On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 1:30 PM, Dale <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Looks like some good info. I just need a GOOD sale and some extra money to > spend. Maybe in a couple weeks or so. Hopefully. ;-) > > As for heat in my case, I have a Cooler Master HAF-932 case. It has those > huge 230mm fans. Heat is not a problem. > > I just wonder how much data they will be able to pack into a 3.5" drive tho. > Hmmmmm. Surely they will run out of room at some point. I mean, the heads > have got to have a little room to work with.
Just don't buy a SAMSUNG drive. I know, I know, everyone has their pet "Don't Buy Hard Drives Made By $x" experience. Here's mine. I bought a 1TB SAMSUNG drive for cheap from Newegg at a Black Friday sale a couple years ago. It failed on me. Around the same time, I identified some flaws in the firmware which I considered severe[2]. I RMA'd the drive, including a full report on the failure and the bugs I'd found in the firmware. I received the new drive in the mail. Same exact model. Same exact firmware revision.[1] It failed on me within three months. I attempted another RMA, the drive's serial number was rejected by their system, and I never heard back. So, I recommend not buying SAMSUNG drives for a combination of: 1) Historical evidence of poor firmware design. (reference smartctl's man page; SAMSUNG is the only manufacturer I know of to get two user-selectable workarounds in smartctl.) 2) I received a failed drive, which was RMA'd, the subsequent drive failed shortly thereafter, and couldn't be RMA'd using normal channels. 3) No acknowledgement (or even denial) of the firmware issue. [1] Ok, sure, there's no way they'd be able to whip out a new firmware revision in time for an RMA. That wouldn't make sense. But they might have sent me a drive with a different firmware revision. Or a different model. As it stood, they sent me back a device I'd already identified as systemically defective. [2] It claimed to support logging, but any failed test didn't get appended to the log, but erased and replaced it. I can probably dig up nearly all the details, but not quickly, since I'm at work. However, since you're on the cusp of making a purchase, I thought I'd give you fair warning... -- :wq
