On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Tom<[email protected]> wrote:
> ... OWC has always been
> a reliable company, so I just up and ordered up two of these 1-TB ones
> from them: <http://tinyurl.com/dec2kl>. There is a cheaper version of
> the same drive offered there ($87 vs. $139, see <http://tinyurl.com/
> mjm49f>), but รง and this model has a 5 year
> warranty and they brag about a million hours and more before it
> croaks.

The Hitachi Deskstar E7K1000 looks like it is an "enterprise" version
of their mainstream 7K1000.B. I'm not well informed on all the
potential differences so perhaps others will jump in here. But the
main differences I could see were:

- a 32MB cache instead of 16MB
- a failure rate of 1 in 10**15 versus 1 in 10**14
- the 5 year warranty versus just the 3 year for the 7K1000.B

I think the drives you bought are claimed to be better for use in a
RAID array. As I say, I have no idea how much of a difference they may
make versus the lower cost more general purpose 7K1000.B.

I have two of the 7K1000.B 1TB drives. The last one I got for $65 from
newegg.com as an OEM drive (seems the most frequent way drives are
sold these days). There's also a $10 rebate for it so if I can get off
my butt and submit it the net price would be closer to $56.

IMO "you get what you pay for" is often as much a hopeful prayer for
the future as a reliable rule of thumb. I also think that part of what
you are paying extra for are intangibles such as confidence in a
particular retailer. Only the buyer can judge how important that is to
them.

In the end, the important thing is that you be happy with your
purchase and it sounds as though you are, so 'nuff said.

What do you plan to do with the nominally still working 5 year old
drive you'll be replacing with one of the new E7K1000s? If it were me,
I'd find some other way to try to continue to get some use out of it.
(Of course, I'd also want to run the manufacturer's diagnostic
software on it to get an idea of how failure prone it might be.)

BTW, as long as that drive is still functioning you could also just
copy/clone it directly to the replacement drive rather than restore it
from Time Machine. Since your Mac is running Leopard you should just
be able to use Disk Utility to copy/clone the non-failed drive to one
of the new Hitachi's provided you can have all three drives mounted at
the same time. That is, if you can temporarily mount 3 drives
internally in your G5 or temporarily attach the new one via an
external USB/Firewire enclosure.

Just because you have a Time Machine backup doesn't mean you must use
it ... unless that's what you really want to do. :-)

-irrational john

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