I hate the computer business..

[theducks]

Everything is so cheap, buggy and commoditised, or insanely expensive.

Case in point: I want a bunch of 400GB USB2 or Firewire hard drives. Now, I could pay $628 (+shipping) for one from Zytech. Or, I could buy a drive for $357 and an enclosure for $99. But would it work? It might. But you can never trust it. The vendor of the case will blame the drive, and the vendor of the drive will (rightly) blame the vendor of the enclosure.

I wish I could just buy PC components and have them act as expected.

Comments

[reaps.livejournal.com]

but where's the fun in that!

[mkj.livejournal.com]

Buy them both from the same place, and make sure that the shop says that they'll work together. If they don't, you can return them (wrt fair trading act or whatever) because of "unfit for purpose".

[mkj.livejournal.com]

... and a "bunch" of 400GB drives? What're you storing.....

[theducks.livejournal.com]

I try to keep three copies of everything ;) One production, two backups in seperate locations. Currently I have 1 x 80GB in my laptop, 1 x 80GB I carry around when I leave my laptop at home, and 1 x 120GB at work.

I'm looking to upgrade the internal drive in my laptop to 160GB.. the enclosures I have only do <128GB drives.. which means I'll need new enclosures to backup the new drive. I figure why stop at 160GB.. I also want something for, as grahame said, storing videos. And backups of that too.

But yeah, 320 might do.

[coxymla.livejournal.com]

Any reason you want 400 GB drives specifically, especially if you're getting multiple units anyway? 320 GB drives are just $200 and much better value for money overall...

[coxymla.livejournal.com]

Expanding on this a bit, I find it odd that I'm a Mac guy willing to pay a hefty premium on hardware that'll do less for my purposes, but as soon as I get that tower everything else is cobbled together as cheaply as possible. Case in point: Firewire ATA controller mounted in a Power Mac 9500 case with a Power Mac 6100 PSU powering a crappy WD Raptor and a cheap DVD±RW, and the internal RAID that sits in the CPU bay of my G5 the cables of which bow out the side panel a bit.

[theducks.livejournal.com]

Nah, 320 would do. The premium on 400's is pretty hefty still.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on the computer business as a whole and I think it is largely deliberate.

That being said, how I'd do it if it was me is:

cheapish decent used quality pc tower (something around a athlon 800 or soish.)
dual ethernet or even a gig e
sata controller card(s)
stack of 5 reliable drives in that case - one IDE whatever for the bsd, 4 for mirroring (or raid 5 if you want, but you already bought the spare drive, right? 2 of them, even, because you'll never find them again!)


if this was on a quicksilver or later powermac, I'd just dump 2 to 4 drives (depending) internally.

I don't really fall in love with firewires drives in general as an online serious storage solution. (that being said, i'm hunting for someone who has an older one in the 20-60gb range to give it to me since I need one for the ibook so I cna put my work lab installs on it to make my job (at apple) easier.)

[theducks.livejournal.com]

It's mostly for backups, not day-to-day usage, and I want three seperate drives/enclosures, since they will end up in physically dissimilar locations. But if it was for large scale storage, I think I'd still go firewire, for latency.

[mexicanjewlizrd.livejournal.com]

"crappy WD Raptor"?!

[coxymla.livejournal.com]

When it's spinning (even just at idle!) it's the loudest thing in my room, even beating out the G5 with 6 spinning drives and a dual-core CPU / 7800GT.

[mexicanjewlizrd.livejournal.com]

I concur. I hate hardware too... but it does tend to fascinate.