boiling lava hot - 5TB Toshiba Surveillance Drives $120 (24/7 rated)
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Good deal
I bought 10 Toshiba Externals and removed the drives. They were model MD04ACA500...Got them for $130 new minus some discounts I got on gift cards.
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-SATA3-7200RPM-Internal-MD04ACA500/dp/B00MBMKZ2S
Anyone know the difference between the B and C models? I can't seem to find the rpm listed on this B variant.
I bought 10 Toshiba Externals and removed the drives. They were model MD04ACA500...Got them for $130 new minus some discounts I got on gift cards.
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-SATA3-7200RPM-Internal-MD04ACA500/dp/B00MBMKZ2S
Anyone know the difference between the B and C models? I can't seem to find the rpm listed on this B variant.
Yeah, thought that might be one difference. I didn't need the extra MTBF, but most here probably will.
Hm... and I thought this was an outstanding deal... maybe people don't do 5TB drives?
6 left *still*
6 left *still*
Retail on these drives is $225. I don't know where you're getting your information.
Only drives I've seen come close to this price range is crap seagates. This is the first time one of my ebay alerts turned up a toshiba drive.
Only drives I've seen come close to this price range is crap seagates. This is the first time one of my ebay alerts turned up a toshiba drive.
Even though they (supposedly) were only used for "[less than 400 hours light use] for software compatibility testing," they're still used. HDDs are like cars, take em' for a spin and they're immediately worth half as much. I, and I'm sure many others, won't trust data to used HDDs (even with proper backups, because restoring takes time). That, and I like to be 100% sure I'm getting the full warranty period when I purchase drives.
Toshiba also doesn't make these surveillance drives any more, as far as I can tell, which means you're likely going to get a X300 5TB if you warrenty one a year from now, which is a non-24/7 spec'd drive.
This definitely isn't a bad deal by any means, it's just not amazing.
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I have a concern about using purpose build Surveillance / Video drives for data. I remember reading something to the effect of "Don't use Surveillance / Video drive for data because the firmware has been optimized for mostly write AND to possibly keep writing in case of errors (and not spend to much time to recover errors ). The theory was something like this, if during a video recording a few pixels/frames are lost here and there no big deal as long as all video streams keep being recorded. This would be a GOOD feature on a VIDEO drive. But in a DATA drive I want my drive firmware to prioritize data INTEGRITY. Has anyone heard this or are concerned about it?
I have, though I'm not entirely sure about the truth of it. I know surveillance drives are very write-optimized, though. The firmware intelligently keeps the head in the "right" place to write streaming data to the disk.
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I looked up some of this when I saw this post, and did not find any credible source to verify the claim that the surveillance disks should perform fewer integrity checks.
What I did find was some some articles (here's one from Synology) mentioning, as you also wrote, that surveillance disks are optimized for writing and random access performance can suffer.