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i am putting together a home server to store all my movies and shows on which will then stream to my htpc with xbmc


i am think of buying the western digital 2tb green drives (probably eventually about 8 of them)

the models available to me are


Western Digital Green 2TB WD20EARX

Western Digital Green 2TB WD20EADS


are these good reliable drives as although i will have offline backups i want to know my data is safe on them


i do NOT plan to have them in a raid array as i personally don't trust raid as one card dies or a software error can cost me all my data if i simply have each drive independant and keep offline backups on a secondary drive if any of those drives goes i only lose what's on there instead of all of it the difference between 2tb and 16tb


i do have a raid card installed but using it as a non-raid option just so i can get an extra 4 hard drives installed as my onboard only has 6 sata ports and one is being taken by a 2.5 toshiba laptop drive as the boot drive running windows 7 x64 ultimate


also apart from if these drives are good i also want to know i have a 620watt seasonic S2II PSU installed would this be enough power for 8 or 9 drives total plus obviously running the motherboard

protocol77 Wrote:are these good reliable drives as although i will have offline backups i want to know my data is safe on them

WD drives are the best - no worries. I prefer the performance of the BLACK drives however. I tend to build based on performance rather than economy. To each their own

protocol77 Wrote:i do NOT plan to have them in a raid array as i personally don't trust raid as one card dies or a software error can cost me all my data if i simply have each drive independant and keep offline backups on a secondary drive if any of those drives goes i only lose what's on there instead of all of it the difference between 2tb and 16tb

I could not agree more.

protocol77 Wrote:i do have a raid card installed but using it as a non-raid option just so i can get an extra 4 hard drives installed as my onboard only has 6 sata ports...

I had a similar type card PCIe 1 and I found it to lag a bit so I axed it. Though again, I HATE waiting for computers to do what I command them to do. I am sick and twisted that way...

protocol77 Wrote:also apart from if these drives are good i also want to know i have a 620watt seasonic S2II PSU installed would this be enough power for 8 or 9 drives total plus obviously running the motherboard

ummm YES.

protocol77 Wrote:also apart from if these drives are good i also want to know i have a 620watt seasonic S2II PSU installed would this be enough power for 8 or 9 drives total plus obviously running the motherboard

It's an overkill really. I power 10 drives, a tv card and a sata card with a 300w seasonic.
Any *singe* rail ~ 300watts efficient psu will be just fine. The drives generally consume the most power in their spinup/startup time for a couple of seconds. Only then you're gonna need the maximum power in a server. These WD drives have around 15watts power consumption at startup so 9x15=135 watts. Add some 30 or 40 for board/cpu and you are still way far below 620. In idle state you'll just be wasting power with this large psu.