How big do people buy HD's

Lee H

Hi

Do people actually buy large hard discs, i mean say you had a 500GB hard disk full with Music Films and Software and the drive failed, then you would be pretty sad, whereas if you had 2 X 250GB hard disk and 1 of them failed you would have only lost half.

Question is, do you think there is a market for very large hard drives, do more people buy smaller ones as a contingency

All comments welcome

Lee

blargoe

Sure there is a market for drives that big. If the data is that important, they will buy 2 drives that size and RAID 1 them or back up the important data to some other medium periodically.

Plantwiz

Still using the smallest I can get....so generally 80GB. But if I could still get 40GB or even 20GB (and get them reliably) That's what I'd opt for.

JDMurray

Yup, smaller hard drives are more reliable. Drives are now so big (i.e., the information on then is packed so densely) that they must constantly perform error correction to correctly read the data that is written on them. The grown defect rate increases with the size of the drive.

More info: http://www.grc.com/sranalysis.htm

RussS

My system is on a 80 GB SATAII with 2 x 250GB SATAII - 1 for general data and 1 for music. I have a program that readas these drives and copies to a matching set to give me redundancy.
2 x 80Gb & 4 x 250Gb in total.

I tried a pair of partitioned 500's and had too many dramas for my liking.

taktsoi

all of my workstations in my home lab have one 80gb SATA only. my file servers have 3x 36gb ultra 320 scsi on RAID 5 controller, 6x 320gb IDE ATA 100 on regular controller. I don't buy larger than 400gb coz i have the heating problem experience with the 400gb. it tends to get hotter than 320gb.

heating is one of the biggest concerns in hdd's life and reliability. think big is never the best.

ally_uk

Yeah go the Raid way for fault tolerance