CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[Spanky Ham]

nombz,
I would be concerned about blowing air into the case. I think it would be better to pull the hot air out of the case. I would also put an air filter over the intake to help keep the inside clean.

Tim,
I see your joking, but I linked directly to the HD section. I don't look that often, but I don't think there is more than five or ten threads a day. It should not take more than a minute to look through it.

[Spanky Ham]

I don't know if it was the holidays are what, but I haven't seen that many cheap drives lately. I know the $79 1.5tb drives at Frys were there in Sep and Oct, because that is when I was in Atl. Anyway, Newegg has a 1.5tb for $99 with free shipping.
http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=1803765

Frys has an external drive for $69 with 500gb. I am thinking of going and getting this. I just bought a Dual stereo for my van. It has a USB input and I could plug this drive in and have my entire CD collection at my fingertips.
http://www.frys.com/product/6082638?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

[WanMan]

I don't doubt that they were a combination of holiday specials and designed geek loss-leaders. New year, they are trying not to jump too far into the red.

[Spanky Ham]

Wan,
You are probably correct. They may have just gotten a good deal on a bunch of them and decided to use them as such. Anyway, by the end of the year there will be 2tb drives for $99 or less. I wouldn't be surprised if there were specials on 3tb drives dipping below that mark.

[VideoGrabber]

Spanky,
> Anyway, Newegg has a 1.5tb for $99 with free shipping. <

Thanks for keeping us updated. I appreciate it, since I frequently forget to look for a while. Those Samsungs are great media drives. Sadly, this "super deal" from NewEgg is $10 more than what I was paying for them routinely, almost 6 months ago. Perhaps the weak dollar has something to do with it.

Luckily, I bought enough drives when they were cheap, and haven't been filling them as fast, so I still have ~20TB free, and thus some time to wait for them to come back down. At this point, it's unlikely I'll pay more than $90 for a 1.5TB drive again. I'll probably shift over to the 2TB when they eventually hit $130 or less, since the one 2TB drive I bought as a trial has been working out well.

If anyone buys these at Newegg, keep in mind that if you click-through Bing, you get 2% cash back. That drops the net price for the drive down a couple bucks. Or go to TigerDirect and click through Bing for 8%, and get the WD 1.5TB drives for $101 net (with free shipping, and no quantity limits) any day of the week.

[VideoGrabber]

BTW,

if I had been following SlickDeals (as you recommended), maybe I wouldn't have missed out last week on the external WD 1.5TB drives for $79 at Dell, with free shipping. I would have grabbed at few (probably half a dozen) at that price. They sold out pretty quickly, and not everyone who ordered got theirs.

[Or perhaps not. Perusing the thread, I see they sold out within 7 hours of the news being posted on SD. I don't monitor things that closely, or need drives that badly, to catch a really narrow window like that. Of course, the reason these deals sell out so fast is because there ARE folks monitoring them very closely, who then buy mass quantities to flip them on eBay. Which means that us regular folks, who just wanted one or two drives for personal use (or 6 ), get left out in the cold.]

[WanMan]

If you dare trust Seagate again Fry's has 1.5TB for $89.

[Spanky Ham]

Wan,
I don't have any issues with Seagate. I am going to try to pick up one of these drives and then do Tim's burn in.

Tim,
Yeah the Slickdeals sometimes go pretty quickly. It almost seems that some of these companies that want to dump inventory would be better to have an ebay subsidiary. I missed out on a great laptop deal from Newegg around two months ago that sold out in hours. I am curious though how they would get around the deals that limit one per customer.

It sucks on the prices, but I think I am going to go ahead and grab one.

[VideoGrabber]

> If you dare trust Seagate again... <

Thanks, but I'm pretty reluctant to go there. While some buyers had no problems, and swear by them, others have had massive grief. Like the guy who bought 6, has been through _16_ refurb'ed replacements, and still has 2 dead units.

It's ironic, because I used to be a huge Seagate fan, and bought, gosh, easily more than a dozen Barracudas... maybe even 20, back in the days I bought only 1 or 2 drives per system. Never had one fail. But after their fiasco with their 1TB drives not all that long ago (which I never experienced myself, thankfully), where they had a huge firmware problem, but disclaimed any knowledge or responsibility for the longest time, they totally lost my respect. Not totally because of the problem itself, but the sh*tty way they handled it. I've passed on many, many very "good deals" (price-wise) on 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0TB Seagates over the last 6 months. Not worth the potential hassle (to me, YMMV). It's their loss.

Much farther back, WD Caviar drives used to be pretty low in the reliability department, even though they were cheap. I wouldn't touch them, even if you gave me one free. My data was worth far more than any potential savings. Fast forward to today, and I think WD Caviars (black, blue, OR green) are some of the most reliable drives around.

Times change. Sometimes radically. You can't always go by past history, or brand name.

[MikeEby]

I'm down to about 2 GB out of 5TB so I'm in the market for more myself, just finished ripping a bunch of my HD-DVD's. I've been mixing brands...The bankers rule..."Never put all your eggs in one basket"...I think that was the bankers rule prior to 2008...It doesn't apply anymore we have another thread for that.

Mike

[VideoGrabber]

Mike,
> I've been mixing brands... <

That's not a bad idea. While most of the drives in my media server are WD, I've been buying a lot of Samsungs, and liking them a lot. I also have quite a few Hitachi 1TB drives, back from when they were priced at $79 and everyone else was $100+.

The (relative) downside to the Hitachi's (formerly IBM), is that they run noticably warmer than the others. The "green" Samsungs are the coolest. I also have some 500G and 750G Seagates that have been fine as well. I just never made the leap to TB with them.

The key (IMO) is taking the time to perform the incoming acceptance testing. That's caught every problem drive I've received (I blamed it on poor packaging by Newegg, but you can't be certain), before I ever put the drives into use. Knock on wood.

[Spanky Ham]

Tim,
That is interesting about Samsung. A tech friend in SoFl tells me that the Samsung laptop drives are the most reliable. Now, you have me thinking about the Seagate. Let me just say I hate you. You aren't making this easy on me, but I think I will make it easy on myself and just get a SSD. Microcenter has that Vertex for $99. Kingston is coming out with a new one for $80. I have been thinking like they say in the article that using these as boot drives would be ideal. With USB 3, external HDs will be much more compelling.

Oh, I wanted to add has anyone ever played with Puppy Linux. I bring it up in regards to boot drives. You can load it and run it in main memory. The OS is about 100mb. I don't believe my computer ever ran that fast. It is not feasible for everyday work, because you can't save anything but it sure is fun to play with.

[VideoGrabber]

> Let me just say I hate you. <



> I think I will make it easy on myself and just get a SSD. Microcenter has that Vertex for $99. Kingston is coming out with a new one for $80. I have been thinking like they say in the article that using these as boot drives would be ideal. <

The SSD drives do make good boot drives, but I've been scared away by the relatively high costs (which are starting to come down from the stratosphere, but usually involve the dreaded REBATEs). Also, I'd like to get better performance from one in more than just the seek-department. I.e., the Read/Write performance should be at least in the same neighborhood as a HDD. There have also been reports of various "issues" with SSD units (stuttering, and other tech stuff I haven't grasped, because I haven't taken the time to research it). I have no clue how serious the problems really are, but I figured if I gave them a bit of time, they'd work them out.

Oh, and while I like to see prices, without knowing the capacities of the Vertex and Kingston units you referenced, they don't mean anything. Feel free to edumacate me.

P.S. Looks like the $99 Vertex units are 30G (after rebate). Before rebates, they're smaller.

[VideoGrabber]

> With USB 3, external HDs will be much more compelling. <

The only "problem" with externals right now is that USB2 limits you to about 30MB/sec (and FW400 to about 40MB/sec). In my book, that's not too bad, considering that average drive speeds (not peak) are only about twice that. Certainly for media purposes, neither presents any significant constraint.

(Well, unless you're editing HD in something like VideoReDo, that has the ability to stream portions not being changed, at near drive speed. Faster could be better then. But as soon as you start to re-encode, the CPU can't pump out that much anyway.)

[WanMan]

Spanky, I bought four 1TB Seagate drives based on the infamous 7200.11 firmware. NewEgg replaced the one DOA unit and within a month or so two more died. But by then NewEgg had removed all evidence of their even haven carried that particular drive and Seagate eventually admitted the problem and came up with a quick replacement program. So far I have a forth drive ready to go back as it has failed as well. That will be four failures of the original four I bought at Xmas 2008.

Now, the replaced units have worked just fine, but these no doubt had better firmware. Still, any savings I originally thought I was getting was quickly eaten up by the cost of replacing the failed drives. This is why when I recently bought some new drives around Xmas 2009 I went to Western Digital.

[Spanky Ham]

Wan,
I am convinced. I really don't need a 1.5tb HD right now.

[WanMan]

I'm not seeing the justification of SSD. You are paying a premium for long-term storage read/write performance. This cannot be a question of data long-term survivability as this can be easily accommodated for less using convention disk-based storage. Also, i just do not see the necessity of read/write time performance over convention technologies when you are talking about a paltry 30-40GB.

Of course, if money ain't no thing to worry about I'd buy a Ferrari as a daily driver, too.

[VideoGrabber]

> I'm not seeing the justification of SSD. <

The justification is 10x faster disk I/O for small block, random access tasks, which comprise a lot of the activity on a system drive. Booting up, shutting down, and launching apps can be significantly faster, and thus improve the amount of work you can get done on your PC... especially if you do a lot of task-switching.

> you are talking about a paltry 30-40GB <

That certainly seems paltry, by today's standards. However, that's enough to hold all the OS files, as well as all the Apps and their runtime data files, for most folks. It's not just a minor convenience issue either. Potentially, you could get twice as much work done, because you spend so much less time waiting on the darn hard drive (which is many orders of magnitude slower than the CPU).

Seriously, I suspect that if you were able to monitor the total amount of time you spend twiddling your thumbs while in an I/O wait state for disk I/O activities to complete, you'd be shocked.

> if money ain't no thing to worry about <

I agree that the current pricing premiums make this a hard sell. Spending 50x as much per GB is a bit hard to swallow, which is why I don't have any SSD's yet. Even though it's at least possible that based on time saved and salary/hour they may already be justifiable.

But I really don't want to spend much more than $100 (which currently buys only a 30G unit), while at the same time preferring to get a 60-80G drive. Prices have fallen dramatically, now that Intel has real competition, but I think I still have some time to wait before they get down to my level. Also, unless you do your homework, it's easy right now to wind up with a crap-SSD that's no better than an HDD... but just costs more. However, the OCZ and Intel units that Spanky referred to are solid products.

[VideoGrabber]

Spanky,

if I were to get an SSD right now, I'd go with the 40 GB Intel X25-V myself. $128 at Amazon, with free shipping. (Or, if I hadn't missed it a couple days ago, $115 at Mwave.) While in an absolute sense, the performance doesn't stack up to the faster -M series, in real-world use the differences are small enough to be easily outweighed by the 2x+ pricing premium. Plus, they should be amongst the least problematic of the SSD drives.

The 30G Vertex at $106 delivered (after rebate) from Microcenter is a good performer, but I' be concerned about the $40 rebate, as well as the fact that none of these are the actual stated capacity, so the 27-whatever GB might wind up being too small.

The only 64G units currently on my radar are the PQI at $170, and the Vertex (actually only 60G) at $180 (after rebate), both at Newegg. Both are more than I care to spend, but that could change over the coming months.

But with prices at the $3/GB level, I'm sure glad I'm not paying that for 2TB hard drives.

[WanMan]

Just not sure how SSD, in the context of having enough disk space, is justified. Sure, an SSD will improve boot/shutdown times, shorten application load times, etc., but this must be profession specific. For general storage considerations it seems bewildering at best.

Maybe they should market SSD to those with AHAD.