Legit Reviews

I have been looking at a 1/2 Terabyte HDD from Maxtor.Any pro's and con's?

Only problem I see with a large capacity drive is that if it fails you'll lose sooo much more stuff. But you should back things up anyway so I guess that's not really a huge issue. Besides being more expensive, it will probably perform just fine (except maybe if it was like 90% full or something).

Oh, and just to get this straight...
1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes?
So 1/2 Terabyte = 500 Gigabytes?

I know a 1/2 terabyte is 500GB.As far as I know that is the max available now.

dont think he was questioning if you knew it was 500gb, rather make shure he had it straight. least thats how I read it.

to me I dont see the point of a 500gb drive. thats just me.

Unless space or connections are an issue, you may look into RAID. If you raided 2 160's or something like that, you still get your large chunk of space plus you gain some performance. However you still run into the issue if 1 drive dies, you loose the entire array. So if you have something important, make sure you back up.

Sasquatch wrote:Unless space or connections are an issue, you may look into RAID. If you raided 2 160's or something like that, you still get your large chunk of space plus you gain some performance. However you still run into the issue if 1 drive dies, you loose the entire array. So if you have something important, make sure you back up.

That makes sense,the only thing is I can't even get SATA to work right on this board.It looks like is going to board heaven soon.

get a seagate maxtor has a horrible reputation.

I see your point,but i have had this Maxtor for 2 trs now and not even a blink.The only thing is. That is PATA

bubba wrote:dont think he was questioning if you knew it was 500gb, rather make shure he had it straight. least thats how I read it.

You are correct sir ;)

And to CyberWarrior, what is the major reason you want 500Gb of space on one drive??

gvblake22 wrote:

bubba wrote:dont think he was questioning if you knew it was 500gb, rather make shure he had it straight. least thats how I read it.

You are correct sir ;)

And to CyberWarrior, what is the major reason you want 500Gb of space on one drive??

No reason really,I am a "latest" addict.LOL.Actually I copy DVD material to HDD first then I send it back to DVD.My 80gb is not cutting it.Plus I have thousands of pics in a folder,plus the OS+ apps and games,including MOH series all of them.Is pretty crowded here.

CyberWarrior wrote: No reason really,I am a "latest" addict.LOL.Actually I copy DVD material to HDD first then I send it back to DVD.My 80gb is not cutting it.Plus I have thousands of pics in a folder,plus the OS+ apps and games,including MOH series all of them.Is pretty crowded here.

read porn

infinitevalence wrote:

CyberWarrior wrote: No reason really,I am a "latest" addict.LOL.Actually I copy DVD material to HDD first then I send it back to DVD.My 80gb is not cutting it.Plus I have thousands of pics in a folder,plus the OS+ apps and games,including MOH series all of them.Is pretty crowded here.

read porn

Get your mind out of the gutter,I have a gourgeous wife and two children.I don't need porn,my wife has a body that will put most of those sluts to shame.

I would say 500GB is overkill even for what you do. I like to upload my home movies ( of my 2 year old son) tot he hard drive and edit them into a movie. If I remember my numbers right 1 hour of RAW video footage takes about 4-5 GB of space which is more than a DVD movie compressed. I have a 160GB Maxtor ( no problems ever) and I had a Video file that was 58 GB plus XP OS and several games ( MOH all 3, NWN all 3 and more) I still had room to spare. If I were you I would go with the Maxtor 300GB 16Meg cache drive...lots of room fro pics and games plus good performance. You could even run twin 300s in a raid and .....nice setup for the movie buff ( Alladin, Lion King etc.)

Are the Maxtor's 300gb SATA?

one thing about RAID I am curious about myself. I was taught by Best Buy (consider the source I guess, I dunno) that RAID 0, which is Mirroring, allows for a direct copy of a HDD, given a second drive of equal capacity is available, and with mirroring, I was also taught that if one drive gives, the other doesn't lose the info; I am incorrect in this, just curious

I personally am totally ignorant,when it comes to RAID.I don't even know what RAID stands for.

RAID= Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; RAID was, at one time awhile ago, found predominantly in workstations. But now, it is making a much stronger apprearance in consumer PC's and is a great choice for disaster recovery, just be sure to keep your PC virus-free, ad-ware free, and bot-free, as (from what I know about RAID) what happens to the source drive usually happens to the destination drive.

in addition to last post... RAID 1 is striping, which allows segments of data to be dispersed across both drives...however, this is where you lose your data if the source drive gives

killswitch83 wrote:RAID= Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks; RAID was, at one time awhile ago, found predominantly in workstations. But now, it is making a much stronger apprearance in consumer PC's and is a great choice for disaster recovery, just be sure to keep your PC virus-free, ad-ware free, and bot-free, as (from what I know about RAID) what happens to the source drive usually happens to the destination drive.

I personally have 3 spyware programs,and NSW premier plus,Win firewall and Black Ice.

MIRRORING
Disk mirroring involves the simultaneous writing of the same data over one RAID controller to two separate hard disks. Since the data is being written twice, mirroring will slow down disk writes but can often increase the speed of disk reads.

DUPLEXING
Similar to mirroring, disk duplexing is the simultaneous writing of the same data over two RAID controllers to two separate disks. A system that implements duplexing can withstand the failure of either a hard disk or a RAID controller.

STRIPING
One way to improve the performance issues involved with mirroring or duplexing is to implement disk striping. This involves breaking data into small pieces and distributing it across multiple disks. Depending on the RAID implementation, data is broken up into bits, bytes, or blocks.

PARITY
Parity is an alternative to mirroring for achieving redundancy. Unlike mirroring, it does not require the sacrifice of 50 percent of disk space in order to achieve redundancy. Parity is logical information about the data you're storing, and it's used to re-create lost data in the event of a disk failure. It is used in combination with striping and usually involves at least three disks. The parity information can be stored on one separate disk or can be distributed across multiple disks along with striping bits, bytes, or blocks.

RAID IMPLEMENTATIONS

RAID 0: DISK STRIPING
RAID 0 is the implementation of disk striping without parity. Data is divided among the available disks, which offers great performance but no redundancy. Data loss would result upon disk failure. RAID 0 can be used for high-performance workstations, but it isn't intended for mission-critical servers.

RAID 1: MIRRORING AND DUPLEXING
RAID 1 involves disk mirroring or disk duplexing. Data is divided by writing data to two or more disks (always an even number), thus allowing for redundancy and data recovery upon disk failure (or controller failure in the case of duplexing). Data in this level tends to be written slowly but can often be read more quickly.

RAID 2: BIT-BY-BIT STRIPING
RAID 2 stripes data bit by bit across multiple disks. This level of RAID is intended for use with disks that don't have built-in error detection. Level 2 is scarcely used since most modern vendors build error detection into their disks.

RAID 3: BYTE-BY-BYTE STRIPING
RAID 3 stripes data at the byte level across multiple disks. Parity is stored on a separate disk. If a disk failure occurs, the parity disk can be used to rebuild the disk without any data loss. For an even greater fault-tolerant solution, the parity disk itself can be mirrored.

RAID 4: BLOCK-BY-BLOCK STRIPING
RAID 4 stripes data at the block level across multiple disks. Again, parity is stored on a separate disk. Performance is greater than RAID 2 or RAID 3 since data is stored in larger units--blocks.

RAID 5: STRIPING WITH DISTRIBUTED PARITY
RAID 5 is very similar to RAID 4, except that instead of storing parity on a separate disk, it distributes it among the available disks. RAID distributes data similar to RAID 0, only it includes parity information along with the striped data across the various disks. This is one of the most common RAID implementations, along with RAID 1.

RAID 10 (ALSO CALLED RAID 0+1): MIRRORED STRIPING
RAID 10 is basically a combination of RAID 1 and RAID 0. Data is striped across multiple disks, and then all of those disks are mirrored. Obviously, this is one of the most expensive levels to implement, although it provides excellent fault tolerance.