My favorite line in description:
Really? If that is true - this would be one of the best deals ever! Now, I do hope that friendly technical support also knows something about said product AND speaks a bit of English…
It has a 3-year warranty through Hitachi. If you have problems working with Hitachi, feel free to contact service@woot.com for assistance.
No, CaptainWes is right to ask. With 512 byte sectors and 32-bit LBA, you’re limited to 2.1TB of addressable space. With a 64-bit OS, LBA is extended to 48-bits, which means that you can address hard drives in the petabyte range.
Of course, another issue is the MBR, which is important if you want to use this as a boot drive. In which case, the MBR can only use partitions that are under the 2.1TB limit as the boot partition (I believe).
However, my experience with these types of devices is very limited. What does this present to the OS? Will I see two 2TB drives? Or one 4TB one? How Linux compatible is this?
Can this be used as a SAN (block-level sharing) or as a NAS (file-level sharing)? If you want to use the on-board RAID 0 or 1, can you set it up using a web interface, or how does that work?
With these high capacity hard disks it’s tempting to put all one’s data on to it, a central repository, if you will.
The problem with that is if it fails, one’s life is pretty much over.
While I have some one terabyte 3.5" drives, I have about ten USB 500 GB 2.5" hard disks on which I put my data. If one of em goes out, I still have the other disks and all is not lost, so to speak.
Where I get all my hard disks with enclosures is Grassroots computers. They sell refurb drives and in the seven years I have been buying from them none of the drives have failed.
Once in awhile through sellout Woot Grassroot’s hard disk enclosures go on sale, e.g., 500 GB “My Passport” 2.5 drive and enclosure for $45 and $5 or free shipping.
If interested, go to sellout Woot and look at the other deals listed below the daily sellout listing.
Here is a link to grassroots where for Woot buyers there was free shipping too:
http://www.grassrootscomputers.com/woot-promo-9-30-10-24-hours-only/
I just purchased 3 of the Hitachi 1TB last night (still on sale) However I just cant pass this up… I love technology… I cant wait to see where we are 10-20yrs from now…
For the DirecTV users out here. You can plug this unit directly into your DirecTV HD-DVR and add more space to your DVR. It is plug and play. Shut every thing down, plug in this drive via eSATA and turn it on. After the drive starts up plug in your DirecTV HD-DVR. The DVR will boot up and automatically format the drive. Your DVR will start and you will have a lot more space.
This unit WILL bypass the internal drive. So any recording you have now will not show up when this drive is plugged in. You can always unplug this drive and reboot your DVR to see your current recordings if you want.
A little more info:
RAID 0 will read/write files faster than using a single disk. But if one of the two drives f a i l, you lose all information on both drives. Be aware of the risk.
RAID 1 will operate slower than a single hard drive, and you will only have access to 2TB of the 4TB. But if one of the drives f a i l s, you lose no data.
RAID 0 for speed and space, but at greater risk. RAID 1 for a little extra protection.
These externals are actually made by a company called SimpleTech which was recently bought by Hitachi. This is the only Hitachi branded one I’ve ever seen. If you go to the SimpleTech site here:
http://www.simpletech.com/
And click ‘Pro Solutions’ you will see that the drives are identical.
I bought a 1TB of this same one last year when SimpleTech was still owned by Fabrik.
The second I plugged it in I noticed the light didn’t work but I didn’t think much into it. A month later the entire thing stopped working so I bought a MacAlly external enclosure and its worked fine ever since.
The Hitachi hard drive inside is the only thing that worked so I can only imagine this is a solid unit now that Hitachi makes the whole package.
I just thought I’ll add about Raid configs:
Raid 1: protect your data. Every single byte of data is written to both hard drives, making it very fаilproof. If one hard drive goes up in smoke, the second will keep all your data…
Raid 0: Increases your fаilure chances dramatically! Not only it does not replicate data, but it stripes it, making pretty much every one of your files spanned across both drives. If one fаils – you lost it ALL, not just a half of your stuff (as if you just set it up as two independent drives)… The benefit - access speed goes up hugely…
So basically - never use Raid 0 for backups! EVER!
And here comes the question: Can I just set it up as two hard drives without Raid at all, to both extend capacity AND reasonably limit fаilure risks?
I have 4 of these. I don’t recommend for a Mac unless you’re happy with formatting at FAT. I inconsistently had problems for matting as Mac Journeled which has been a bother. Some did it, some did not.
I’m pretty sure this is a similar if not the same price than at Fry’s in California a few months back.
They stack well if you put the feet on correctly.
Works great on my PC, A+.
My old 1TB version of this lost firewire after about a week. Apparently that was a pretty common problem. Can’t speak for the new model though.
USB still works, but that’s not what I got it for, so I’m a little cautious of that model.
Not out of the box. There’s no LAN connectivity (ethernet or wireless), so the best you could do would be to connect the drive to a networked computer as a shared volume, or connect a NAS server (like the LinkSys NSLU2 or similar) to your network and then connect the drive to the NAS server.
I wouldn’t use this as a striped array (RAID 0) if I were you. If one drive goes you lose both. Doubling your chances of catastrophic failure. Either mirror them or treat them as separate drives.
LEM- wrote:
"So basically - never use Raid 0 for backups! EVER!
And here comes the question: Can I just set it up as two hard drives without Raid at all, to both extend capacity AND reasonably limit fаilure risks?"
Good point, although RAID 1 (mirroring) by itself isn’t a backup solution either. All it means is that if you accidentally delete or change a file, you’ve simply deleted it or changed it on two drives instead of one. But, a RAID 1 array makes a dandy solution for backing up another drive’s contents.
And no, you can’t set this up as two independent 2 TB drives. That would require some extra sophistication in the interface electronics (for instance, how do you tell it which interface port on the back connects to which drive?) The only two choices you get are either a 4 TB RAID 0 array or a 2 TB RAID 1 array.
I don’t think that’s what he meant. There are many SATA to USB bridges that attach multiple SATA drives to ONE USB port. They just show up as individual devices.
Interesting concept that I have yet to see, external RAM, 1 TB no less. Wow…
Thought Bubble: “I would not have to turn off my computer for an entire year, to refresh the memory.”
I may have misread his question, but I’m fairly certain he was asking if you could configure this two-drive box to show up on your desktop as two separate 2 TB drives. I don’t think this is a possibility. The box’s interface is set up to present a single drive to the attached computer - you just have a choice of whether it’s a 4 TB RAID 0 array or a 2 TB RAID 1 array.
Striping multiple drives is an attractive idea because the resulting array is oh-so-fast and oh-so-big, but because of the decreased reliability, I would never use a RAID 0 array for anything other than fast temporary storage (a “scratch” disk) for something like Photoshop or a video editing program.