Need to buy a Hard Drive

Hello.

I need more hard drive space and it seemed to me this would be the best board on this forum to post a question about buying one or more hard drives. I hope this is the right place to post this.

In general, does it make sense to buy two 1.5TB drives or one 3TB drive? I’d like to get a total of about 10 TB (or even larger). But I’m just asking this because I’d like to know if there are any other factors involved in buying multiple drives besides the cost.

I know it would be less money to buy one large drive, but I’m wondering if there may be any other factors in favor of buying two drives - each with one half the capacity of the large one.

I’d appreciate if anyone has any advice for as to which drive(s) to get and what size(capacity) would be best.

Thank you.

Do you need the drives right now? Compared to what I bought a couple of years ago, prices are still up as much as 50% because of the flooding in Thailand last fall. They are projected to drop back over the next six months or so.

Some thoughts:

The larger the drive, the more you lose when it fails.

Your computer only has some many SATA connections (I’m assuming these are SATA), and power connections. SATA can be chained and I’m pretty sure adapters can convert those old 4-pin power plugs to SATA but it’s a factor to think about.

Fortunately hard drive prices seem to be recovering from the floods. I’d find the happy medium in price and reliability. Then I’d buy twice as many because if you have 10TB of data, you’re probably gonna need at least 10TB of space to back it up to. You DO backup your data, right?

Thank you very much for that advice.

I don’t need them right away. I could wait for 3 or 4 months. So, I will check out some prices tomorrow and then keep an eye on them.

MobiusStripes, I’m afraid that I don’t understand your point about SATA drives and “chaining”. It’s not your fault. I just don’t know very much about hardware.

Could I ask you to explain what you meant in a way that I can understand?

When you advise me to find the happy medium between price and reliability, would you have any specific hard drives in mind?

If possible, I’d sure appreciate if anyone would recommend a specific hard drive (manufacturer and model number).

SATA is the name for the size and shape of the connector plug ends. SATA plugs look different than older 4-pin plugs, and won’t fit in 4-pin plug sockets (unless you have an adaptor, I guess.) If your computer is kind of newish, it will almost certainly use SATA connection sockets for your hard drive.

To “chain” SATA drives is to run a strip of cable (or a device) that has 1 SATA plug on one end (to plug into your motherboard) and 2 or more SATA plugs at the other (letting you effectively plug two SATA components to a single plug on your computer). This usually is not optimal, in my opinion because of the extra space inside your computer tower it requires. It’s also not “plug and play” and requires some configuration.

In your situation, there’s no technical reason why 2 half sized hard drives would be preferable to 1 full sized hard drive. I’d go with the single 3TB drive.

Another consideration is that the more drives you have, the more power your power-supply needs to be capable of supplying simultaneously.

That is an important consideration. In the past I have blown out two sockets. Not fuses. But the entire socket.

I have a feeling the building manager is getting ready to let me know I can leave.

Welcome to the SDMB, Lazlo. We have divided this message board into different forums, for different kinds of topics. The Game Room is for threads about sports and games; since you’re looking for advice, I’ll move this to our advice-giving forum, IMHO.

Thanks very much.

I’ll try to remember that and pick the best forum in which to post in the future.

Barring the occasional supply crisis like the current Thailand situation, hard drives always get cheaper.

If you need 3TB buy 3TB. If you want 10TB, buy 3TB. What you pay for 3TB now, will buy you 6TB a year from now. Ten terabytes of data is a huge number that would take me several years to fill. By that time, prices on those drives will have dropped to $50. There seems to be a law that prevents hard drives from ever dropping below $40, so you unfortunately won’t be able to buy 6TB for $10.

You haven’t stated where your desired storage size includes back up space or not. Make sure you have back up space. But consider that within five years, cloud storage on the web will be much cheaper and the preferred method for keeping your data safe. And you’ll be left with twice as many hard drives as you need.

Yea, but if you have two drives to hold the data of one, you are also twice as likely to experience a drive failure and lose half of your data.

Solution? Buy two larges and use one as a backup.

It will be quite some time before it is feasible to backup 1TB to the cloud. The uplink bandwidth to the home user is typically around 1 to 10 Mbit/s backing up 1TB would take years. I haven’t seen a lot of growth in bandwidth available to the home user in the past 5-10 years. Just more people deciding to get a cable modem.

I have a cable modem and uploading is just unbelievably slow.

I signed up for the best package they had and they quoted me a D/L speed of 50 Mbps but for upload it’s only 2MBps for my package. I pay $100 per month by the way.

That may seem fast to a lot of people because some of the less expensive packages let people D/L at 3Mbps and U/L at 256 kbps. That is only one-eighth as
fast as my U/L speed.

But it’s still painfully slow.

I never noticed before when I was DLing music. But a video file is no comparison. A one hour TV show can be around 500 MB and that takes me about one hour to D/L and one week to U/L and that is just pathetic.
A 3 minute song is around 5,000 KB. A one hour TV show of 500 GB is 100,000 times larger than that. There has to be a faster way to U/L.

Maybe someone could start a company where you get some worker to go to your home and get the file you want to U/L on a DVD and then travel to the place you want to U/L to and hand it to them. It has to be faster than taking one week to U/L.

My first hard drive was five megs, and I was glad to have it. Just saying.