best current price per gig?

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swingdjted

Limp Gawd
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Sep 14, 2008
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I'm sure this has been asked before, but I couldn't find a thread that addressed it directly that was at least somewhat current.

At this point it looks like a lot of 1.5 TB models seem to be the best, with the exception of this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145298

Hitachi's cheap 2TB model. At $139.99, it's about 7 cents a gig.

I'm thinking about picking up a couple of these (just for media storage, not necessarily in need of extreme performance), but I've never owned any computer equipment from Hitachi, let alone hard drives. Does anyone else have experience with Hitachi drives? Does anyone have drives that they can find that cost less and are still reliable and decent for media storage?

It appears that the chipset on the drive's board is from Samsung. I have a pretty nice 27" sPVA monitor from Samsung that I've so far had good luck with, but I'd still like to know what you guys think about this drive and other inexpensive mass-storage drives.

Thanks in advance for your replies.
 
swingdjted said:
I'm sure this has been asked before, but I couldn't find a thread that addressed it directly that was at least somewhat current.
Click to expand...

you know there's an entire thread dedicated to the Hitachi 2tb if you look. :) "lowest cost per gig" isn't the only factor to consider - if all you based your decision on was that, you'd be buying a different make and model of drive every time you needed more space. different people have different goals for their storage, but in general i'd say try to minimize buying too many different makes and models for simplicity sake.

In my case, at one point a few months ago when I ran out of space and needed to start buying more drives and the biggest size drives I owned were 1Tb, even though 1.5Tb's were cheaper than 2Tb's, I had decided my long term plan was to standardize on 2Tb form factor, so I didn't mind spending a bit extra per gigabyte to fit my longterm plan. I like to decide on one make and model every few years, and then only buy that drive until it no longer makes sense. Because I happen to prefer hardware raid arrays, my 2Tb choices were narrowed down to pretty much just the Hitachi 2Tb, after I had problems with the WD 2Tb's and kept reading about other people having problems with WD, Seagate and Samsung 2Tb's in raid arrays.

If your goal is to run WHS or even just standalone drives in Windows, then you wouldn't need to worry about standardizing as much, but I'd still recommend it because it will make life simpler, you'll get to know the behaviors and "personality" of a particular drive better (example the loud click some Seagates make when they spin up is normal yet scares some people that aren't familiar with the drive), and keeping a cold spare on hand is easier when you minimize how many different drives you own.
 
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One major thing, that odditory touched upon, is how many drives you will be using and what you will be doing with them. The reason I'm moving now from 1.5 to 2TB drives is because I realized that I'm basically spending $47/ drive just to connect them between a raid controller port and a hotswap bay. Doesn't seem like much but if you add those costs in, 2TB drives look better and better. Here's my calculation on both the old and new WHS boxes: http://www.servethehome.com/?p=279
 
That's true, which is why it's tempting to start grabbing 2TB's for WHS...

I got a fairly large RAID with 1TB drives right now, and I think I'm just gonna drop some 2TB drives in the pool for WHS to have a little redundancy (The RAID holds stuff that isn't managed by WHS). The 3TB RAID5 is currently in the WHS pool but I'm thinking it's somewhat pointless, I'd be better off expanding the 7TB raid (actually running low on space). And just throwing a couple drives directly connected to the motherboard / WHS pool.

But I also got the 31605 used and fairly cheap (closer to $200 if I remember right). Then I had to buy cables which was another $50, but anyways, I was going for most ports for least cost.

But then again if I can get 1.5TB drives for < $90 I'd be happy... I have a similar setup to you with the 31605, and 2 Norco 5-in-3's ($70 after cashback on ebay) with a Stacker ST01 case ($50 refurb from Coolermaster, 12 5.25" bays)... dropped the Rocketfish, wouldn't fit 5-in-3 hotswap bays because of rails.
 
Doesn't account for bing cashback ;)

Which does get WD 1.5TB drives from Tigerdirect/CircuitCity for $93 something brand new vs. open box...

I did actually order one for that price, I figured nobody would be selling new drives for that cheap on the forum...
 
I ordered 8 WD 1.5TB greens from Tiger/ CC when they were $85-95/ drive. Lost 3 in the first 14 days. From TD make sure you test those suckers for a week or two before trusting with data.
 
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