If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below. |
|
|
|
Thread Tools | Rate Thread | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the
partition as GPT. Are there any if's, and's, or but's to this? GigaByte Z87X-UD3H-CF with 6 "Intel-Controlled" SATA ports that support 6 GB/s SATA. The background agenda: my NAS box is getting tight on space and it seems logical to move my RecordedTV from the NAS to my 24-7 PC that runs my Tivo-on-Steroids DVR app (SageTV). Current usage is capped at 5 TB on the NAS but, looking at prices of 5400 RPM WD Reds, 8 TB at $275 seems pretty reasonable compared to 6 TB comprised of 3-2 TB drives at $240. I figure access speed (one humongous drive vs multiple drives on the NAS) sb a non-issue considering the DVR app is currently happy going across my LAN to the NAS box. I can live with a drive failure - RecordedTV being a throwaway commodity in my scheme of things. Am I missing anything? -- Pete Cresswell |
Ads |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
(PeteCresswell) wrote:
I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the partition as GPT. Are there any if's, and's, or but's to this? GigaByte Z87X-UD3H-CF with 6 "Intel-Controlled" SATA ports that support 6 GB/s SATA. The background agenda: my NAS box is getting tight on space and it seems logical to move my RecordedTV from the NAS to my 24-7 PC that runs my Tivo-on-Steroids DVR app (SageTV). Current usage is capped at 5 TB on the NAS but, looking at prices of 5400 RPM WD Reds, 8 TB at $275 seems pretty reasonable compared to 6 TB comprised of 3-2 TB drives at $240. I figure access speed (one humongous drive vs multiple drives on the NAS) sb a non-issue considering the DVR app is currently happy going across my LAN to the NAS box. I can live with a drive failure - RecordedTV being a throwaway commodity in my scheme of things. Am I missing anything? There are two kinds of drives. PMR - read speed equals write speed - one track written at a time - this is how all the older drives were made - good stuff, if the flying height is high enough and there is no "wear phenomenon". SMR - Shingled magnetic recording - tracks written in 7 track sets, with zero gap between tracks in a set. To change a sector might mean re-writing all seven tracks. - Read speed 200MB/sec. Write speed 25MB/sec - If you had a quad tuner, and were writing four file streams to disk, mixed with 25MB/sec writes, the queue on the drive could be huge. The drive would be close to overwhelmed. The drive may want to do a lot of start/stop to conserve life. Even if it's designed for a NAS, these days I would not expect a guarantee of "always on" performance. The last couple higher end drives I bought, they're doing start/stop on me, and I don't know what more expensive drive to buy, to stop this from happening. When I'd bought those drives previously, they stayed running and loaded 24/7. Chances are, you'll be buying an 8TB boat-anchor. If the thing is PMR, read equals write, then I'd buy it. Just check the reviews and see if anyone reports that "the drive runs too hot". I don't know what they're doing to the drives this year, but whatever it is (zero flying height?), it isn't a good thing. The platters could be 1.3TB a piece right now, up from the previous value of 1TB per platter. So 8TB might be six platters. Do your research, check for unhappy customers. Paul |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge
suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable. Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes... Per Paul: (PeteCresswell) wrote: I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the partition as GPT. Are there any if's, and's, or but's to this? GigaByte Z87X-UD3H-CF with 6 "Intel-Controlled" SATA ports that support 6 GB/s SATA. The background agenda: my NAS box is getting tight on space and it seems logical to move my RecordedTV from the NAS to my 24-7 PC that runs my Tivo-on-Steroids DVR app (SageTV). Current usage is capped at 5 TB on the NAS but, looking at prices of 5400 RPM WD Reds, 8 TB at $275 seems pretty reasonable compared to 6 TB comprised of 3-2 TB drives at $240. I figure access speed (one humongous drive vs multiple drives on the NAS) sb a non-issue considering the DVR app is currently happy going across my LAN to the NAS box. I can live with a drive failure - RecordedTV being a throwaway commodity in my scheme of things. Am I missing anything? There are two kinds of drives. PMR - read speed equals write speed - one track written at a time - this is how all the older drives were made - good stuff, if the flying height is high enough and there is no "wear phenomenon". SMR - Shingled magnetic recording - tracks written in 7 track sets, with zero gap between tracks in a set. To change a sector might mean re-writing all seven tracks. - Read speed 200MB/sec. Write speed 25MB/sec - If you had a quad tuner, and were writing four file streams to disk, mixed with 25MB/sec writes, the queue on the drive could be huge. The drive would be close to overwhelmed. The drive may want to do a lot of start/stop to conserve life. Even if it's designed for a NAS, these days I would not expect a guarantee of "always on" performance. The last couple higher end drives I bought, they're doing start/stop on me, and I don't know what more expensive drive to buy, to stop this from happening. When I'd bought those drives previously, they stayed running and loaded 24/7. Chances are, you'll be buying an 8TB boat-anchor. If the thing is PMR, read equals write, then I'd buy it. Just check the reviews and see if anyone reports that "the drive runs too hot". I don't know what they're doing to the drives this year, but whatever it is (zero flying height?), it isn't a good thing. The platters could be 1.3TB a piece right now, up from the previous value of 1TB per platter. So 8TB might be six platters. Do your research, check for unhappy customers. Paul -- Pete Cresswell |
#4
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
(PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable. Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes... I think two 4GB drives might be OK. If you spend $164 CDN, you get a 5400RPM 4TB drive. If you spend around $275 CDN, you get a 7200RPM 4TB drive that runs hot. Those are examples. I've been pretty happy with the $164 one for doing backups. I've not used it for booting an OS though. The $164 drive, the advert was careful to *not* mention the RPMs. Dishonest *******s. And this starts with Seagate, not my computer store. Seagate doesn't list it either, but with a little research, you can track down the info. I don't understand why there should be such a price premium all of a sudden. One possibility, is they use a different number of platters, and a different data density. But that's all that comes to mind on those two examples. It's even hard to get tech info on platter count in the datasheets now. Things missing from datasheet: 1) SMR or PMR 2) RPMs 3) Platter count 4) 512n, 512e, 4Kn ? 5) Startup current (1A to 2.5A on spinup). Usually operating current is listed. 6) Admission of read/write datarates ? The datasheet used to assume they were equal (because in the slightly old days, the drives were perpendicular magnetic recording only). PMR drives are available up to at least 6TB. I don't know if they've succeeded in pushing PMR larger than that. If you were looking at a 10TB drive, that's most likely to be shingled writes SMR style. Paul |
#5
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
Per Paul:
I think two 4GB drives might be OK. If you spend $164 CDN, you get a 5400RPM 4TB drive. If you spend around $275 CDN, you get a 7200RPM 4TB drive that runs hot. Those are examples. I've been pretty happy with the $164 one for doing backups. I've not used it for booting an OS though. Before my previous mobo bit the big one, I had 5400 RPM WD Reds in it doing the job that I foolishly delegated to the NAS box. No perceived problems, although I never went out of my way to stress it (as in recording 4 shows concurrently and viewing a fifth). -- Pete Cresswell |
#6
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
"(PeteCresswell)" wrote:
I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the partition as GPT. GPT pertains to the disk, not the partitions. GPT is the newer partition table format that can handle disks larger than 2.1TB. If you have a disk this size, you will have to use GPT or you'll never see anything past 2.1TB. Once you've got that in place, you can define your partitions. The NTFS file system will have no problem with a single 8TB partition. -- Tim Slattery tim at risingdove dot com |
#7
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote:
That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable. Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes... There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered to the theory that multiple spindles is better. |
#8
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
"Tim Slattery" wrote in message
... "(PeteCresswell)" wrote: I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work - just format the partition as GPT. GPT pertains to the disk, not the partitions. GPT is the newer partition table format that can handle disks larger than 2.1TB. If you have a disk this size, you will have to use GPT or you'll never see anything past 2.1TB. Once you've got that in place, you can define your partitions. The NTFS file system will have no problem with a single 8TB partition. One thing to be aware of if you are copying data from an existing disk to the new 8 TB one, so you don't fall foul of the same thing that I did with my 4 TB disk... You may not have sufficient SATA ports on the motherboard to connect both the old one and the new one at the same time, so you may decide to connect the 8 TB disk by a SATA-to-USB adaptor temporarily. Don't do it that way round. You may find that the adaptor can't handle disks of that size - I think it's the cluster size or the LBA number. Instead, disconnect the smaller "donor" drive and connect it to the adaptor, and connect the new 8 TB drive to the motherboard SATA right from the beginning. And then copy the data from one to the other. Doing it the way that I did it, I spent the best part of a data copying data from my smaller 1 TB disk and also some from the C drive to the 4 TB, only to find that when I then connected the 4 TB to the motherboard SATA, the system couldn't detect any partitions and claimed that the disk was uninitialised. I had to initialise it again as GPT and make a whole-drive NTFS filesystem, and copy everything all over again :-( I didn't lose any data because I didn't delete any donor copies, but I did lose about a day in time. |
#9
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
|
#10
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
"pjp" wrote in message
... In article , says... On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote: That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable. Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes... There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered to the theory that multiple spindles is better. I adhere more to multipule drives along with backup optical disks. Biggest drive I use currently is 3Tb, couple of 2Tb's and a slew of 1Tb's. They all are used to keep least two copies of things I value. The 6 desktop pcs in house all have at least 2 hard disk in them, smallest is a 256Gb SSD, all others are larger. I also regularily backup and burn to optical anything and everything I really don't want to loose. It's OK going for multiple smaller drives but what if your PC case only has room for three internal HDDs (plus a DVD drive) and only has four SATA ports? Apart from the slightly higher power consumption that each drive adds, I'd have gone for several 1 TB drives rather than replacing one of those 1 TB drives with a 4 TB when I needed more space (and to free up space on the system drive that was almost full). I back up everything to external HDDs (a 2 TB drive for TV recordings, a 1 TB for digital photos and camcorder footage, various 300 GB drives for other things). And I *try* to keep those drives separate from the PC and in a fire safe when I'm not actually backing up. Backing up to optical would take a mountain of discs since each one is only 4 GB (assuming DVDs rather than CDs!). |
#11
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 12:39:14 -0400, Big Al wrote:
On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote: That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable. Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes... There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered to the theory that multiple spindles is better. As far as I'm concerned, the best way by far to avoid losing it all if a drive fails is by doing regular backups to external media, not by having multiple drives. Multiple drives are subject to losing all at the same time to many of the most common dangers: severe power glitches, nearby lightning strikes, virus attacks, even theft of the computer. |
#13
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
pjp wrote:
In article , says... "pjp" wrote in message ... In article , says... On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote: That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable. Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes... There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered to the theory that multiple spindles is better. I adhere more to multipule drives along with backup optical disks. Biggest drive I use currently is 3Tb, couple of 2Tb's and a slew of 1Tb's. They all are used to keep least two copies of things I value. The 6 desktop pcs in house all have at least 2 hard disk in them, smallest is a 256Gb SSD, all others are larger. I also regularily backup and burn to optical anything and everything I really don't want to loose. It's OK going for multiple smaller drives but what if your PC case only has room for three internal HDDs (plus a DVD drive) and only has four SATA ports? Apart from the slightly higher power consumption that each drive adds, I'd have gone for several 1 TB drives rather than replacing one of those 1 TB drives with a 4 TB when I needed more space (and to free up space on the system drive that was almost full). I back up everything to external HDDs (a 2 TB drive for TV recordings, a 1 TB for digital photos and camcorder footage, various 300 GB drives for other things). And I *try* to keep those drives separate from the PC and in a fire safe when I'm not actually backing up. Backing up to optical would take a mountain of discs since each one is only 4 GB (assuming DVDs rather than CDs!). For backups and not "real time" stuff I see nothing wrong with USB external drives even when only USB2 spec. They're perfectly capable of handling "normal" output requirments, e.g. watching movies etc. off them. Some of them have capacity limits. The one I own, is rated for 4TB drives. On the manufacturer web site, it says the product is now rated for 8TB drives, but it also says they changed some component inside the thing. And that's something that is poorly defined on those things (firmware?). Some storage controllers have an internal firmware, plus an interface on the chip to add an external EEPROM for more or different firmware. I would prefer there was a theoretical reason a certain size is listed in the advert, rather than it looking like a "guess" by the manufacturer. The specification method is sloppy by these companies, leaving it to the consumer to do the testing. And that's not right, when the answer is at their fingertips (just call the dude at Asmedia and ask, FFS). Paul |
#14
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 22:11:08 -0300, pjp
wrote: In article , says... "pjp" wrote in message ... In article , says... On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote: That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable. Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes... There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered to the theory that multiple spindles is better. I adhere more to multipule drives along with backup optical disks. Biggest drive I use currently is 3Tb, couple of 2Tb's and a slew of 1Tb's. They all are used to keep least two copies of things I value. The 6 desktop pcs in house all have at least 2 hard disk in them, smallest is a 256Gb SSD, all others are larger. I also regularily backup and burn to optical anything and everything I really don't want to loose. It's OK going for multiple smaller drives but what if your PC case only has room for three internal HDDs (plus a DVD drive) and only has four SATA ports? Apart from the slightly higher power consumption that each drive adds, I'd have gone for several 1 TB drives rather than replacing one of those 1 TB drives with a 4 TB when I needed more space (and to free up space on the system drive that was almost full). I back up everything to external HDDs (a 2 TB drive for TV recordings, a 1 TB for digital photos and camcorder footage, various 300 GB drives for other things). And I *try* to keep those drives separate from the PC and in a fire safe when I'm not actually backing up. Backing up to optical would take a mountain of discs since each one is only 4 GB (assuming DVDs rather than CDs!). For backups and not "real time" stuff I see nothing wrong with USB external drives even when only USB2 spec. They're perfectly capable of handling "normal" output requirments, e.g. watching movies etc. off them. I've never really found a use for external drives. I have at least a half dozen external docks from when they used to come free with every hard drive (Newegg), but I think I only used one, once, just to see if it worked. External drives require shelf space, they require an external power supply, and until recently they required the painfully slow USB2 interface, so they really have nothing going for them. For a number of years, probably about 1996 to 1999, I used optical media to store data. First CDs, then DVDs, including a few rewriteables and a few dual-layer DVDs, but that fizzled very quickly. I've trashed all of that except for some music CDs that I burned back then (and labeled with a Sharpie, a subject of another thread). IMHO, the only viable data storage solution is internal hard drives, with the exception of eSATA, which unfortunately never really caught on. At the moment, I have 3 laptops, one desktop, and a server, and no optical drives anywhere to be found, as well as no external drives anywhere. Each laptop has two hard drives, (all are SSDs, actually, minimum size 500GB, with two 1TB units), and the server has 15 internal data drives and the 16th drive, a 500GB SSD, mounted above a PCI slot. To get that many SATA ports, (in addition to the 8 that are on the mobo) I use a PCIe adapter that provides two SAS ports, with each port expanded to provide 4 SATA connectors. -- Char Jackson |
#15
|
|||
|
|||
8-TB Hard Drive: Doable on my Win 7 Box?
On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 12:39:14 -0400, Big Al wrote:
On 08/12/2017 06:55 PM, (PeteCresswell) wrote: That tends to confirm my totally-unfounded-in-any-real-knowledge suspicion: that multiple smaller drives would preferable. Maybe I'll go for some combination of twos and threes... There's always the concept of putting all your eggs in one basket. If you have one drive and it dies, you lose it all. I've always adhered to the theory that multiple spindles is better. Multiple spindles are better, until you run out of drive bays, SATA connectors, or power. Then you get to replace existing drives with bigger ones. At some point, you look back and figure you'd have been a lot better off skipping the little drives and going with bigger ones from the start. -- Char Jackson |
|
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | Rate This Thread |
|
|