Seagate 15k Cheetah SAS vs. WD 10k Velociraptor

[rnappi]

Any words of wisdom on this choice for an internal audio drive? I've been using 10k&15k Cheetah Ultra320 drives since forever, but I'm seeing that as of recently, Seagate is no longer the company it used to be.

Thanks,

rich

[bayswater]

If you try to find info on Seagate quality problems, all roads seem to lead the view that it comes down to one firmware disaster for the "7200.11" series.

This is typical. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/16 ... re_plague/

Looking back at my own experience, it is consistent with the argument about the 7200.11, but I'm still not buying any more Seagate drives.

[Dwetmaster]

Looking back at my own experience, it is consistent with the argument about the 7200.11, but I'm still not buying any more Seagate drives.

+1

[rnappi]

Thank you bayswater & Dwetmaster for the replies.



rich

[HCMarkus]

Any words of wisdom on this choice for an internal audio drive? I've been using 10k&15k Cheetah Ultra320 drives since forever, but I'm seeing that as of recently, Seagate is no longer the company it used to be.

Thanks,

rich

SSD for current work, use the spinners for backups.

[rnappi]

SSD for current work, use the spinners for backups.

Thanks for the reply. I've read positive things about using SSD for System and Sample Drives, but there also seems to be some uncertainty using them for constant write/rewrite duties. Maybe those opinions are completely unfounded, but reliability is first and foremost for me. To be honest, the newness of the technology & the high price point have deterred me from making the leap to SSD.

What Brand do you recommend?

Also, is there a sufficient real world difference between SATA2 & SATA3 that makes it worth loosing a PCI slot?

rich

[mikehalloran]

Are you running an enterprise server farm? If not, you have little use for 10K or 15K drives. Really.

In any case, SSDs are running circles around them nowadays. The technology is proven.

SATA 2, SATA 3 are your bottlenecks for SSDs; platter speed is your bottleneck for usb3 and Thunderbolt.

[rnappi]

Thanks all for your help. I think I'm gonna try a Velocityx2 SATA3 upgrade kit + Samsung 840 Pro and see what kind of abuse it will take.


rich

[HCMarkus]

If you are going to use your new SSD for your boot drive, you may not see much (if any) difference between SATA3 (the Velocity card) and the native SATA2 ports. My understanding is most OS reads and writes are small, and the speed at which SSDs deliver these small chunks of data is usually within the bandwidth of SATA2.

SATA3 will provide more of an advantage if used for drives that are streaming samples and/or audio and video files. This suggests that, if you ultimately move to a multi-SSD system, you may want to put your boot drive on an internal SATA port (I suggest the second optical bay port) and use the Velocity card to serve other-purposed SSDs.

You should be happy with the Samsung 840 Pro. It has a good reputation and performs very well.

[rnappi]

Are you running an enterprise server farm? If not, you have little use for 10K or 15K drives. Really.

I guess my biggest problem is I'm old and set in my ways. I've been using Cheetahs since the 90's with stellar results and without issue. I write for TV, which I'm sure you know has ridiculous turnaround time frames, so I've been extremely hesitant to change my setup which has been so reliable all these years.

SATA3 will provide more of an advantage if used for drives that are streaming samples and/or audio and video files.

I'll swap my Atto 320 card and Cheetas with a SATA3 card and HHD and we'll see how it goes. My System drive is a WD Velociraptor which is pretty fast, so I'll wait until it craps out to replace it with HDD.

Thanks again for everyone's input, I very much appreciate it.

rich

[HCMarkus]

I loved my Raptors... until I got my SSDs.

[mikehalloran]

There was a time when I had Cheetahs in an ultra SCSI 3 array but that was then. This is now.