Re: [gentoo-user] Are those "green" drives any good?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wed, 09 May 2012 04:52:57 -0500
Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com> wrote:

> I was thinking the same thing about the speed and them lasting longer
> because of the slower speed.  I mean, it's less wear and less heat.
> I'd just hate to buy one and it be a piece of junk or something else I
> wasn't expecting to be wrong.   I wish I could afford server grade.
> Weeeeee!!

My thoughts these days is that nobody really makes a bad drive anymore.
Like cars[1], they're all good and do what it says on the box. Same
with bikes[2].

A manufacturer may have some bad luck and a product range is less than
perfect, but even that is quite rare and most stuff ups can be fixed
with new firmware. So it's all good.

For video, I would advise you invest in gobs and gobs of RAM (the stuff
is dirt cheap these days). Have more RAM than the biggest video you
will watch (so go for 8G minimum) and the entire video will fit in
memory = read the disc once and watch.

Funny lags in video just go away. That's what I did with my HP
MicroServers - maxed out the RAM to 8G and bought 4 x 3T WD 5400
drives. It runs FreeNAS (built on FreeBSD) with ZFS = shove the drives
in and let them software figure out what the blazes to do. Over the
years I've gotten sick and tired of pampering with disk arrays and
treating them like fragile china that must be molly-coddled. What I
want is lots of storage that will mail me when it detects issues.

-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com