around the periphery, with each column holding 10 rack-mount cages, with each rack holding a dozen hot-swappable drive trays vertically. (I'm just assuming they were supposed to be populated with 1.5 TB drives, given the time-frame... in actuality, they were probably all empty trays.)

Spanky Ham · Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 5643 Location: Comedy Central

nombz · Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 119 Location: Stockholm, Sweden

[quote="Spanky Ham"]

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 933 Location: Michigan

Spanky wrote:
> As for Slickdeals, fortunately they have a drive's section so you don't have to deal with wading through all of the stuff you may not be interested in. <

Really? Is this "section" a special feature for Registered users only? Because I can't find anything like it on the site, and I went up and down the Forum tree several times. I really have no time to scan all the "Hot Deals" on mattresses, jackets, lawn chairs, etc. to find a potential deal on a hard drive.

Ah, wait a minute. What are these teeny, tiny icon buttons at the bottom, if you scroll ALL the way down? "Filter by Category". Hmmm. Apparel, Sports, Beauty, Drives! Yeah, that's the ticket. Beauty! Oops, I meant Drives. Too bad it's not also filterable by capacity.

I'll leave this silliness in, just in case someone else is suffering from the same myopia as I was. (Justs adds "&icon=41" to the URL string.)