Re: [LAU] Which SATA drive? Size? [Was: Re: partition table]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 10:42 PM, david <gnome@hawaii.rr.com> wrote:
> Ivan K wrote:
>>
>> I was surprised to hear that so  many people write their audio
>> files to a second drive.  I always thought that most audio
>> people preferred as few drives as possible in a system to keep
>> noise down.
>>
>> On a somewhat related topic, is there a brand of SATA drive
>> that people recommend as far as reliability, speed, and low noise?
>> Also, even though Terabyte drives are inexpensive these days,
>> would a 500 GB drive be better as far as speed (reading/writing)
>> than a 1 TB drive?  (I really would not need a full TB anyways).
>
> I saw a 1TB drive for sale at NewEgg for $59. Does it matter if you don't
> need a full TB???
>
> Don't know about noise. There are "green" drive models that have a "reduced
> noise" setting, but I think it usually entails reducing the drive speed, I
> think.
>
> I don't think drive size has any impact on speed. Newer drives tend to be
> faster than the previous models, I think. Also, the larger drives may come
> with larger on-board caches.
>
> Largest drive I have here is 1TB (split into 2 500GB paritions), the only
> time I notice the size is when the system decides its time to fsck the
> drive. ;-)
>
> Brands? I like Hitachi and Western Digital. Toshiba for notebook drives.
> I've also had good results from IBM and Seagate. I've only had 2 drives fail
> on me. Both very old Seagates. The oldest failed after being used for about
> 10 years. The newer one died during its first year, was replaced under
> warranty, then died again about 18 months later.
>
> --
> David

I own 8 of the WD 1TB Green drives along with 5 WD 500GB RAID Edition
drives so I've seen this stuff up close over the last year..

A couple of points for consideration:

1) The Green drives do typically run at lower RPM. It's part of the
power saving strategy. I don't typically thing drive RPM has a huge
impact on audio work but clearly others could have a differing opinion
on that. It would make for an interesting conversation I think.

2) The biggest part of power saving on the WD Green drives is that
they park the heads _very_ often. While this hasn't been a big problem
under Windows for me under Linux it's a bit of an unknown at this
point. I have one system that uses one of the 1TB drives as the main
system drive. The head gets parked and then Linux wakes it up every 2
minutes or so. The issue is these drives are only spec'ed at 300,000
head parks over their lifetime and then they are out of spec.

30 parks per minute * 24 hours * 365 days = 262,800 head parks.

Basically, if the drive is left in a Linux system that's powered up
all the time then the drive is out of spec in a little over a year.

Does this matter? I don't know. I have one machine that is a year old
and it's approaching end-of-life?

3) One of the potential advantage I see with the larger density drives
is they are using 4K sector sizes instead of 512 byte. As long as you
partition on a 4K sector you only need to do one read of the drive to
get 4K vs 8 reads with older 512 byte drives. In my mind that's a big
potential win in terms of real speed independent of what the RPM of
the drive might be. For audio data where you have long streams of data
you aren't going to waste much disk space.

Please note that last time I looked the 4K drives don't identify them
selves as such so you have to know how to do the partitioning
correctly up front, keeping everything on a 4K boundary by hand. If
you don't these drives become __VERY, VERY, VERY__ slow.

Hope this helps,
Mark
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Received on Fri Dec 24 00:15:04 2010