Advice on best HDD

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gaking

New Member
Mar 25, 2011
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I'm busy building a server which, to be honest, is probably a bit in excess of my needs as I'll use it primarily to stream blu-ray's, dvd's, MP3's, backup home videos, photos, documents and so on. As a result, I'm using WHS v1 which generally works okay. The system is based on an Intel S2340GPLX board, 8Gb ECC ram and a Xeon 3450 with 2xWD20EARS drives, 2xWD10EADS and 1xWD20EADS all running off the onboard SATA ports in AHCI mode.

In preparation for a possible move to WHS 2011 (or possibly 2008R2 standard, although I'm not sure it's worth it for my needs), I picked up a new Adaptec 51245RAID card for a very good price. I'm therefore considering adding RAID5 or 6 to this sytem and am debating which HDD's to go for.

As I understand it, the EARS drives were probably not the wisest buy, which I only found out afterwards and are probably not suitable for RAID setups. I've been looking at the 2TB RE4-GP drives, but they are very expensive. Hitachi looks like a good option, but I can't get them in this part of the world, other than the 7K3000 model - not sure if that would be suitable.

Any other suggestions for 2TB drives which will be suitable for the Adaptec card without breaking the bank? Power consumption is quite key for me too as our electricity rates have been hiked on average 30%pa over the last 3 years and it's likely to continue for the new few, which is why my existing drives are the green models. Hence my post in the motherboard section bemoaning the lack of S3 standby support on the S3420GPLX board...
 

halkx

New Member
May 21, 2011
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well...speaking from my own experience, you can't go wrong with hitachi drives...well until WD takes over...grrrr.
Because you will be using the system for streaming purposes mainly, I would recommend 5K3000's...cool,fast (faster in some cases than 7K2000's) and reliable when used in raid arrays as all hitachi drives are...
But what ever you buy...stay away from WD drives at least their consumer level ones if you want to use them in RAID...
That's my 2cents...