With 1 TB drives being so cheap now I was thinking of buying one to backup EVERYTHING i have or probably will have for a few years to come. Right now I have all seagate drives but the drives that are cheaper are the WD Green drives that seem to have a cache of 16MB instead of 32MB. Will that make any difference in a storage drive I am not booting my computer from? This drive is 115 at Microcenter (the retail version not the OEM) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136151 Is that a much lower quality drive than this one? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148278
I wouldn't place a premium on the cache size of a hard disk. I tend to think it's more of a gimmick. For me, it's difficult to tell the difference between two disks having the same rotational speed but different cache sizes.
yeah I found out that the WD is a 5400rpm. That turned me off to it until I saw it still performed very well in benchmarks despite its low speed. The only problem is I have to write about 250GB to it ASAP and it is supposed to be 25% slower write speed than the Seagate. The advantage is since I am using it primarily for storage the lower heat and Watts it uses will be nice. Basically I am stuck.
Check out storagereview.com for benchmarks on various drives if performance is important to you. They have a database of hard drive performance using various benchmarks.
whatever you do, please back up your files on disc... i just learned this the hard way when my external HD crapped out on me last month. 250 GB of music and pics and documents gone
It's not all that bad. You can just download the free 30 second clips and your collection will be back to respectability before you know it.
RAID and DVD backup (repeatedly) is probably best. But know that some of those writable CD/DVD discs have been known to go bad within a few months to years (especially the cheapo ones).
Hooray for blurays. As soon as I get a better pc I'll get a bluray burner and burn everything onto discs. My 500 gig external just ate **** 2 weeks ago. 200+gigs of pr0n and another 250+ of music. I got it running again but since my internals are only 80 gigs each I couldn't back up a whole lot. I burned about 25 dvds of stuff before it finally died.
