Hard Drive Replacement/Upgrade

RMS Oceanic

My media collection is currently spread across two 1TB internal hard drives (each backed up with a 1TB external hard drive), but the space I have is dwindling. As a result, I'm looking at replacing those drives with two 3TB hard drives. However the selection is currently limited, and I'm not sure which type would be best to get.

Current Drives: 2x Samsung HD103UJ 1TB ATA Hard Drives
Motherboard: Asus PK5 (I've checked, this can support SATA)
OS: Windows 7 32bit

So does anyone know which 3TB hard drives would be worthwhile?

Ruckus

If your motherboard supports it, I'd recommend 3+ 2GB drives in a RAID5 array. This will give you a performance increase as well as some redundancy in case one of the drives fails, though at the cost of 1 drive's worth of space (3x 2GB would have 4GB of usable space, 4x 2GB would have 6GB of usable space, etc).

RMS Oceanic

I've heard of RAID, but I've heard mixed things about them sometimes being more trouble than it's worth, although that may have been a few years ago. In any case, to be specific my motherboard is a "ASUS® P5K SE: DDR2, SATAII, PCI-e x16, 2 PCI, 3 x PCI-e x1", so I don't know what it can or can't support in terms of RAID.

Ruckus

If you can find it on Asus' website and link the page, I can tell you.

additionally, there are a variety of RAID configs, including, 0, 1, 5, 10, and everything in between, though those tend to be specialty configs not commonly seen. Pretty much home systems have either 0 (two or more physical disks become one logical disk, increasing performance, but no redundancy), 1 (two disks become exact duplicates of each other, leaving you with half the space, normal performance, and full redundancy), and RAID 5 (3 or more disks become one disk, with part of each disk's space being used to hold parity information from the other drives. Performance is increased, a small amount of space is lost (equal to the size of one of the member disks), and performance is increased).

RMS Oceanic

Here's the link

Djeet

If it's just for storing media I'd just get the cheapest thing I could find. I picked up a 3TB Hitachi CoolSpin bare drive (because it was the cheapest I could find) just for storing media. It's a 5400 RPM drive, but that's fine for just storing and playing back media. If you need something with higher data bandwidth, like for a boot drive I'd opt for something else. This drive is fine for playing back hi-def media, but if you were trying to do something else with it at the same time (extracting video from rars to the same drive for example) then HD media playback gets all choppy.

If you are going to do RAID, make sure the drive supports it, or make sure you investigate the caveats the drive manufacturer makes w/r/to using the drive in various RAID configs. Western Digital, for example, cautions against using their non-RE Green, Black and Blue drives in anything other than "consumer-grade RAID" (2 drive sets in RAID 1 or 0): http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1397 or http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/996/p/227,294/session/L3RpbWUvMTMxNjcyNjA5My9zaWQvUHNta0NMRWs%3D, though there may be a workaround (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1191548).

RMS Oceanic

Hmm, my Motherboard is like three years old, so I dunno if I could set up a worthwhile RAID with modern Hard Drives. I think I'll stick with the 1TB -> 3TB plan for now.

And now to start setting money aside to acquire said drives...

Foomy

you could also look into setting up a nas(network attached storage) solution. than all your files would be available to any computer on your network. it would also handle all the raid stuff for you painlessly.

the models that netgear and seagate make are pretty nice.

Mr_Rose

Also, quite a number of NAS boxes are also DLNA servers these days so you can stream your movies to your Xbox or whatever too.