mike wrote:
On 8/15/2018 12:04 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
On 8/14/2018 8:55 PM, mike wrote:
On 8/14/2018 3:24 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:
On Tue, 14 Aug 2018 13:58:00 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:
On 8/12/2018 12:58 AM, Mark Perkins wrote:
On Wed, 8 Aug 2018 20:37:01 -0500, Lynn McGuire
wrote:
"Why I Will Never Buy a Hard Drive Again"
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ch...ves,37563.html
"It’s been years since I was willing to work on any PC that boots
from a
mechanical hard drive. Once you get used to the snappy response
times
and speedier gameload times of an SSD, going back to a hard drive
feels
like computing through a thick layer of molasses."
Lynn
If you were buying a 'large' drive now, what would you buy? SMR seems
like something to be avoided, so if I want a drive in the 8-10-12+
range, what's available?
Not just asking Lynn, anyone can chime in.
I buy 8 TB WD externals for backups drives for our LAN. We have three
spinning and seven externals. I replace one external drive every six
months and archive the old one. It may be time to jump to the 10 TB,
our LAN backup is now 4 TB.
https://www.amazon.com/Book-Desktop-...dp/B01LQQHLGC/
Your situation is obviously business-related while my situation is just
a home LAN with a handful of PCs, three of which I actually care about,
so the part about archiving a drive every six months and replacing it
wouldn't apply, but the rest is very helpful.
I see the 8TB on Amazon for $160 ($20/GB) and the 10TB for $270
($27/GB), both of which are pretty darn amazing. The higher per-GB
price
of the 10TB is offset by the fact that fewer drives are needed, if
USB/SATA ports or desktop/bay space are a limiting factor.
In my case, if I were to buy external drives, I would open the cases
and
strip the drives out to mount them internally. I don't have much use
for
external drives, but I know they're popular with others.
Make sure you know what you're getting.
I bought a 2.5" external USB drive.
Took it apart to discover that the USB is on the drive controller
board and there's no option to use it otherwise.
No idea if this happens with 3.5".
I stripped the 8 TB out of an external WD drive to replace the internal
4 TB backup drive on my office pc. The USB is on a daughterboard so no
big deal. I've done the stripping before.
That's not always the case. I have at least one example of a 2.5"
external drive where the USB is on the drive controller board and not
removable...
as I stated above.
I've run into this problem in discussions of "shucking".
That's the practice (as a business) by some, where they
buy 2.5" external products, strip out the drive, and
sell the drive as a raw mechanism. And some of those
people got caught by the change in design. The problem
is, you'd need to find a compatible controller board,
to replace the USB version with. Since 15mm high 2.5" drives
were never intended to be retailed, there's no guarantee that
a SATA version of drive controller board exists. But I
understand too, that external companies sometimes make
these controllers, and that would remain a possibility
as a replacement.
You have to credit the product manufacturer, with
finding a way to stop "shucking". Pretty clever.
If the board used a USB to SATA converter chip, maybe
you could tap into where the SATA connection exists.
While they could do a SOC with USB on the side,
what are the odds of that happening ?
On the very first SATA drives built, they made IDE controller
boards, then slapped an IDE to SATA converter
chip onto the controller board. There is a precedent
for "bodging" a controller board for the purpose.
While it's easy to get SOCs with USB on the side,
it's hard to say whether those would be available
to make this development "easy". Slapping a USB to
SATA chip on the controller board instead, would
only cost money, and they wouldn't need to spin any
firmware. Which makes the option attractive
from a development perspective.
*******
And I've never heard of a motherboard controller
having an issue with disk size. That's a first.
There are all sorts of USB to SATA converters
with weird firmware limits. The closest "buggy"
design, was the SIL3112 add-on SATA chip, that
used to "freeze" when 1TB drives got connected.
And a firmware change fixed that. It wasn't really
broken.
In an example here, the problem was traced to an
Intel RST driver.
https://communities.intel.com/thread/110559
http://forums.legitreviews.com/viewtopic.php?t=31350
Jan 07, 2011
"The latest Intel Rapid Storage does not have support
for 3tb hard disk drives on RAID mode. Only for AHCI.
Future releases of the Intel Rapid Storage software
will support 2TB hard drives on RAID."
And you could always run MSAHCI or STORAHCI or whatever
passes for an in-box driver, rather than something like
one of those drivers. In some cases, you have more than
one choice for a driver solution.
Paul