HDD - Samsung or Hitachi

[karhoe]

Talking about WHS, I don't see the logic of having another PC in the house.

How many of us would utlize it?

[Chai]

Originally Posted by karhoe

Talking about WHS, I don't see the logic of having another PC in the house.

How many of us would utlize it?

There's quite a lot of use for a WHS, but I really can't afford to build one myself. The reasons I would want one includes:

1. Backup data
2. Share photos, movies
3. A low powered machine to do other various tasks instead of leaving your high powered main PC on.

[PsYkHoTiK]

Originally Posted by karhoe

Talking about WHS, I don't see the logic of having another PC in the house.

How many of us would utlize it?

Anyone with more than 1 pc in the house should have a WHS in my opinion...

All you need is some spare hardware (which techies more often then not will definitely have - I'm running my old AMD64 FX-55 system from yesteryear as our WHS). and a spare place to store the PC (a closet, under the desk, etc - mine is running headless - just a power chord and a CAT6 LAN cable is hooked up to it).

Things I use it for:
1) PC Backups (done daily and moving 2 day backup, 2 week backup, 2 month backup image is stored). From the backups, I can either boot up a disc to restore a mirror image of the backed up PC or go in and retrieve individual files.
2) File Sharing (3 PCs are connected via Gigabit network and 4 other laptops via wifi - 60-70% network utilization when transferring files to the server are AWESOME btw - FLAC albums take seconds)
3) Host shared applications - I run a ventrilo server for local network use (VOIP for gaming), I used to run a PS3 media server (needs a bit more horsepower to do that better though haha - encodes on the fly).
4) Remoting made easy. I can login through a website that's tied to my Windows Live account and login into the server to access any files on the server and also, I can remote into my desktop without having to mess with things like Dynamic DNS whenever I am not at home. I have also streamed MP3s over the internet from what is stored on the WHS using an add in.

Having files hosted on a separate machine rather than a shared drive on your PC is really beneficial. You don't have to worry about people not being able to access things when your PC is turned off (for files and printers actually), and more importantly, your main PC's resources are saved for what you need to use it for.

And what I use it for honestly, is just the tip of the iceberg. Others run uTorrent as an add in. Servers can do a LOT and the WHS in particular has a strong community add in following.

I would readily build another if I moved out of this house. I need it just as much as I need my dual monitors... Both fall into the "If you try it, you'll need it" category... hahaha

[karhoe]

I have 4 pc's at home, with each PC being used by my brothers and I.

Printer is connected to my PC and is shared so if anyone wants to print, just turn on my PC and print the stuff.

Next, I plan to get NAS and network printer.

1) As for backup, I find the built in Windows System Image backup feature very useful, I created an image of Win 7 and then installed back Vista for some reason, after that, I just restored back and it went back to 7, no need to use Acronis for such simple task.

2) That's a small issue we face, each have to have a duplicate of the songs, but that will soon change with NAS

3) Not needing it

4) With NAS, I can have webFTP and almost all router has DDNS client

My main concern of having a WHS is, I do not want to have another rig being turned on 24 x 7. It seems uneconomical.

Seriously I have enough hardwares for another P4 PC and a P3 pc lying around - would love to try WHS, in fact I have the trial here,but I just have no time for it lol

[Adrian Wong]

Back to topic, I think both are pretty okay drives. How reliable are they? It's hard to know until a few years down the road.

Remember the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8? We thought they were reliable but after a few years, they started dying like flies.

[lee_what2004]

things nowadays don't get tough like the old days...

[zy]

in my apartment. all the PC/laptops are turned on 24/7 been running them for 2 years.

2 - core 2 duo PC
1 - Pentium4 pc soon to be core 2 duo
2 - core 2 duo laptops.

i run all WD on my own PC. no problems so far. but my external mybook was failing because it there was too many accidents with it.
kept tripping on the wire and it fell down a couple of times while i was back in malaysia ;p rma it xD
my latest drive in WD 1TB green. hopefully it does fail. its only been with me for couple of months compared to 2 other WD drives.

my gf's pc i believe is either running hitachi/fujitsu for its main drive. no problem i believe.

my laptop is running hitachi. swapped out the fujitsu to be a external. no problems here.

my housemate is running.. i dunno didnt check. its a Dell desktop, so it should be seagate i guess?

[lee_what2004]

Originally Posted by zy

in my apartment. all the PC/laptops are turned on 24/7 been running them for 2 years.

2 - core 2 duo PC
1 - Pentium4 pc soon to be core 2 duo
2 - core 2 duo laptops.

i run all WD on my own PC. no problems so far. but my external mybook was failing because it there was too many accidents with it.
kept tripping on the wire and it fell down a couple of times while i was back in malaysia ;p rma it xD
my latest drive in WD 1TB green. hopefully it does fail. its only been with me for couple of months compared to 2 other WD drives.

my gf's pc i believe is either running hitachi/fujitsu for its main drive. no problem i believe.

my laptop is running hitachi. swapped out the fujitsu to be a external. no problems here.

my housemate is running.. i dunno didnt check. its a Dell desktop, so it should be seagate i guess?

[zy]

Originally Posted by lee_what2004

right now only 2 is on because my housemate is away for the summer visiting girlfriend in Cali.

the lowest electric bill was $40 with 2 PCs
highest was more than $100 in winter because we are using heater

housemate plays alot of online game. so he leaves his game on to sell stuffs. LOL

me & my gf, we are too lazy to turn on the PC.
my PC shares alot of stuffs on the network. so it is partial file server.

[PsYkHoTiK]

Sure that is true that with pretty much any hardware, anyone can set up anything. Heck if I wanted to, I could always install Windows Server 2008 R2 and pretty much do most (if not all) of these things myself manually. Question is how accessible is it to the general everyday people (aka people not on this site). The thing with WHS is that it is so darn simple. Heck my 55yr old technically un-inclined dad can use it (I use him as my benchmark on if something is easy enough or not haha - highly resistant to change and woefully stubborn ). He knows how to share stuff, how to remote in if he needs to grab files while away from home (nothing is as easy as longing into a website, and clicking twice to remote in - setup on the server side is just a click away too), he even knows how to stream stuff to his PS3. It brings all the neat things techies can choose to do to the general population.

Even the backups are so easy (yet configurable). Automated and a moving days, weeks, month images are kept (selectable rate). Long gone are my days of off loading data off of a PC to reformat. I just reformat, login to the server connector and pull all of the files that were already backed up the night before (appears as a virtual drive on the pc). And I am never worried about a drive dying on my WHS and the data loss associated with it as there is redundancy over the drives (sorta like a quasi-software RAID). That and it's highly scalable (the data hdds are truly "hot swappable" - don't have to worry about transferring crap from one drive to the other if I need to remove it - just unmount it on the GUI and remove the drive).

And as far as economics go, I have all power savings turned on, it is a powerful machine in its own right (way above the min specs - tons of processing power and RAM) but it runs completely headless. Heck it doesn't even have a GPU plugged into it (haha removed it after I completed installation - now for anything apart from the admin console, I just remote into it). And since its built from crap I was gonna get rid of anyways, the cost to me was only the license. Only thing I'd do to mine is change the case to a proper server case (HDD bays!) so I can take its current case to use when I build my mom a PC when I eventually go Core i7 (its using my nice aluminum CoolerMaster Praetorian case right now).

Originally Posted by Adrian Wong

Back to topic, I think both are pretty okay drives. How reliable are they? It's hard to know until a few years down the road.

Remember the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8? We thought they were reliable but after a few years, they started dying like flies.

Funny thing is my 2 Barracuda 8s are still running. In fact, I got so worried that I recently took em off any active PCs just because its either close or has passed the MTBF... Time to use Boot and Nuke and make good use of my drill press...

Though I can't say I will be using much of Seagate for a while now (due to recent occurrences). I'm really happy with WD, and Samsung. The Hitachi I had is really good as well but WD and Samsung have a good price perf mix to me. I say that but I'm using WD RE3s as my main OS RAID array and a Raptor X as my Linux drive hahaha... But to be fair, I also have one of the old old WD 250GBs that were famous for dying from a few years back (It clicked once but runs steady since ).

So honestly, its not really so much as to what brand is better, but which drive in particular needs to be compared. All of the manufacturers have stellar drives (F1, Caviar Black, Raptors, et al) but also some pretty crappy drives at the same time.