Western Digital set to launch 2TB drive

[Lowlander]

I definately want to condense down all these drives on my desk

Wait 5 years and you can fit the content of all those drives on a something that fit's in your pocket . I agree that using individual discs can be a mess, I currently got 9 standing on a shelf next to me. Moving to a singe box (okay maybe a few) would certainly make it more manageable. I also like the way the TS-409 looks and as this will be standing in the living room that counts a little as well.

[nynaevelan]

Another question, if there are 4 drives in the NAS and it is setup as a Raid 5, how many drive letters will actually be visible to the user and how much capacity, assumingthey are all 1tb drives??

Nyn

[Lowlander]

There should be only one drive letter and your usable space should be 3TB. RAID is a method to join all discs in one way or another. RAID5 will give you the amount of installed discs - 1 disc as total capacity and will appear as one logical unit (the last part I'm not totally sure about).

Do take in account that I'm new to this as well, and although I've been researching this a while I might be wrong on certain things.

[nynaevelan]

No worries you have not led me astray yet. This is still a little confusing because if the 1 disc is held aside in case of failure, how does it protect the data if two discs fail at the same time? The discs which I am combining into the RAID are my backup drives, which do not need to be available over the network, and to handle the drive letter issues I can separate them into folders with the same hierarchy which I have now. I'm just a little worried since I do not know anything about this Raid stuff I will end up losing data in my ignorance. Not to mention if I upgrade the discs from 500gb to 1tb drives one at a time, how long will I have to wait before I can use all four drives?

Nyn

[Lowlander]

With RAID 5 you're protected against the failure of 1 drive. If you have 2 drives fail before you can replace the first failed drive you will loose all data on all discs. With RAID 6 you can have any 2 drives fail, but a third (before replacing first 2 drives) will loose all data.

I'm not entirely sure how upgrading to higher capacity drives works out. I don't know if you would be able to use the higher capacity on the first replaced drive or that you need to replace all drives in the system. This is something that you may want to clarify on the Qnap forum.

[Lowlander]

Here an article from ArsTecnica about the Seagate drive issue.

[nynaevelan]

Are there any other companies making large hard drives besides Seagate and Western Digital??

Nyn

[Lowlander]

There are various that make 1TB drives (NewEgg) like Hitachi & Samsung, but only Seagate has 1.5 TB and only Western Digital has 2TB (still not available).

[Peke]

Just passing by and wanted to clear things a little with Seagate 1TB and 1.5TB drives:

- I've had in possession 17 "Damaged" 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives
- Have talked with Seagate tech support (Contact by mail would be enough, but I wanted to be sure so I talked with tech on the phone)
- There was/is an error in older Factory firmware that on some SATAII motherboards/controllers garble HDD physical information which lead to performance loss or in some cases complete degradation of HDD and false detection
- After confirming by their tech support that firmware update will fix the problem
- End result: After firmware update all 17 drives are alive and kicking like new. On some drives that were not tried to be "fixed" with regular means/apps I even managed to save all data on them

Conclusion: Over the years I've seen that from time to time every hardware company make mistakes, this was Glitch hopefully with not too much consequences.

WARNING: Unless you contact Seagate you may lose warranty.

EDIT: BTW I bough them for 30€ each and sold for 100€ after fix with including original warranty Seagate gave to retail I bought them from. None returned back to me

[Lowlander]

Where did you get them that cheap? I'd like me some that cheap too.

[Peke]

@lowlander
I got them all from dumb local retailer as broken When they got available my friend bought one in Germany for 170€+ and when he got back issues started to emerge after few weeks I fixed it and then put Ad in local paper that I need to buy several broken Seagate 1.5TB to try fixing NAS thinking that this would not be only problem and I was right.

I didn't asked retailer how he bought HDDs and why he is selling instead of returning to manufacturer, but instead I earned some € on people stupidity.

BTW The problem is related/caused by some types of motherboards/controllers but not all so I'm guessing that using our law retailer could blame user for damage and break warranty (but that is just wild guess and I hope he didn't done that) without losing money and even earn few more reselling them to me.

EDIT: Until Firmware was wide spread I saw that some US online stores dropped prices to less than $95 with limited 1-3 Month warranty due the high number of returned "damaged" drives. Regarding WD drives it had similar issue with S.M.A.R.T. Values where HDD stopped working due the HDD temperature is reported as 60-80 Celsius instead of 20-30 as normal.

[Lowlander]

You're lucky, I doubt that I can find them locally in the first place and even if they'll be double the US price which currently seems to hang around 129 dollars.

[Lowlander]

The drive finally has shown up on the Western Digital site. Seagate seems also to be preparing a 2TB drive as they reached 500GB per platter as well.

[nynaevelan]

Well, I'll wait until they are on the market for a bit before getting any. I did decide to go with this one. Now that I finally have everything mvoed to where I want it and my backups running regularly I can put it through it's paces. I will admit it takes a little getting used to with the difference in speed between it and a USB external drive.

Nyn