Drive Recommendation

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W.Feather

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I'm looking to setup a full home file server....using an linux distro of some kind(have yet to decide), anyhow, its going to be used for:

1. Media access house wide(2 HTPC, up to 4 laptops, 3 desktops), potentially up to 4 or more at one time

2. File backup for most of our machines

3. Central file storage


what is a good drive, or what specs should I look for when the time comes to buy them.....

would a 5400 RPM WD Green allow the usage I want? Do I need alot of cache? I'm not really knowledgeable in hard drives, so any help would be nice.....

btw- it will probably be in the 2 TB size, no idea the amount of drives, that will be dependent on how much media we have backed up
 
would a 5400 RPM WD Green allow the usage I want?
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Yes. My 2TB green is actually faster than my 750GB Segate 7200.11 drives at STR and at seek. I got it for extra storage for mt HTPC not expecting speed however I moved my virtual machines to the green drive cause it was faster..

John
 
ok, thats good news :) The Eco Drives will be able to shoot data to/from 4 or so devices at once....my concern was playback may become laggy if more than one or two machines were pulling from it at once......
 
I have to admit. I did a quick tally of Newegg hard drive egg ratings (linked to save you some time doing it yourself), and the Samsung 1TB-2TB drives seem to be pretty good. Not the best data set, but I was quite surprised.
 
drescherjm said:
I playback multiple streams of MPEG2 HD from my WDC green at the same time. I am however using it with mythtv and not a windows solution.

http://www.mythtv.org/
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i wont be doing a windows solution for the most part either :p Both HTPC's will be running XBMC, proably on an Ubuntu Distro, the server will probably be the server Ubuntu(or something else)......

anyhow, most/all video files will be .iso, hence the need of 2 TB's instead of 1's :)


@pjkenned, i was leaning towards the Samsung Eco drives, WD Green's, or the Hitachi offerings, thanks for that link, never thought to check newegg drive ratings and the such(though ive never put too much stock into what customers say
 
nothing will be run on it really, this is for purely a file server setup, will have all low power components and such, i just need a drive type that will work with multiple devices potentially accessing files on the same drive at the same time
 
W.Feather said:
nothing will be run on it really, this is for purely a file server setup, will have all low power components and such, i just need a drive type that will work with multiple devices potentially accessing files on the same drive at the same time
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Well, it depends on what kind of throughput you're going to want. And, no, green drives aren't the best at multi-user scenarios.
 
dandragonrage said:
Well, it depends on what kind of throughput you're going to want. And, no, green drives aren't the best at multi-user scenarios.
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i'm looking to allow the data to be accessed by potentially 2 HTPC's at the same time, and a few other devices(my desktop, dad's, sisters laptop, although these will probably be at different times if the HTPC's will be being used :p ), without any lag on the files........would it be better to jump up to a say SpinPoint F3, or a WD Blue?(buying up to 10 WD black 2TB's is out of the question.... ultimately were looking at having ~20TB of storage in one machine)
 
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