Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm sure we've had some discussion at some point in the past about terrabyte drives. I'm looking in Dudley's direction. I think it's time my highly successful business bought an enormous hard drive for backups.

So, best price vs. best quality terrabyte (or 2tb if it's not murderously priced) drive recommendations please. IDE or SATA is fine by me, otherwise I'll just pick the cheapest one I see on ebuyer.

I've just bought an external Western Digital MyBook 1tb drive for 124 quids from Amazon. Just copying my music to it now after it arrived this morning, in fact.

I remember Western Digital's being a bit sniffed at for their habit to fail, but that opinion is almost 10 years old. Presumably they're better regarded nowadays?

They're my HD of choice along with Seagate.

I'm going to butt in with the mandatory "1Tb! Holy Cow!" comment. 1Terrabyte! Holy Cow! I remember being chuffed to bits with the 20mg drive we got back in about 1990. By my calculations, this means that by the space year 2025, we'll have drives that are 50 Bumptobytes, or maybe even larger.

My first PC that I bought myself when I was 16 (after saving for months while waitering) came with a 3.2gb hdd, and then I layed out serious cash for a 6.4gb hard drive. I remember thinking to myself '9gb! Fucking hell! I'll NEVER fill that'. But smaller hard drives were still very common, 500mb, 300mb, that kind of thing. I even hooked up a 40mb hard drive once for shits and giggles.

In fairness though, this was before mp3s and large downloadable files were conceivable.

With 1 Terabyte to play with, do you still compress your music? Or are you going to go for maximum quality now?

Nah, everything will be stored on the Google Hive Mind by then Squirt.

£95 -> http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143288

mmmm, phat storage.

I bought an 80gb external drive a couple of years ago for backups, which now seems laughably inadequate.

The Google dreive reliability survey from last year pretty much debunked the idea that some drive makers are better than others. Occasionaly there is a particularly model that fails more often (e.g. early Fujitsu drives.. shudder) but mostly the failures were evenly distributed across brand and model. And Christ knows, Google buys a lot of disks.

I would have recommended exactly what Grimster did.

Just one single big hard drive?

I wouldn't be massively against it, but I must confess that I would buy two and RAID them.

If it's a backup sure, since you clearly already have an original copy at all times.

Just but a SAN! There ggggrrrreeeaattt!












and expensive! ha I lose!

Copied Dimmers and bought the same as him, a snip at £119.99! Cheers chaps.

Apart from the IBM Deathstars obv. Most of the 80 gig units did indeed fail (mine did).

I also had a bad run on Maxtor drives a couple of years ago.

Currently running WD, Seagate and some Maxtors. Although I think the super mamba 750 gig cheapie I purchased last week for backups was a Samsung.

As I've always said, hard drives are like courier companies, everyone has a horror story about at least 1 of them. It's usually a different one.

City Link is presumably the IBM Deskstar.

The Deskstar failiures apparently did so much damage to IBM that they sold their entire drive making business off. Prior to that they had a fantastic reputation.

Wiki says the following:

"Deskstar failures

The IBM Deskstar 75GXP, and several other models made around the same time, became infamous for their reportedly high failure rates. This led to the drives being colloquially referred to as "Deathstars".

Lawsuit

Despite failures being reported within the manufacturer warranty period (3 years), Michael T. Granito, Jr., an American user of IBM's 75GXP hard drive, filed a class-action lawsuit against IBM on 2001-10-16 for defects in the product causing it to "crash".[1] Without admitting responsibility, IBM settled this lawsuit in 2005.[2]

Details

A firmware update (details) gives a clue to some of the issues:

* Possible data corruption due to a problem with S.M.A.R.T. background operations.
* Application of wear levelling to avoid the heads dwelling too long over the same area

The drives were also known for commonly head crashing. The combination of two relatively new (at the time) technologies, GMR heads and glass platters may be largely to blame for the issues.

In addition to the failure that had led to the lawsuit, additional flaws were found in Deskstar 60GXP, 75GXP, 120GXP, 180GXP, which are caused by Giant Magneto Resistive read / write heads, and the easily corrupted NVRAM chip.[3]

Aftermath

Since the filing of lawsuit, IBM unveiled Deskstar 120GXP, Travelstar 60GH and 40GN in 2001-11-07.[1] The Deskstar documentation was updated to show the drives had been rated to 333 power-on hours per month (45 percent), leading to speculation that was the result of the lawsuit. However, IBM spokesperson replied that the rating is not new at the time.[2]

In June 2002, Hitachi and IBM reached a framework agreement under which Hitachi would purchase IBM's HDD operations. The deal was closed on 2002-03-31. On 2003-01-06, Hitachi announced the new hard disk drive storage company is named Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.[4] After finalising the sale of the storage division, IBM announced taking $2 billion charge in its second quarter.[5]"

Terabyte.

"I think you'll find CG had it right, as far as we're concerned"
\

Pedantbyte

I made you byte.

Oh dear, kill me now.