Digital Trends

Reliability, not performance

by Steve Knox on Nov 4th, 2005 at 10:58 AM:

The main advantage of this drive is how cool it runs. I run it in a case with very poor cooling, and it is still barely warm to the touch even after days of operation. I use it as a data drive in my home server and leave it on 24/7. The drive is designed and rated for that kind of use.

Because of the cool operation and fluid bearings, it's rated for one million hours MTBF. Most 7200 RPM drives are rated for half that. In practice, though, this drive will be running strong long after your boot drive burns up.

Granted, this is not a performance drive, so don't boot or edit video from it. It is ideal, however, for multiple drive setups where you keep your data on a different drive from your system and applications. It is also great for firewire drives.

It is used a lot in enterprise servers, not as the main drive, but as a 'near-line' drive, to keep data infrequently used, or archival data on it's way to backup. Enterprise databases are sometimes organized like that, so it doesn't have to be taken offline to do backups.

The transfer rate is actually pretty decent for large files, in the 45MB/sec range, mainly because of the high data density: 250 Gig from four platters. Seek performance kinda sucks, though, so like I said, don't boot from it.

But if you use it for what it's made for, this is a drive that's not gonna conk out on you.