SATA drives

[mikec]

Looking for a few SATA drives for a new Drobo that I just ordered. Any ideas or thoughts on makes or models? Not looking at 1TB drives yet, don't have that much data yet. Probably looking at 250-500GB drives.

[tehboris]

Seagate ftw.

The more cache the better. If you got the USb version, more cache won't make much of a diffrence.

[mikec]

It's the new model that has Firewire and USB. They claim they upgraded the performance when using USB, we will see. I just may get a firewire card.

[slonkak]

I just bought one too, the new one, using Cali's $50 promotion. What really really really sucks is that no sooner did I buy it, I looked at twitter and Kevin Rose posted a $100 promotion. :( I jumped the gun by a few minutes.

[tehboris]

It's the new model that has Firewire and USB. They claim they upgraded the performance when using USB, we will see. I just may get a firewire card.

Get a Firewire 800 card.

[slonkak]

I've never bought a firewire card before. A search of Newegg shows multiple vendors who I have never heard of before.

SYBA, PPA, Koutech, StarTech, SIIG, BYTECC.

Does anyone know if any of these are total crap or if any of them are worth the extra money?

[mikec]

I just bought one too, the new one, using Cali's $50 promotion. What really really really sucks is that no sooner did I buy it, I looked at twitter and Kevin Rose posted a $100 promotion. :( I jumped the gun by a few minutes.

I bought using Kevin's code. I had been thinking for a while then almost buying one.... then I saw the $100 off and it still worked. No second thought.


As for BYTECC, I have heard of them before, mostly external enclosures for drives. Of course, you and I could start a company and have some Chinese company make parts for us and label them however we want.

[mikec]

Finally got my Drobo today. They claim something like seven days to process the order. It took a week to ship ground across the country. Yes, I could have ordered one from Newegg but that would have cost more.

I found some Seagate 500gig drives on sale locally, bought two to start.

I would have to say that my computer is noisier then the Drobo. I have yet to get a Firewire 800 card, so I am using USB. Not the best option, but it works.

[slonkak]

I forgot to post, but I got my Drobo a couple days ago. I love it. I followed this post (http://krook.net/archives/217) on correctly formatting it for ext3 (the dude got insider info from a Drobo guy) and it's been working like a champ. The only thing I don't like about it is that it announces itself as a 2tb drive, even though I only have 500gb of storage in it (2tb is Drobo's default volume size, not sure why).

I never used firewire before... ever. So when I hooked this thing up over fw800 (I bought a SYBA card for $28) I was amazed at how fast it was. I copied over 28gb of music in a few minutes, and that was with human-lag because I only copied 3 directories at a time to make sure my old external hard drive could keep up.

I also have it exported over nfs so the other computers on my network can hit it "locally."

So far, I love this thing. A few hours and a few perl scripts into it and all of my data is protected.

[mikec]

Where did you get the firewire card?

[slonkak]

Where did you get the firewire card?

I got it from Newegg. It was the cheapest one they had and most of the reviews said there wasn't any trouble with it. It has 2 fw800 ports and one regular fw port.

[mikec]

Appreciate the info. Thanks.