Which HD's to use...

[TheFamilyMan]

I've currently got roughly 1tb of ripped music, 1tb of recorded TV, 6tb of ripped movies, and roughly 500gb of other media (divx cartoons, series, pictures, home movies, etc).

All this data resides on "frankensteined" hard drives...running up to 10 at the moment. I'm wanting to grab 3 - 4 1.5tb - 2tb drives and consolidate them all and just have a couple larger drives attached to the spare PC. I know I'll end up pairing the ripped movies down or just keep some of them on the 2 external drives they're currently on and have ~ 1.5tb available on the machine. I can utilize on-board RAID if needed as well...

These new drives will be attached to an A8N-SLI Premium from an old gaming rig I had running. It's running an Opty 165 o'clocked to 2.8 with 4gb ram. It has 4 SATA 3.0gb ports and 4 SATA 1.5gb ports on it.

So what drives should I be looking at for best price/performance? I'm not looking for reads/writes that are stratospheric or mind-blowing but I'm also not looking for extremely sluggish and unbearable.

So, to resident storage gurus on AT, which 1.5tb to 2.0tb drives should I be targeting for this??

 

[Old Hippie]

So, to resident storage gurus on AT, which 1.5tb to 2.0tb drives should I be targeting for this??

Whatever is cheapest at the moment and here's a 2TB WD for $100.00 after rebates.

PS....I guess you get an extra $10.00 discount for using an email link so it's 110.00 to you....but still cheap.

 

[TheFamilyMan]

Will the 5,900 RPM drives work from a speed standpoint? The way my house is set up, there's only 2 (at most) connections that will be reading from the data drives at any given time.

 

[Old Hippie]

They stream 720p and 1080p movies just fine.

If you want to go with the faster 7200 rpm drives, look at the Hitachi Deskstar HD32000.

 

[JohnnyTech]

Whatever is cheapest at the moment and here's a 2TB WD for $100.00 after rebates.

PS....I guess you get an extra $10.00 discount for using an email link so it's 110.00 to you....but still cheap.

Go with this link. You'll get it for $100 after Mail In Rebate http://bit.ly/du2cmR

 

[Old Hippie]

Go with this link. You'll get it for $100 after Mail In Rebate http://bit.ly/du2cmR

Weird, says $110.00 for me.

 

[getho]

have a look at windows home server. I was initially very sceptical, (and loathe microsoft generally), but after a wobbly start it seems pretty robust. You can shove any amount of any size drives in it and they show up as one enormous drive. You can specify how many drives mirror the content and which content is mirrored (so the most precious stuff you can duplicate).

I've got 4 tb in mine in 6 drives