Playin' the hard drive shuffle!

randomJACKASS

randomJACKASS

Banned
Sometimes I just hate being a geek because it means a lot of work and migrating hard drives can be tricky business with potentially devastating consequences!

I saw a Samsung Spinpoint 750GB drive on Newegg for a really kick ass price. The drive is among the fastest drives ever designed being as they have found a way to fit 1GB on just 3 platters. The 750GB is sort of a baby brother also on three platters but with less platter used. I wonder if a firmware hack could make it a 1TB drive? I'll have to Google that....

See now the way I planned to use it probably is a waste of all that speed, but I had a Seagate 500GB I was using for an external in an enclosure. The enclosure does do eSATA, USB 2.0 and Firewire, but I was using it via USB so probably a waste?

In any case, I am moving the 750 into the external job, the 500 is gonna get cloned from the 400 which currently has Vista on it, the 400 will be my secondary in the machine (I like to keep videos, ISOs, and stuff only used periodically on the machine for instant access and the external is just a true redundant backup).

What a monumental bunch of Data moving I have ahead of me (well in mid process by now!)
 
I personally wouldn't try flashing it that way.

You have to consider the density of the particles on the platers.
 
If it's 1TB on three platters, then each platter holds 1/3 of that and each side of the platter holds 1/6. But 750 GB is 3/4, which isn't a multiple of 1/6, meaning it's not just as simple as a firmware hack to get access to one more side of a platter. Plus, even if it was just one side of a platter turned off, there might not be a head physically there to read it.
 
I've had some good luck with seagate, but somewhat less with samaung.
I've been moving heavy to wd, over the last ~year+.
 
I've had great luck with Seagate, Western Digital have usually been good to me too. The first "big" harddrive I bought directly from a store (Best Buy) was a WD. 6.4 gigs and like $150 or something. :D
 
A 750GB drive storing its data in 3 plates *might* actually be slower than a 750GB drive storing it in 6 plates. Reason: the drive can read from all the plates at the same time. Think of it as a RAID within the drive itself.

Making denser plates has improved greatly the capacity of the drives, but if you couple big density plates and "few plates" you either have a case for profits or for making the device smaller. Not about making it faster.
 
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