Yea I'm using 64k stripe size, haven't tested it's xfer speed yet but I've been curious. I went with RAID10 instead of 5 for performance purposes, I would love to know what it can actually do, since I am only getting 50% of my drive space instead of the (approximately) 66-75% you get with raid5. Drives are rated at 6.0Gb/sec and so is the mainboard sata.

Still, wish they were 2TB drives, but the prices......

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#resist

I'm not sure I understand the objection to 2 TB drives re cost. The figures I get from Newegg for Hitachi drives are as follows:

3 TB $200 -> 66.67/TB Hitachi 6 GB/s 32 MB cache ??? RPM
2 TB $120 -> 60.00/TB Hitachi 6 GB/s 32 MB cache ??? RPM
1 TB $130 -> 130.00/TB Hitachi 6 GB/s 32 MB cache 7200 RPM

I have many (16) of the Hitachi 2 TB drives in RAID performing splendingly for more than a year. I back up the RAID arrays with 8 × 3 TB Hitachi drives again without incident.

I am sure someone can relate a horror story, but I have had nothing but smooth sailing.

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Classic 82353 WU / 400979 h

At the time of my build the 2TB Seagates were 50-100% more $ than the 1TBs I ended up getting. Things have changed a little in the past months.

At the time the only 2TB Hitachis available were the low energy (i.e. slow) or their first generation 1TB/platter drives they have which I wasn't interested in.

And now since I have the 1TBs in my array, there's no point (for me) in upgrading until I can more than double the space cheaply. Hence, just waiting for 4TBs to be common and affordable. (Now that all makers have 1TB platters available, 4TB 4platter drives will be around)

And side note, I like Hitachi's. I have many builds out there with them, and have yet to replace a single one. This past year was not so kind to a few Western Digital drives I had out there in the world....

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#resist

Yeah, personally, I stick to WD. My four 500gb RE2's were bought at a time when there was a high reported failure rate in the feedback on Newegg and I had one fail on me after about 2.5 years. RMA'ed it through WD and they sent me a 500gb RE3. Before that failure, I bought another RE2 to have as a spare but ended up loading it up with data as just as single disk, so when I got the RE3, I moved the single RE2's data over to the RE3 and put the RE2 into the array to rebuild it.

Other than that, I have not had any other WD failures. Like I said before, I have a 4x500 raid5, and then I have an external enclosure that has 5 trayless hotswap bays, and that has 3x1tb Black and 2x640 Blue. I want to replace the 640s with 2TB Blacks. I was waiting for the prices on the 2TB drives to come down to around 150 or so and they got pretty close (I think around 175) and then the flood happened.

However, I had tons of bad experience with Deskstar and Travelstar back when IBM was making them, and I've heard they're not bad now that Hitachi makes them, but I got a bad taste of the name years ago and just stuck with it. I know Seagate is pretty reliable though, but I'll stick with WD.

Since most of my data is not redundant and is on the external setup, I need the peace of mind of knowing that there is a very high chance of it being safe. One of these days I'm going with a 15-disk raid6, but the 2TB RE4s are and always have been astronomical in price.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Yeah, personally, I stick to WD. My four 500gb RE2's were bought at a time when there was a high reported failure rate in the feedback on Newegg and I had one fail on me after about 2.5 years. RMA'ed it through WD and they sent me a 500gb RE3. Before that failure, I bought another RE2 to have as a spare but ended up loading it up with data as just as single disk, so when I got the RE3, I moved the single RE2's data over to the RE3 and put the RE2 into the array to rebuild it.

Other than that, I have not had any other WD failures. Like I said before, I have a 4x500 raid5, and then I have an external enclosure that has 5 trayless hotswap bays, and that has 3x1tb Black and 2x640 Blue. I want to replace the 640s with 2TB Blacks. I was waiting for the prices on the 2TB drives to come down to around 150 or so and they got pretty close (I think around 175) and then the flood happened.

However, I had tons of bad experience with Deskstar and Travelstar back when IBM was making them, and I've heard they're not bad now that Hitachi makes them, but I got a bad taste of the name years ago and just stuck with it. I know Seagate is pretty reliable though, but I'll stick with WD.

Since most of my data is not redundant and is on the external setup, I need the peace of mind of knowing that there is a very high chance of it being safe. One of these days I'm going with a 15-disk raid6, but the 2TB RE4s are and always have been astronomical in price.

The drives from IBM were already being made by Hitachi. It was sort of like when IBM sold their desktop business to the company that was already producing the hardware, Lenovo. Hitachi was recently bought by WD after the flooding. So there is one less drive manufacture.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[

I was semi-unhappy about Western Digital buying out hitachi. We lost Maxtor to Seagate years ago, now this leaves what, 2-3 makers out there. BLAH!

Far as quality. I referred to several WD drives I replaced this year, none were mine however, I have a couple still running around here from 10 years ago!

I tend to use Hitachi's and Seagates myself. In my house I have over 15 Seagates, more than half are in use and the other half work, just are too small now. The small seagates I'm not using now also had roughly 10 years 24-7 on them.

But in the end I use all three (plus Toshiba drives comprising my Toshiba laptops), And honestly they have all been good to me. I have not personally lost a drive, ever. Though my builds for others have. And I have not noticed any one maker being worse than the others overall.

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#resist