Build your own External Hard Drive

The thing with benchmarks is that they are not always consistent.

For example, run HDTune 10 times in a row. Your numbers won't be the same...but they really should be.

When I build my current machine, 2 years ago, I went with a 1TB Seagate 7200.12. It performed great, but benchmarks it had about 25ms access time for some reason. No matter what port, what cable, what drives, or what OS.... (vista or 7), I showed this same slow access time. Real world usage didn't seem to indicate anything was wrong. It was this very problem that brought me to this forum.

In the end, I ended up buying a WD Caviar Black 1TB for my new machine, and it was about 15Mb/s slower transfer, but was around 8-10ms access time. I put the Seagate 7200.12 in my older Linux desktop, and it came back with 12ms access times and has performed just fine.

Benchmarks for me, are not the be-all end all for my performance. They are simply an indicator showing that nothing is terribly wrong or broken.

If you put that same 2-7 month old hard drive in 5 different boxes, you would likely get 5-7 different results. Don't fret over 1-2ms, it's simply just not worth it.

I have a very similar opinion of benchmarks.I started off by cheking my SSD. With AS SSD the numbers were all over the place. I'v seen scores of 335 and other times I've seen scores of 440. Yet, in actual useage I could tell no difference. Startup times were the same and apps opened the same. I've come to the conclusion that benchmarks have no bearing on actual usage.

For the heavy data whores and you know who you are this bad boy or the like is the direction I would tend to go. Smallish foot print with massive expand ability.
Sans Digital TR5UTP Hard Drive Enclosure - 5 Bay, 3.5, SATA to USB 3.0eSATA, RAID, 2-Port eSATA PCIe Card Included at TigerDirect
4 bay in black.....nice!
http://biz.tigerdirect.com/applicati...223&CatId=2780

linnemeyerhere said:

For the heavy data whores and you know who you are this bad boy or the like is the direction I would tend to go. Smallish foot print with massive expand ability.
Sans Digital TR5UTP Hard Drive Enclosure - 5 Bay, 3.5, SATA to USB 3.0eSATA, RAID, 2-Port eSATA PCIe Card Included at TigerDirect
4 bay in black.....nice!
Sans Digital TR4M-BP Hard Drive Enclosure - 4-Bay 3.5 SATA to eSATA, RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, JBOD, SATA 6G PCIe Card at TigerDirect

I've thought about it but don't know If I want to go that route. But I do have enough hard drives to fill them up.

Newegg U.S.- 20% off external enclosures or docks. June 27-28.
Not sure about Canada.

I also posted on the Deals thread in Chill Room.
It seemed appropriate here also this one time.

Newegg.com - External Enclosures, External Hard Drive Enclosures
--

Cr00zng said:

Other than the huge increase in burst rate, which is doubtful at best,

Yeah, that burst rate is obviously not realistic...clearly the benchmark is not working properly or measuring remotely accurately.

Cr00zng said:

1-2ms agreed, but when the difference is about 6ms that does indicate some issues; however, the difference is still not to the point to be worth for looking into it further. Especially when the drive works just fine otherwise.

Exactly, my random access times on my Seagate 7200.12 read in the 20-25ms range on my box. I drove myself nuts and replaced it with a WD Caviar Black. All-in-all, I can tell no performance difference between the drives on the actual machine. That Seagate in another machine is fine. So, I'm unsure if there were any actual issues, but I felt better seeing that my access times were lower with the WD. And just being a storage drive in the end (as I'm now using an SSD for the OS)...the access times are far less important now.

Newegg Samsung Spinpoint $55.00