Monday, December 01, 2003

Hard Drive Prices

Looks like IDE drive prices dropped recently. I picked up a 5400 rpm Maxtor 160Gb drive for around $130 including shipping and handling. Toss in an external USB enclosure for $40 and it does make a very nice backup solution (I now have 2 that I alternate with plans to add a 3rd sometime next spring).

I am about ready to rip down and rebuild my 282Gb RAID5 server (Windows 2000). What I'm finding is that once you get 500,000+ files on the partition that it becomes very difficult to defrag the drive and keep performance up. When I do, I figure a 20Gb system partition, a 60Gb scratch partition and then a pair of large partitions that are 100Gb each. But by that time I might be ready to rip out the (6) 80Gb drives and replace them with 160Gb drives to give me 565Gb net space. (I don't think I'll do that until next fall at the earliest, and most likely create multiple 120Gb partitions.)

More likely that I'll be switching to small, power-efficient mini-ITX cases with mirrored 160Gb 5400rpm drives. Less noisy, probably running on Linux, and distributes the workload / risk a bit.

posted by Wuphon's at 7:46 PM