Hard drive prices - and innovation - decline

jimbo45 said:

Gary said:

WD has come out with a 4TB Hard Drive for $299.00 at NewEgg.

Hi there

In Europe these can be had for around 125 - 140 EUR so the price is about the same.

What you MUST have to get any sort of decent performance out of these large spinners is A LARGE CACHE otherwise the system will forever be calculating the area / sectors of the disk to acces, wait for the drive to position to the correct physical address and then retrieve the data.

The SATA speed of course becomes important ONCE THE DATA HAS BEEN READ as it's then handled by the computer bus rather than the disk's hardware. Having a large cache means that disk accesses are much less as the data is already in storage, and with a decent "pre-fetching" algorithm the disk controller can read the next bunch of data that it thinks the user will want while the computer is doing something else.

So my advice to anybody thinking of investing in large capacity spinners is ALWAYS to pick the one with the largest Cache as well as having a decent spin rate - typically 7200 rpm or faster.

Cheers
jimbo

Nothing truer said! When looking at the WD Black editions as well as the cache I didn't want those compared to the Blue and GP models seeing a 32mb cache when I could grab a 1tb drive with 64mb instead! That can be similar to some extent as how you would explain the differences between the 32bit and 64bit OS in that why is more ram taken with the 64bit like 2.5gb minimum rec over the 2gb rec for the 32bit?

The 64bit kernel preloads more data into the active ram for the most frequently used programs meaning less swapping out to the paging file created on the drive by the 32bit which relies more heavily on that. Likewise the larger the cache the more data is stored in that form of active memory providing a smoother operation as data is accessed faster. It makes for a more efficient startup of apps just the faster bus speed can utilize the data already preloaded without delays.

Obviously there is a vast difference between the cache and 64bit one being OS and the other hardware access times. But the similarities are evident once you "do the math" in that sense. With mean times on the other hand looking at the manufacturer's own white paper data sheets generally provides a more accurate assessment since these are reached under controlled circumstances the average user wouldn't see like having a batch of 1,000 drives to work with out of let's say a model line of 100,000 or more drives on a large production scale.

You can't sample each but gain the average expectancy from extensive testing with a handful out of a product line. Once those data sheets are confirmed a company will then know what to expect when something goes into mass production. The 3-5yr. limited warranties you see for various makes and models only reflect what the manufacturer already knows. And with anything mass produced you know there will a few "ut ohs" along the way.

Even without a HDD or SSD failure backups are needed, anything can happen, and will if there's no backup. Windows can decide to quit working for no obvious reason at times. Mine has been fine since I started making backup images though.

jimbo45 said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

jimbo45 said:

...What about cases where it's not actually an HDD failure -- but say Nature -- Floods / Earthquakes / Volcanoes / Tsunamis / even simple traffic accidents where a truck crashes through your front wall and destroys your computer -- to say nothing of Burglars or even accidental data erasure.

Cheers
jimbo

Still your own fault for not having a reliable off-site back up scheme.

Hi there
Absolutely --there's no such thing as "too much backup".
I was answering primarily answering one of those people who were saying that the HDD's should NEVER fail so why should I take backup.

The above cases were for the situation assuming the HDD's NEVER failed there's still scenarios where you would need to recover your data from backups !!!!.

Cheers
jimbo

I didn't think you could have too much backup while you may use up a lot of drive space or removable media at times. Hard drives never failing? HAR! That's a joke! You can have a brand new as well as old clunker drive decide to give you a major headache!

Brand new drive comes in with bad sectors or something else goes and without any backup(s)... oops! "having a bad hair day" is someone learning a valuable lesson by an unfortunate mishap with hardware as well as not having any foresight about the countless problems that might come up.

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Britton30 said:

Even without a HDD or SSD failure backups are needed, anything can happen, and will if there's no backup. Windows can decide to quit working for no obvious reason at times. Mine has been fine since I started making backup images though.

It's like rain and umbrellas. If you have an umbrella (bumbershoot for those on the east side of the pond) with ypu, it won't rain. Forget the darned thing and it is guaranteed to rain.

That's one of those: "gee if I had only...." type of days when you seem to be all prepared with every precaution and ? nothing happens! But as soon as you turn around and don't tend to some type of preparation all H breaks loose and you get caught between a rock and a hard place!

Lady Fitzgerald said:

Night Hawk said:

...That's one of those: "gee if I had only...." type of days when you seem to be all prepared with every precaution and ? nothing happens! But as soon as you turn around and don't tend to some type of preparation all H breaks loose and you get caught between a rock and a hard place!

Ok, I'm getting old. The first time I read that, I saw Preparation H.

Me too. It's appropriate, computers, or building them, can be a PITA.

You can get "slam dunked" fast when putting everything into a system and lose it all from not using the old noggin ahead of time. Whether drive or some hardware fails you can be stuck without some form of backups accessible if needed from another machine. That would apply to removable media and usb flash drives where surprisingly people carry photos and other file types like work around with them.

As for having one external drive to keep everything on as for laptop users without any other means of backing things up? that can easily turn into a "recipe for dsaster" if the drive fails or you have an oops and bump into it and awwwwayyy she goessss.. cccrasshhhh... and you out of a drive! Even with extreme care having the backup of the backup for the... may just save the day.

Besides second drives like externals another you can never fully count on for backups is removable media like data disk you burn. Once you get into the next optical drive or into a new system premade or other the disks can be unreadable at times! I've tossed plenty fo cd-rs and several dvd-rs used for backups of folders for various file types often enough to never completely rely on optical either. Spare drive to back up another secondary drive to back up...