On 14 Dec 2008, at 02:49, Grant wrote:
My desktop currently runs one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148140
I'm pretty much out of space and I'm trying figure out the best way to
expand. The factors to consider are cost, capacity, speed, noise, and
heat. ... but $200 for 300GB is pretty expensive
I don't find your criteria well-defined - fast, cheap (large) &
reliable, pick any two.
If the factors were ONLY cost, capacity, speed, noise, and heat, then
I would say throw away your old hard-drive & RAID 0 across cheap 1TB
drives, which are c £65 each at the moment.
In RAID 0, however, the 0 stands for how much data you get to keep in
the event of drive failure, and most of us don't want that. I also
don't see your old drive as redundant.
Haven't you considered just mounting an additional drive at /media/
video, or /var or /home or wherever?
I personally don't find hard-drives to be significant contributors to
a system's noise. There are too many fans in any of my machines to
notice the difference made by an extra disk crunching away.
Additionally, in typical PC systems with capacity for only 4 (maybe 6,
these days?) ATA drives, I don't find heat to be a problem. I'm sure
I've read articles saying how heat is the biggest contributor to drive-
failures, but I have two machines in my airing cupboard here [1], each
stuffed as full of disks as possible (3 in one, 4 in the other PC) and
have never had a failure on any of them. One system is at least 4
years old, probably more like 6, the other at least a couple.
In a later post you say drive throughput may be an issue for you,
which I did not really find clear initially. I would personally
consider a pair of two of the cheapest new drives I could find
(probably 80gig @ £22 each inc VAT or 160gig @ £28) and RAID 0 them.
Others may advise if the partition scheme which immediately occurs to
me - 3 partitions: swap, /tmp and /mnt/video/my_tmp - is wise. RAID 0
will be twice as fast as any single drive, but for me I wouldn't need
a large volume in that configuration, as I wouldn't keep anything
important on it, nor the root of my system, nor anything that would
need restoring in the event of a failure.
Stroller.
[1] US readers: I'm not sure if you use the same expression. In the UK
the "airing cupboard" is the small cupboard in which the home's hot
water tank sits. I guess you may keep the hot water tank in a large
basement, but British homes have less room, so it is confined in a
small cupboard which gets very warm indeed. Consequently it is used to
dry bath towels after use, and hence the cupboard's name.
