I Need Advise On Buying A New Harddrive

i want to get a new hd for my computer as a second drive. i want to get a high capacity becasue im going to store captured video on it so 200gig/250gig/300gig. i live in the uk so im buying from uk dealers. i was wondering where is best to buy. ive looked on ebay and there are lots on there but i dont know anything about hardware brands or storage or anything hardware much. will the drive come formatted or will i need to do that [not a bit problem as im gonna be using linux on it]. how will i install it onto my current xp. could anyone tell me any useful infomation about brands/prices/dealers/sizes anything useful really becasue im a bit warey as i dont really know what im doing thanks in advance

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Hmm ... I've always had pretty good luck with Western Digital hard drives. There are plenty of other good ones out there too, but I can't really recommend stuff that I haven't tried much.

But one thing I *can* say that has nothing to do with brand:

Get the most space that you can reasonably afford. You might not think that you'll need all of it, but it doesn't hurt to have it around just in case.


Which reminds me ... it's been a while since I've re-formatted my Mom's hard drive. I should probably do that when I go home this weekend.

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Anouther thing to look out for is the type of hard disk...

SCSI, IDE or SATA.

IDE is the most common, SCSI is supported by very few boards, and SATA is a littrle faster, and usually supports hardware RAID.

If your board supports it, It may be worth paying a little extra for SATA especially for video editing purposes.

It may even be cheaper to buy 2 150 GIG disks than one 300 Gig disk.

then with Hardware Raid, you can cause the Operating system to see both 150 disks as a single 300 Gig disk.

Having two differant disks worjking simultaniusly as RAID devices has the added advantage that when you save a large file, half will be saved to disk one, the other half will be saved to disk 2.

Effectivly, halfing the time it takes to write the file, and doubling the disk writing speed.

definatly worth looking into.

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You might consider getting one of maxtors newest drives with 16Mb cache, could speed up things a bit .

The RAID0 thing is also a good idea, but remember that chances to loose your data because of a disk failure will double (2 disks can die, if one dies, everything is lost, now way to repair the data).

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Hence RAID5!
JBOD is just a bunch of disks, RAID0 is striping, RAID1 is mirroring, RAID2 is bit-level rather than block-level striping and is no longer popular (mem to choose a large block size in RAID0 if you are storing/manipulating large AV files), RAID3 is byte-level stripes with a dedicated parity disk, RAID4 ditto but block level, RAID5 is block-level striping with parity data distributed across all the disks is the array & it is currently the most popular method. When having large numbers of disks, RAID6 which is ditto but with the parity data stored at two locations so it can survive two disk failures!

Then there are all kinds of nested RAID levels like RAID0+1 (two HDDs in RAID0 stripe, with another two disks as a RAID1 mirror of the original), and RAID10/1+0 which does a similar but opposite setup (stripe across drives that are locally mirrored), RAID50/5+0

 

 

 

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Hi qwijibow,
there are many different speeds of IDE, SATA, SCSI ...

pSCSI runs up to dual channel U320 (320MB/sec) and 640 is on the way soon along with serially-attached etc.

SATA is currently at 150MB/sec and soon will be at 300MB/sec which is still slower than good old U320 SCSI!

If money is not an issue, a SCSI RAID array is the way to go for NLE video editing apps, no doubt about it. However, SCSI drives and controllers are more expensive than their SATA/PATA counterparts, due to the extra complexity in the protocol (it's made for multiple devs accessing things simultaneously & is built with large queues & respective algorithms for this). The algorithms are not all aimed at server tasks, since AV is a popular use of SCSI drives, so some desktop alg's are also defined by the big disk vendors. Note you'll not get as much GB's for your GBPs if you go this route, but you'll get higher performance using fewer drives, so if this is what you value go for it.

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I agree with Sarah81, WD SATA/PATA drives are very nice. They are the only 10k RPM SATA drives with 3-5year warranties on their top end drives, so they believe their drives are reliable otherwise they'd be losing money ;-).

Ditto I'd agree that you need to get as much HDD space as possible if you're gonna store tons of videos on the HDDs. However if you are just aiming at max performance on a few AVs then SCSI would be best. Maybe even a combination of the two if you're loaded!

I'll probably be selling a bunch of WD250GB SATA's on ebay soon, and I took a look at the average price a few weeks ago (to guage what price I should sell the at) and I think it was around 80GBP for new ones.

IBM have some 400GB drives out, and several other manuf's will be doing likewise (right now just a bunch of stoopeed paper launches which are now stoopeedly common in this supposedly-fast-developing but-more-like-fast-lame-@r$-marketing industry :-((). Sorry for the rant, just remembered how long I've been waiting for larger drives promised nearly a year ago .. so dumb to wait for things that aren't out yet when they keep changing their deadlines all the time!

With AV files, 16MB caches were popular on SCSI drives & are now common on high-end SATA/PATA ones ... not sure it'd be that big a deal when streaming a giant AV into RAM, but obviously no harm if it's the same price :-).

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I'm a hugh fan of Western Digital HDD. I currently have 4 installed in my system:
WD68BB - 6.8 GB
WD400BB - 40GB
WD800BB - 80GB
WD800BB - 80GB

I had a WD drive fail one time about a week after purchasing and they had a new one to me in 3 days. I didn't lose any data because I have the drives in a mirrored array.

I recomend the WD 200GB or higher with 8MB cache. You can try to buy smaller drives and set them up in a RAID to combine their capacity but in the end, you'll probably spend as much or more than you would on the single large drive. Smaller capacity drives aren't that much less than the higher capacity drives plus you'll probably need to buy a RAID controller even though there are software options available which are less reliable than hardware solutions.

You may even benefit from going a little smaller on the hard drives and invest in a DVD burner to hold either your raw video data or make DVD movies. This type of optical storage offers better security of data than magnetic solutions.

Next, to overcome any lag from slower HDD's, I highly recommend maxing out your system memory. At the very least, if you have any empty memory slots, fill them with the largest allowable memory module available for your motherboard. Having the maximum amount of memory in each slot ensures that you'll never have to discard a smaller memory module when replaced with a larger stick. (Overall money saver).
The larger the buffer between your video capture device and your hard drive, the few dropped frames you'll have. The buffer consists of system memory, virtual memory, and HDD cache. So max the memory and set your page file (virtual memory) high.

Next capture video to a hard drive controller separate from the hard drive controller that hosts the operating system and video capture application. Basically, if your OS and Apps. are on the first controller then be sure the target drive is on the second controller. This prevents the app or OS from tying up the HDD while the video capture is being written to it because the two are separated.

Obviously, close any non-essential task and program that you have running during the capture. This will free CPU and memory resources for the capture. I pretty much close everything but the video capture application and the OS.

WD has their own web store which has pretty good prices as well as newegg.com.

I would also suggest checking out ebay cause a lot of new drives are sold there pretty cheap.

Hope this Helps.

vujsa

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thanks very much for the help so far.

unfortunatly i dont have sata ive only got ide. i would have thought better from a newish sony highish end pc [can you tell i feel a little ripped off for this sony, but it does look pretty]

about the os on one drive and video on another: i am going to be installing gentoo on this drive but im gonning to use premier in windows for video editing. that should have the desired effect i surpose? also a further question - its not totally hardware but related. do you think that i could install my windows agina on a small partition on the end of my current drive and only install premier in there are not have network etc running in that one to keep it fast and clean. ntfs partition tools? - on the install cd? could i use my oem version for that?

p.s. im not loaded but im the kind of person that waits and buys the very best i can afford.

also could you guys just advise me on this. i went to my local computer hardware shop the othere week and the guy in there has been useful - [im having this stupid problem identifing some crappy ati chipset and some random board with the worlds most unusual dvi output that wont let me have two monitors.] he has a 1gig stick of ddr ram in there at £90 [$157.473] seems alot but again im totally new to hardware. i earnt £150 [$262.456] the other day for a website and my aim is to get my hd and ram with that. is the ram too much and will i get the hd for the other half?

thanks very much again.

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ok ive found 2.

#1
and
#2

the main difference is the 16 or 8mb buffer size difference. will this make much of a difference, id would have thought is would but according to all the seek-read/write info it wont. also will the WD be quieter?

thanks

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