[Saixbmc]

About to buy an internal 2TB hard drive to store my media.

Anyone recommend the best HD, WD or samsung?

Also what speed is best for media 5400 or 7200rpm?

Thanks

[Choque]

Google is your friend http://forum.xbmc.org/showpost.php?p=725...stcount=21

[eskro]

all my Movies are on a WD Green 5400RPM and they play without a hitch!!

[gnif]

I find that WD drives are much more reliable then other brands, if it came to it I would chose in order.

1: WD
2: Seagate
3: GOTO 1

I have experienced a few Seagate failures, and almost no WD failures, as for other brands such as Fujitsu, Maxtor, Samsung, the rate of failure for these drives is very high in my experience. In order of failures across 12 months:

1: Fujitsu (13)
2: Samsung (11)
3: Maxtor (8)
4: Toshiba (5)
5: Seagate (1)
6: WD (0)

(These stats come from the computer repair business I operate)

As for size, obviously getting a 2TB disk over 2x 1TB disks is going to use less power, and be quieter, but, if your 2TB disk fails, you will loose 2TB of data, thats alot to loose. I opt for 1TB disks, and setup a LVM under linux to make them one large volume to the system.

BTW, LVM, unlike RAID0 (stripe), if a disk fails, the data on the other disks can be recovered still, just needs a bit of work to do so as long as your not using LVM stripe.

[Saixbmc]

Thanks guys

[P.Kosunen]

BTW, LVM, unlike RAID0 (stripe), if a disk fails, the data on the other disks can be recovered still, just needs a bit of work to do so as long as your not using LVM stripe.

Is this natively in LVM or with some RAID on top of it? Link to howto?

[KiSUAN]

I find that WD drives are much more reliable then other brands, if it came to it I would chose in order.

1: WD
2: Seagate
3: GOTO 1

I have experienced a few Seagate failures, and almost no WD failures, as for other brands such as Fujitsu, Maxtor, Samsung, the rate of failure for these drives is very high in my experience. In order of failures across 12 months:

1: Fujitsu (13)
2: Samsung (11)
3: Maxtor (8)
4: Toshiba (5)
5: Seagate (1)
6: WD (0)

(These stats come from the computer repair business I operate)

As for size, obviously getting a 2TB disk over 2x 1TB disks is going to use less power, and be quieter, but, if your 2TB disk fails, you will loose 2TB of data, thats alot to loose. I opt for 1TB disks, and setup a LVM under linux to make them one large volume to the system.

BTW, LVM, unlike RAID0 (stripe), if a disk fails, the data on the other disks can be recovered still, just needs a bit of work to do so as long as your not using LVM stripe.

First I must say that that numbers mean nothing, it's not failure rate, just numbers of fail disks, which can mean that you have 0 WD (i know you don't, just an example) and 1000 Fujitsu. I must point also that failure rates vary a lot from model to model.

In my experience (work at a Computer Hardware Distributor) the RMA in WD Ecos 2Tb is quite higher than the F4 2Tb, this based in a sale volume of 300 F4 2Tb per month and 100 WD Ecos 2Tb per month, occasionally we buy/sell some Seagate and Hitachi, but not enough to give an accurate failure rate, anyway, in my opinion they are both worst than WD or Sammys.

[gnif]

@KiSUAN - These figures are based on 1000 units sold to customers, sorry I did not mention that.

@P.Kosunen - Yes, native LVM, you can span a volume across multiple physical disks, but without stripe, so if one fails, you can recover the data of the other disks without too much effort.

[wicky]

I think the only thing we can all agree on is that the only way to truly protect your data is through system redundancy. Do not let a single point of failure destroy all your data. Either rely on a raid array for redundancy, keep data backed up on secondary drives, have dvd/bluray backups, or just be prepared to re-rip or otherwise reattain your data.

Brands these days all tend to have the same accepted MBF ratings and similar warranty periods. So save for a few models plagued with firmware or manufacturing issues that are well known, you could reasonably expect each brand to be as reliable as the next.

So if you want my advice, just read the RECENT customer reviews on places like newegg and be sure to backup your data in some way. You can generally look past old reviews as the issues that plagued those buyers typically get dealt with through new revisions in hardware, firmware, or production. If all the reviews for the last month are pretty negative overall, you should probably look to the alternative brand.

And spindle speed shouldn't be a limitation due to the sheer density of modern platters. Most users tend to favor 5400 RPM drives as they are lower power, less noise, and produce less heat than their 7200 brothers.

[P.Kosunen]

Yes, native LVM, you can span a volume across multiple physical disks, but without stripe, so if one fails, you can recover the data of the other disks without too much effort.

So it's basically mirroring, need 2 * disks for redundancy?

[wsume99]

^^I've just started looking at LVM recently myself. I think when you are using it as gnif mentioned - span a volume across multiple physical disks - it is basically equivalent to JBOD. Correct me if I'm wrong here. What I'm trying to figure out is how I would go about adding parity protection to a volume created in LVM. I'm assuming that in such a configuration if you lost a single physical volume that you could rebuild the data using parity and the other physical disks that did not fail.