New 2TB hdd on sale in UK

[sjbuck]

I'm glad these have finally been released. As already stated, the price is crippling them at the moment and only those with no regard for money will buy them It's a shame my synology 207+ won't support them, simply because the power drain is too much for it's puny PSU (it won't support even the green WD 1Tb drives reliably apparently)

[Funkstar]

It might work, it is a WDC Green drive after all, which are supposed to use less power.

[Leggie]

What I'd like to know about this model is what revolution it runs at. The current Western Digital Green Power series drives run at 5400rpm and yet still manage excellent performance, from what I've read, so if they're increased it to 7200rpm for the 2TB model this could potentially be a very fast, very quiet, very large, and very low-powered drive. Here's hoping.

[watercooled]

From what I've read on the net, it's a 5400rpm drive but still fast.

[Funkstar]

Sequencial transfers will be fast due to the density of the data on the platters, but the random access will suffer from being 5400rpm.

However, I'm pretty sure this one uses a combination of 7200 and 5400 depending on how it is being used.

[Mighty God]

You'll struggle to find any in stock right now.

In the past couple of weeks they have been on pre-order, the prices have gone from around £206 to £258. I would really recomend waiting until plenty of places have stock and prices have settled a little. I suspect £258 is list price and not a great reflection on their realistic street price.

edit cheapest I can see is £211, wouldn't trust it though.Dabs is £245, Scan is £244 which is already £14 less than the start of this week.

http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=W...tf-8&scoring=p

Thanks for that, it was more curiosity than anything else as I intend to wait until the prices fall and settle down before I purchase, but thanks again anyway!

[TooNice]

However, I'm pretty sure this one uses a combination of 7200 and 5400 depending on how it is being used.

Is there any indicator for that? I seem to remember reading that the first 'Green Power' drives were actually 5400RPM drives but marketed in such way as to appear that they combine 5400-7200 (which is apparently quite difficult to do from an engineering perspective) depending on usage.

[Badbonji]

There is also a 512gb SSD out now/soon, as well as a 1gb SSD raid array which is enclosed in a case fitting into a pci-e 8x slot

[watercooled]

However, I'm pretty sure this one uses a combination of 7200 and 5400 depending on how it is being used.

I've done some research into this and found that WD simply markets all green drives as 5400-7200 and certain models have their own spindle speed. Apparently, WD doesn't want to market drives as 5400rpm because it makes them sound slower than competing drives. The drive's spindle speed is constant and doesn't vary however the drive is used. The 2TB drive happens to be a 5400rpm model.

[Funkstar]

Fair enough. I was just going by what I'd read else where.

I don't really care too much what speed they spin at, still the highest data density out there, so thats what I want to build a new array from.

[arthurleung]

I would be happy even if these babies spin at 4200RPM. With 4~8 drive configurations with large cache, speed is just not an issue at all.

[Badbonji]

It would be nice to have better access times though, I mean you want as fast as possible for such a huge amount of space... imagine the size of a raid array from 2Tb drives :O and trying to back it up lol

[arthurleung]

It would be nice to have better access times though, I mean you want as fast as possible for such a huge amount of space... imagine the size of a raid array from 2Tb drives :O and trying to back it up lol

Where do you want to backup your 2TB drive to? The only way to backup a huge array (6TB for 4 Drives) would be just have another identical array on another computer, copy it over through GbE. The speed is capped to about 110MB/s which can be fulfilled easily even at 3600RPM. Or alternatively some tapes, a dozen at least, or 120 Dual-layer BD-R.

Access time of RAID array might be low, but with cache of 256MB+ on RAID HBAs, Small files are cached efficiently, and larger files would behave like sequential.

And in most case you will be compacting the small files into like RAR files, extract those files to some faster drives (or the SSD), then deal with small files from there.

[iftiq]

Why do you need 15 TB of disk Funkstar? You running a Pr0n server?...

Nope.

...hopes dashed...

[TooNice]

I would be happy even if these babies spin at 4200RPM. With 4~8 drive configurations with large cache, speed is just not an issue at all.

Probably depends what it's been used for. I can see the benefits of having a high capacity, low RPM drives for low the heat/noise, but I am sure there are people wanting to use the outer edge of those massive drives as their OS drive. There's a market for both high/low RPM until SSD becomes mainstream.

In regard to your previous post about using a 'proper' barebone computer, could you list the components of one of your builds as an example? I do have a fair number of files with Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters, so I would rather avoid any potential issues with corrupted filenames.

Is the CM stacker suitable as a case if I want many drives, or should I be looking at something else?

[arthurleung]

Probably depends what it's been used for. I can see the benefits of having a high capacity, low RPM drives for low the heat/noise, but I am sure there are people wanting to use the outer edge of those massive drives as their OS drive. There's a market for both high/low RPM until SSD becomes mainstream.

In regard to your previous post about using a 'proper' barebone computer, could you list the components of one of your builds as an example? I do have a fair number of files with Chinese/Japanese/Korean characters, so I would rather avoid any potential issues with corrupted filenames.

Is the CM stacker suitable as a case if I want many drives, or should I be looking at something else?

Spec is basically irrevelant, just get the cheapest Socket AM2 setup with two 16x PCIe slots. Most motherboards don't support non graphic card on the first PCIe 16x slot.

Slap in one or two PERC5/i (Cost about 80 quids on ebay)(Two cards if you have 3 16x slots). The card will basically do all the number crunching for you, and put out speed far higher than your GbE can handle.

Case size rarely matters, people mostly use 4-8 drives. Wouldn't recommend more than 6 drives for RAID5 IMO.

If you want something fast for OS drive, get some cheap refurbished 15K RPM 2.5" SAS / Raptor / WD Black drive / 32GB SLC SSD. As long as you don't run anything intensive on the OS drive, it won't be slow.
I don't see why would anyone use the outer edge of an huge array (You're talking about 0.4% of a 6x2TB array). OS doesn't need fast throughput but relatively low random access time.
The huge stripe size for large array will be slow for OS files which tends to be very small.

One of the server my friend built recently have the following spec (Note he also run some CPU intensive stuff on top of storage). Otherwise even a single core CPU will be fine.

Phenom 9750
3Ware 9550SX-8LP (Migrate from old machine)
4GB ECC DDR2-800
DELL PERC5/i (For the SAS drives)
4x1.5TB Seagate 1.5TB
4x1TB WD Green Power
2x74G Fujitsu 15K 2.5" SAS
CM Stacker (The very first version)
Corsair HX620W

With plenty of space to expand to 16 3.5" + load of 2.5" that could be placed anywhere.

You design your storage sub-system to fit your usage pattern. You don't NEED super-fast access time on every single GB of your stage.