Internal Hard Drive Question

[Joe Pontecorvo]

I am not sure if these are considered "server grade drives," but they come with a 5 year warranty, and so I assume would be more robust. By the end of a long term edit project I usually have at least (EDIT: two hard drives fail out of 20). Do you think these drives are worth the extra dollars?
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0F12456/

[Chris Puerstl]

Hello Joe

First let me start by saying that server grade drives are 10,000RPM. The more you spend on drives it doesn't mean that the drive will be better it is still limited by 7200RPM. It does not matter if the connection on the drive is SATA rated at 6GBS the drive will only sustain a max speed of 330MBS. The old drives you buy are they 3T drives if they are not why take the chance of loosing 3T of data on one drive. If your willing to drop $600 per drive on 20 Drives you might aswell look into a RAID box to do your project on and then off load the finished items and raw back to a LTO tape.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Er... There really isn't any specific classification like "server grade". This 3TB unit you linked is an UltraStar model, which does include a 5-year warranty. The UltraStars are also tuned a bit differently and have different firmware and are targeted more toward use for database and RAID applications. They appropriate their cache usage differently and have shorter time-out events on data requests for these purposes. When it comes to raw performance on large file transfers, especially that of sequential data, they don't perform any better than the regular DeskStar Hitachi models with the same specs.

Rotational speed is only one factor in the overall speed or performance of a hard drive. Rotational or spindle speeds usually transfer to faster seek times with higher RPM's, but not necessarily to faster data transfer. Data transfer is dependent on just how many bits pass by the read heads in a given amount of time and how many heads there are to read the data from multiple platters or platter positions.

Most 10K and 15K rpm hard drives on the market today have capacities lower than 1TB and are more commonly found now in only the 2.5" size. Most 2.5" HDD designs need rotational speeds upwards of 10K rpm's in order to provide similar data performance compared to 3.5" 7200rpm units when comparing drives that have the same, or very similar, areal density to their data on the platters.

Western Digital has their more expensive line of drives (comparable to the UltraStar) in their Black-X series -- currently designated "RE4" drives. So Hitachi isn't the only company that does this.

[Joe Pontecorvo]

Thank you both for your expertise and advice.