2TB drives under the duopoly

[Mercutio]

After this weekend, I'm basically down to just using these drives in WHS.

 

[Mercutio]

Actually, I think I'm going to try Drive Bender instead of screwing around with WHS. It will install on Windows machines I already have and if it works OK, the license is only $20.

 

[mubs]

Interesting product! Do provide feedback on your experiences. If it works as advertised, it would be worth the $40 non-sale price.

 

[Mercutio]

I played with the trial version last night. What I can say right now is that it makes a quasi-JBOD where the disks can maintain their identity as an independent drives or be addressed as a unique volume. Drives that already have content merge into a single directory structure within the volume, and uninstalling the program is non-destructive to existing data. I didn't check the data duplication feature (I kind of don't care about that), but I did make a nice 18.5TB array using a mix of the WD drives and some 1.5TB Seagate and Samsung drives. If I wrote data to array members as their individual disks, that data showed up in the volume. If I wrote data to the volume, it showed up on the individual disk containing the parent folder. That makes sense.

I'm a little worried about all the data structure maintenance options in the program, but this looks like it might be a reliable way to use crappy green drives.

 

[LunarMist]

If I wrote data to array members as their individual disks, that data showed up in the volume. If I wrote data to the volume, it showed up on the individual disk containing the parent folder. That makes sense.

But what happens if you keep adding data to the volume rather than a single disk? Does it start writing to a different drive if one is full?
The whole point to me of having a pool is that you don't have to worry about which data goes on on which disk and how to divide the data without running out of space.

 

[Mercutio]

It's a JBOD. I assume that in traditional JBOD fashion, it will write the disk #0 in the array first and until that drive is full, then move on to writing on disk #1, then #2 and so on. That's what JBODs do.
Given your concerns about data integrity, it's probably not a good answer for you.

 

[Chewy509]

Just acquired my first TB+ capacity HDD, a Hitachi 2TB 7K3000 (aka HDS723020BLA642) ... Functions as advertised, and the performance is a nice improvement over the 250GB WDC Blue drive it replaced.

PS. This is a 512byte sector drive, not one of the 4K drives.