If you are considering using RAID in your setup, this is a great thread to read. One commenter put it best:

[T]he reason for using RAID is NOT as a backup. RAID != Backup.
RAID is for redundancy and performance increases.

This is a great point. RAID will protect you from drive failures but is not a backup solution as if you lose your data on one drive, you have lost it on all of them.

Personally, I don’t see a need for an end user machine to really have a RAID setup as it is expensive and not cost effective for performance gains when compared to better hardware.

Does anyone have any personal experience or thoughts on this?

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Effectively Using A RAID Disk Array

Cheapest of the cheap: Hitachi Deskstar, 80GB, $32.99. And yes it is a SATA 3GB/s. Bear in mind a Western Digital flavor is just one dollar more.

King of the hill (price-wise): HP 347708-B22 147GB, $499. What makes this hard drive expensive is its 15,000 RPM. If you feel inclined to buy one of these, bear in mind it’s a SCSI interface.

Solid State Disks: All of them are still too expensive and makes the HP listing above look like a steal. See, the deal is that if you want SSD now, you’ll most likely need the controller card to go with it. And this can easily bust over $1,000. But even if you have the controller card and just want the SATA II SSD alone, 120GB can cost $400.

Drives that normal people would actually want

The 500GB drives are now below the $60 price point, many of which have free shipping.

1TB drives are now below the $80 price point. I can’t believe this is true but it is. If prices keep dropping at this rate, 1TB will be had for $50 by fourth quarter 2009.

Make no mistake, 1TB is huge. It will take you a good long time to fill that. But the problem that presents itself is how to back it up. The solution is to buy two 1TB drives. One for your primary; the other as backup.

Important note to Windows XP users concerning hard drives

A basic NTFS volume has a maximum recognized size of 2TB. With 64KB clusters, it is possible to achieve a 256TB dynamic volume.

If you intend to go over 2TB with NTFS, get educated on how to create or convert to dynamic volumes. Everything you need to know about those type of volumes is in that link. Read it and bookmark it.

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By The Numbers: Hard Drive Prices

Enter the My Passport portable hard drive from Western Digital. This is a 500GB portable drive that connects via USB 2.0. It also comes in 400, 320 and 250GB sizes as well. And it comes in 9 different colors – but you don’t care about that.

What you do care about is what it looks like and what makes it truly portable.

Here’s a few images of it:

This is certainly better than a larger USB hard drive caddy especially considering it does the same job and is self-powered via the USB. No external power supply needed. That’s a huge plus.

For those using Windows you also get 128-bit encryption.

The price? It’s $149 thru Western Digital or if you shop around you can get one for as low as $109. When I checked the price I honestly thought it was going to cost a whole lot more, but thankfully it stays well within a reasonable price range.

The biggest drawback is that USB 2.0 can be a bit slow. Do not expect it to have blazing fast performance. As long as you remember that, this is very usable tech.

Were you to try to get the same amount of storage with USB sticks you would easily spend over $200. And with a 3.5-inch setup you have to deal with a power supply.

This is probably one of the cheapest, easiest and most useful backup solutions yet. And for those with media center computers this would also serve quite well.

Would you buy one?

Is this tech something that sounds good to you, or would you rather stay with the older 3.5-inch setups? Let us know in the comments.

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Stylish Portable Hard Drives?

The point of this is simply if you are getting rid of a hard drive with important data on it, 0 writing it one time is enough. I’ve written a tip about this in the past which references the Ultimate Boot CD as a great resource for easily getting access to the tools you need.

Let’s be realistic, nobody is going to be running your hard drive through rediculously sophisticated and expensive hardware to try to steal your data.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Permanently Erasing Your Drive? A Single 0 Pass Is Enough

The fixed disk drive you have is guaranteed to fail someday. I’m not saying this to scare you because it’s common knowledge. You already know you’re supposed to back up your data. What I’m getting at is that with all tech out there, it’s nothing short of amazing we still use these things considering how fragile they are and how easily they can break.

Watch this video below – it’s a bit old but it still brings home the facts:

At 4:45:

“Is it good for society to entrust so much data to something so delicate?”

“No …and frankly, I’m surprised we’re still in business. I’m surprised there are still hard drive computers.” (spoken by the DriveSavers owner himself!)

Needless to say I really champion solid-state drive tech. Granted, it’s still a very young tech that’s going thru its “growing pains” right now, but hopefully someday soon we can ditch the magnetic platter way of doing it and go with SSD.

Why does SSD have such better reliability? No moving parts. When there’s nothing moving, there’s nothing to break. This isn’t to say SSD is infallible (because it certainly isn’t), but it sure is better than what we’re using now.

Keep your fingers crossed that the prices for SSD will come down enough to where it’s affordable for everyone (it’s still way too expensive at present).

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Why Are We Still Using "Old" Hard Drives?

The only problem with that is that when applied it seems to be bricking the 500GB versions of the drive.

Seagate is very aware of this issue, has taken down the update and is investigating it currently. And I’m quite certain a fix for it will be posted in short order.

See source link below for more information on what’s happening (this is really upsetting a lot of people for obvious reasons).

[Source: Channel Register]

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Seagate Firmware Update Causing 500GB Drives To Fail

If you stock your built PC with parts that are the right choice the first time, your Windows installation will run better and faster.

Please Login or Register to read the rest of this article. Gold/Silver Membership required.

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Building A “Perfect” Windows PC

GParted fully supports NTFS and FAT as well as the two major Linux file systems (ext2/ext3) along with lots of other files systems. You can shrink, grow, copy, move (and more) partitions which should just about handle any needs you may have. Additionally, GParted can easily be configured to boot and run from a Live CD or USB stick which is the ideal way to deal with any partition changes you might need to address.

Of course, before you make any changes to your partition structure, you should be comfortable with the process as well as make sure your import data is backed up in the event of a disaster.

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Open Source Partition Manager

Typically, those that need the big-big drives do one or more of the following:

• Video editing. Camcorder, DV, DVR, Tivo, DVD ripping, etc.
• Multitrack audio editing. The raw WAV files are quite large.
• Gaming. Many newer games require a significant amount of space.
• Photography. Even on point-and-shoot digital camera photos, each photo can easily be over 3MB in size. If you take a lot of photos this can add up in size rather quickly.

Those that don’t do any of the above or only on a semi-regular basis typically don’t need the big-big drives (or just use an external when required).

With that being said, here are the numbers as of now for what you’d pay if you decide to add on a hard drive.

All prices are listed in US dollars. All drive types are standard 3.5-inch form factor with SATA connector. Links provided are lowest price offerings from NewEgg. Always remember to do your research with hard drives before buying one. Just because something is lowest price doesn’t mean it’s the best offering (obviously).

80GB: $35

It makes no sense to purchase a 40GB any longer because the 80GB versions are cheaper by a few bucks. This is the smallest and cheapest available offering for SATA.

If you are still going super-old-school with Windows 98, this is the drive you want because the 120GB versions are tough to come by new and that is the maximum ‘98 will recognize (technically it’s 137GB but you obviously can’t buy a 137GB drive).

160GB: $42

I have no idea why this size is still even offered. It’s too big for old-school operating systems and to small for newer ones. I’d skip it.

250GB: $50

I wouldn’t bother with this one either. See next listing.

320GB: $50

It’s amazing that for just 8 bucks more you double the size from 160GB to 320GB.

500GB: $55

Yes, you can go for the big guns for just 55 bucks. Most would agree that this is the start of big-big territory by current standards.

640GB: $70

The 640GB size is a bit of an oddity because the 750GB version is just 5 bucks more (see next listing).

750GB: $75

We started at $35. Forty dollars later we’re in 750GB territory.

1TB (1000GB): $100

Twenty-five bucks after that we’re in terabyte territory.

1.5TB (1500GB): $120

Twenty bucks beyond that is one-and-a-half terabyte territory.

…and this is where we end.

For now.

NewEgg currently doesn’t stock 2TB internal hard drives – but I’m sure they’re right around the corner and waiting to be sold in ‘09.

Is the terabyte range worth the price?

Yes. When it broke $200 it was worth the asking price.

However for most people that don’t do a ton of video stuff (be it DV and/or DVR, etc.), 500GB will fit the bill nicely.

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By The Numbers: Cost Of Hard Drives

A file-system specifies exactly how files are laid out on a hard disk. In other words it defines, in conjunction with the registry, where the computer would go to find files and folders stored on the disk and how the computer locates the data on the hard disk associated with the files and folders that it finds. With the Windows XP and Vista operating systems you have a choice between 2 file-systems:

FAT32

(”File Allocation Table, 32 bit version”) is an upgraded version of its predecessors FAT16, and FAT12, which dates back to the 1970s.

One of the limitations of FAT32 is that a single file can be no greater than 1 byte short of 4 gigabytes.

It also has fairly lax security: Any experienced hacker should be able to easily bypass any security mechanisms and protocols with nothing more than a DOS script.

NTFS

(”New Technology File System”) appeared with Windows NT in the early 1990s.

Among other things its file size limit is 2 terabytes or 2,048 gigabytes; 512 times greater than with FAT32.

Its security is pretty sturdy, and even many experienced hackers have extreme difficulty getting past security mechanisms and protocols used with this file-system.

The decision seems pretty clear-cut, judging from the above.

Should You Switch?

What if you’ve already formatted in FAT32 and added data to the disk? Have you read this article too late? Will you need to back it all up and reformat the disk in NTFS?

The answer to that is, unless you are a professional geek and extremely security-conscious and/or are using the disk in a fully-professional capacity, then no. For the average user there is a much simpler method…

A little computer magic, courtesy of Microsoft: Open a Windows Command Prompt and enter the following command. (Here I’m assuming that the drive-letter assigned to the drive in question is E: If it’s another letter then replace E: below with the appropriate drive letter.):-

CONVERT E: /FS:NTFS

The conversion utility will convert your file system to NTFS with no data loss. Once the drive is formatted as NTFS everything will work as before. Microsoft’s library article on the subject can be found here. Also see this article for a further explanation.

The outcome is, nevertheless, a little less than if you were to have backed up everything and reformatted the disk in NTFS. This will not normally be a problem for the average user, and normally will go unnoticed. If you are not an average user then click here .

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FAT32 or NTFS? [Geek]