I have four Hitachi drives (7200 RPM, 500 GB) in a Firmtek 4-bay external enclosure which I use with my PowerMac G5 Dual 2.7 computer. All Pro Tools HD data are stored on these four drives.
The drives are over 3 years old with around 3500 hours on them, so I am going to replace them, just to be safe. They have been extremely reliable (zero problems), so I plan to stay with Hitachi.
The Hitachi Deskstar drives shown below are listed at the Hitachi site. All are: Serial ATA 3Gb/s, 7200 RPM, average Seek of 8.5 ms.
Model #. .Capacity. Cache buffer, MB. Disk Heads
HDT721050SLA360. 500 GB. 16 MB...2/3
HDT721050SLA380. 500 GB. 8 MB...2/3
HDE721050SLA330. 500 GB. 32 MB...2/3
HDS721010KLA330. 1000 GB. 32 MB...5/10
HDS721075KLA330. 750 GB. 32 MB...4/8
HDT721010SLA360. 1000 GB. .16 MB...3/6
Any recommendations on which drive to select?
I assume more cache buffer is good at the same average seek. correct?
Any of these drives new and not proven yet?
Thanks!
Topic Tags
Comments
Because of flawless operation (not one single problem) over 3 1/
Because of flawless operation (not one single problem) over 3 1/2 years, I am staying with Hitachi.............although I am aware that some others have had problems with them. Possibly my well cooled enclosure helps.
FYI, I am going with this one:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B002D5XY8A/arizomacinusergr
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-c
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,50.html
Check it out. Traditionally, Seagate and Western Digital seem to have the most reliability but there are other options. The most stable and reliable hard drives are single platter models. The trade off is that this limits the size of the drive. The general rule of thumb is the more platters the shorter the life of the drive. Now this is much more crucial in the land of servers than in audio but there you are. Yes, more cache is better.