Last time I looked at computer stuff, the largest internal hard drives I could find were 750GB. Now I see that they've made 1.5TB 3.5" SATA drive (http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4138742&Sku=TSD-1500AS)s, and they're quite reasonable. That being said, I would like to wait until 2.5TB SATA drives are available -- for less than $200 each -- and buy three of them to build a new 5TB RAID 5 system. Do any of you have an idea of how long I'll be waiting?

I'd say 6 months is pretty reasonable with the way things are going.

Although they would be expensive as fuck, you'd be better off buying a bunch of 1tb drives.

Do you really think so? The 1.5TB drives aren't that expensive at the moment and they're fairly new. I suppose I could get six 1TB drives instead, the case I'm planning on will fit 8 internal 3.5" drives, but I'd prefer to go with three 2.5GB disks. This way, down the line I can buy two more and have a 10TB RAID 5 setup.

Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Just thought I'd throw that out there.

Please familiarize yourself with RAID 5: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel5-c.html

Give it six months to a year.

Depending on what you're doing, you might be better off with more disks of lower capacity.

You'll have better seek times and better read speeds. More heads on more platters to move around is good for getting data. If you need more capacity later on, you can use an external enclosure. As time passes, those 1.5 TB disks will go down in price, so it won't be painful to buy more matching disks.

On the other hand, more disks means that there are more things that can fail-- if you have 6 disks it's more like for one to fail than if you would have only 3. It also means more heat, more noise, and greater power use.

considering prices are down now due to the holidays, i'd say it could be a year before you see those kinds of prices for a drive of that size, but i would also guess that by then there could be drives even bigger than that. also, think about the rate solid state drives are advancing and how that affects the market.

please familiarize yourself with raid 5: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singlelevel5-c.html

lol

rdp

.....

Why the HELL would somebody need that much space?

I...just...can't see anybody ever filling those, or getting near full.

Because a finite amount of space is never enough. (http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/7259/storagerb0.jpg)

I think my next storage solution will be a couple 1 terabyte drives in RAID-0. My current raid-0 is 2x250gb, and hits about 140MB/s, but these new drives will hit 120MB/s each, so thats a 200+MB/s in RAID-0. SSDs are trying hard to beat that, but RAID still rues supreme.

Well, at the moment I'm using over 400GB and I've had to delete a lot of stuff in the past to fit everything on to my current 800GB (formerly 1.1TB) system.

I'm not a huge hurry to get the new system setup, I'm expecting to build it some time next summer, but when it's done I want it to last four years.

I'd like a 2.5 TB as well. I prefer having one HD instead of two for some reason :p

Probably because it's easier to work with files on a single partition. Anyway, you can always span over multiple drives and prevent data loss with RAID 5 like I'll be doing. Assuming your drives are all the same size.

I am running 5x500GB in RAID-5. I love it. I have about 500 GB of movies, 250 of TV shows and another 200 in .ISO images of anything I want (never use actual disks anymore).

RDP

Because a finite amount of space is never enough. (http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/7259/storagerb0.jpg)

I think my next storage solution will be a couple 1 terabyte drives in RAID-0. My current raid-0 is 2x250gb, and hits about 140MB/s, but these new drives will hit 120MB/s each, so thats a 200+MB/s in RAID-0. SSDs are trying hard to beat that, but RAID still rues supreme.

Please don't use RAID 0 for storing tons of precious files you spent years downloading...

one faulty drive or raid controller...goodbye!

btw I'm using raid 10 with 4x 250's. Great speed :)

Please don't use RAID 0 for storing tons of precious files you spent years downloading...

No kidding. I already had Vista kill the array once, it had been a couple weeks since a reboot and wham, vista crashed and one of the drives' raid data got nuked and it lost its status in the array. I coulda recovered it probably, but it was just easier to reinstall. My important stuff was mostly backed up, and my internet is quick enough to get the lost tv shows and whatnot. I switched back to XP after that and never had the problem again. Ill be getting a DX10 video card soon, so ill be walking down the vista plank once again.

Just thought I'd throw that out there.

lol, retard.