By Philip Churchill on April 19th, 2010
2TB Hard Drive Roundup
Computer hardware review site HotHardware has a roundup of 2TB hard drives from Samsung, Seagate and Western Digital (WD).
Its a great 11 page review which looks at general purpose hard drives, performance drives and those designed for the enterprise.
Loads of benchmarks are included plus cost per GB and bang-for-the-buck graphs, which you can find here.
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I have a WD20EARS that I use for chores that NEVER gets backed up by my EX470. I have seen a lot of commentary as to whether they can be used in a WHS. The consensus seems to be that they can, but only the system drive can be aligned (4K sector length, etc.) while all the Data drives must operate jumpered as 512 byte sector, non-aligned drives.
I have a lot of concerns about whether they are compatible AT ALL for use on the same network as a WHS. My concerns centre on the basic backup/restore functionality of WHS, which has no concept as I understand it of file and directory structures, but relies on detecting changes in individual sectors within a partition, and backing them up accordingly.
How can, or does the WHS handle different sector sizes in the various partitions being backup up?
Will a WHS be able to handle the case of duplication in a 2-drive system? Will it handle backups/restores on a 1-drive system where the system drive is aligned? Has anyone actually tested disk saves/restores for the various situations that this implies?
I know, you can’t do a system restore without losing data if your system was ever used with less than 3 drives and duplication, because the first step in a system restore is to format the system drive… but that is another issue. However in this case you undoubtedly saved backups on your aligned system disk. Did you lose 3/4 of your disk capacity saving non-aligned sectors in your aligned system disk?
Will all the data from an aligned client partition actually be saved in your non-aligned Data drives, or will the sectors be truncated? If the data was not lost could it ever actually be restored to the original sectors?
What is the effect of trying to restore an aligned backup to a non-aligned new disk (or vice verse)?
I feel really ignorant here, but the truth is I have been thinking about this for about 1 day and I have nowhere near enough knowledge about the WHS internals to even guess intelligently about the questions that are making me so nervous!!
Am I worrying about nothing? Can anyone give me “The Word” about these issues from experience or knowledge about recent developments.
Without input from someone I trust, I would not have an aligned (4k sector) drive anywhere in my network where it would be backup up, or on the server. I’m a chicken, ’tis true. I would be happy to use them jumpered and unaligned, though.
Regards to all,
Tom