I have been out of the hard drive market since the flooding created insane prices last year. It seems we are down to basically 2 choices, Seagate and WD. For mass storage, I had been going with the Samsung 2TB "EcoGreen" model, with great success. They have now been purchased by Seagate and have only a 1 year warranty, a bit of a disappointment. I also have a number of 1 TB WD Black Caviar units that have given great service. The 2TB model is almost 2x the price of the Samsung/Seagate and WD Green models. Lastly, I have several Hitachi 1TB 7200 RPM units that have not given me any issues.
I am looking at building a new system for media storage and am trying to determine the best approach. I am thinking on building on a hardware RAID card to reduce the number of "partitions" (right now I have 21 "drives", "partitions" and "DVDs," ranging from C: to W:, almost exhausting the alphabet of available designations) and provide "automatic" backup. I have read that many drives don't like hardware RAID cards unless you go with to the ultra-expensive Enterprise drives. This system would not be designed for speed (the 5400 RPM Samsungs streams movies without a problem), but safety and reliability. I was looking at the Areca ARC-1223-8I PCI-Express 2.0 x8 Low Profile SATA / SAS 8-Port PCIe 2.0 Internal SAS/SATA RAID Controller and eventually 8 drives. Suggestions, comments or warnings? You input is much appreciated. Jim Maki [email protected]
