Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
DataDrives
Seagate Barracuda XT ST32000641AS 2TB (four)
(
http://www.seagate.com
)
We've used and recommended Seagate hard drives for many years, and have
never had cause to regret it. Seagate Barracuda-series drives are fast, extreme-
ly reliable, quiet, and reasonably priced.
Of course, we didn't actually decide on Seagate drives without considering
competing models from other manufacturers. Of the few 2 TB 7,200 RPM SATA
drive models available, we ruled out the Hitachi models immediately, despite
their low price, based on their small caches and short warranties. That left only
two candidates, the Western Digital Caviar Black and the Seagate Barracuda
XT, both of which sell for the same price.
Western Digital recently went through a bad patch of several years' duration,
during which we refused to use or recommend WD drives. In the last couple
of years, the reliability of WD drives seems to have improved dramatically,
and we've returned them to our recommended list. The Caviar Black models
are louder and run hotter than similar Barracuda models, but have excellent
performance.
One major reason the Caviar Black drives are so popular is the widespread
perception that they outperform competing models by significant margins.
In fact, our benchmark tests showed that the performance of the Caviar Black
and Barracuda XT is very similar overall, with the Caviar Black winning some
tests and the Barracuda XT others. In every case, the margin of victory was at
most a few percentage points.
Given the identical prices and similar performance, we gave the nod to the
quieter and cooler-running Seagate Barracuda XT. We decided to install four of
them in our extreme system, for a total of 8 TB of rotating storage. We consid-
ered configuring these four drives in a RAID 3 array to maximize long-block se-
quential read performance—which is ideal for video editing—but that would
have required buying an expensive hardware RAID controller and would have
given us only 6 TB of visible disk space. Since we have the very fast SSD avail-
able to our video work files, the additional speed of the RAID 3 wasn't really
needed.
BackupHardware
SYBA SD-ENC50020 eSATA Dual SATA Hard Drive Docking Station
At first glance, it might seem impossible to maintain adequate backups of this
system without spending a fortune on a high-end tape changer. With as much
as 8,000+ GB of storage to be backed up, there aren't many options.
A full backup with a DVD burner would fill a couple of thousand DVD+R discs—
at a cost of several hundred dollars just for the discs—and would take a week
or so to complete, even burning discs 24/7. And that doesn't count the time
or cost required to replace the DVD burner several times. Blu-ray would be
no better. A full backup would require more than three hundred 25 GB BD-R
discs—again at a cost of several hundred dollars—and by the time it finished,
your expensive Blu-ray burner might be on its last legs.
