Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLHX

[GreatEmerald]

That's my set up, actually:

• One SSD for the system (including /home), just one simple partition
• One large, green (silent, low heat) HDD for media
• One large HDD for backups of everything (media and /home)

This works great on a desktop.

Sounds about right. I had a 640 GB WD Black drive for my main PC storage (with separate / and /home partitions), then I got a 1 TB WD Green drive (with the head parking feature turned off so it wouldn't self-destruct, of course) for storing media and archives I make whenever I reinstall the OS, then I switched to Btrfs and thus had only one partition on the Black drive, then I put the Green drive into a NAS, and now I'm getting an SSD (which Btrfs can seamlessly integrate with the existing HDD).

hmm, is there one you would recommend for home nas usecase, at least 2 TB better 3 TB capacity?

I never found much use for anything larger than 1 TB, and that's considering I need to record a lot of 1080p raw gameplay footage... As for recommending things, as I noted either keep away from WD Scorpio Blue and WD Caviar Green or make sure to use a tool to disable head parking if you get one of those; otherwise, just check reviews and price of the drives you can choose. Also, don't choose SATA 6 Gb/s drives just because it's SATA 6 Gb/s, because HDDs never use that bandwidth, anyway. In the article it's shown that they can only reach 2.2 Gb/s and that's only in ideal, synthetic situations.

[devius]

This drive doesn't make any sense. 6 years ago it was awesome, but now for the price you can get a cheap 120GB SSD which is still many times faster than this, while losing only 30GB.

[s_j_newbury]

It's not really fair to compare performance of a 1TB drive to a 150GB drive. The storage density is *much* higher on the 1TB so much more data passes under the read heads each rotation, and the head doesn't need to move so far to seek the next track.

I actually have 5 2008 vintage WD3000BLFS drives in my server running btrfs RAID5. I'm quite happy with the performance. The firmware needed reflashing due to a bug which caused the drive to die once the SMART online time overflowed! (The fixed firmware was leaked as Western Digital do not officially recognise the problem!) Certainly felt no need to upgrade it to SSD! ;-)

[philip550c]

no, not even close. in theory and practice the ssds will last by far longer than any hdd.

Ugh no. Ssds in our servers do not even come close to hdds, they stop working after a certain amount of writes unless we buy the expensive enterprise drives and even worse is that in raid they fail about the same time so even mirroring doesn't help.

[DanL]

What is the point of making the Raptor in 2.5" form? Sure, it has less power consumption/heat, but it also limits storage. Anyone with half a brain would mount a 3.5" Raptor right by an intake fan. I'm guessing too many little epeen kiddies overheated their Raptors and RMA'd them which is why WD feels the need to put a huge heatsink on it.

believe it or not but all my samsung drivers are still working fine (the yungest is 3 years old) and they were all less noisy than all my WD i had.

I so miss Samsung. They were choice disks for quiet computing. I still have a 7,200RPM 500GiB SpinPoint as my system and media drive, a 7,200RPM 320GiB SpinPoint in another system, and a 5,400RPM 500GiB SpinPoint collecting dust.

[philip550c]

All of you left clinging to spinning mechanical drives are still in the stone age... guess some people just wont learn or somehow use the excuse of a steam library and need a TB to store it even though you maybe play 100GB worth of it.
I "use the right tool for the right job" and store my primary OS etc on a 256GB SSD and I use ~120GB of it. And I store random archival stuff on an external where the data is meant to be.

Yeah cause you know best and cause you know how I use my steam library. I guess valve was stupid for putting a terabyte drive in their steam machine? Oh and when I rip a Blu-ray to my drive that's 50gb and then batch encode several of them down to 4gb each an ssd would be just fine? Ssds are nice but they have a bunch of drawbacks. It's funny how some of you guys are getting offended that some of us like hhds.

[GreatEmerald]

I so miss Samsung. They were choice disks for quiet computing. I still have a 7,200RPM 500GiB SpinPoint as my system and media drive, a 7,200RPM 320GiB SpinPoint in another system, and a 5,400RPM 500GiB SpinPoint collecting dust.

It's not like they went anywhere, it's just that Seagate bought out Samsung's HDD division, and now their drives are labelled as Seagate.

[philip550c]

What is the point of making the Raptor in 2.5" form?

Lots of enterprise drives are that size, it's for servers. It's not a laptop sized drive.

[Vim_User]

What is the point of making the Raptor in 2.5" form?

Because it runs hot and has to have a cooler, so it doesn't die. This cooler increases the size to 3.5". If you wanted to use a 3.5" disk instead the cooler would increase the size to the next form-factor, 5.25", which is a no go for many server cases.

[Veerappan]

hmm, is there one you would recommend for home nas usecase, at least 2 TB better 3 TB capacity?

Well, I don't know about the person you're originally responding to, but I use WD Green 2TB's. Just make sure to disable the 5-second head parking feature (using wdidle) before you put the drives into service. If you don't, the heads park after 5 seconds of inactivity, and the drives wear out pretty fast. If you disable that "feature", they should last a good long time.