21 Jul 2014

WD Red Pros & HGST Helium drives

by | posted in: Technology News | 0

Western Digital LogoNAS, DAS and SOHO server owners will have a performance option through Western Digital Red series. The WD Red Pro will forgo its “Intellipower” feature and crank up RPMs up to 7200.

I wouldn’t get one. I’m perfectly happy with my Western Digital Red drives running at 5400 RPM while sipping power. I care about reliability and power efficiency more when it comes to network storage solutions.

While reading up on these Western Digitals, I ran into the HGST Helium filled drives. These drives made by Hitachi (a subsidiary of Western Digital now) use helium to reduce friction which means these drives should use less power to spin those many platters encased within.

Sounds like a good idea but it’s also an expensive idea which is why it debuted in the enterprise market first. I’m curious when we’ll see it in the consumer market.

1 Dec 2013

Checkpoint: Post-Black Friday 2013 Edition

by | posted in: Editorials & Features | 0

This past Black Friday may be the most I ever spent on America’s biggest shopping day. I didn’t approach it with the intention to spend but surprise sales and opportunities arose and I just couldn’t say “No”.

  • 2 x Seagate 1TB Solid State Hybrid Drive w/ 8GB NAND (ST1000LM014)
  • Mario & Luigi Wii U 32GB Deluxe Set
  • 2 x 1 year PlayStation Plus membership codes

The Seagate drives will be used to upgrade PlayStation 4’s storage solution. I look forward to both the capacity and performance increases. The two years of PlayStation Plus for $30 each was too irresistible. As for the Wii U? I wanted to wait for a price drop to around $199 but when Amazon.ca took $50 off the $299.99 price tag, I couldn’t resist. I had gift certificates to use as well.

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19 Nov 2013

PlayStation 4 storage options tested

by | posted in: Game News | 0

Will Smith over at Tested explored the storage options of the PlayStation 4. With large capacity solid state drives being so expensive, it is important to find out if they’re worth their high price tags.

I would never place a solid state hard drive (hybrid drive) in one of my PCs because they can take advantage of the solid state drives. The PlayStation 4? Apparently it doesn’t utilize SSDs very well. Nobody is sure if future firmware revisions will improve SSD utilization but for now it looks like SSHDs are the way to go. They offer both capacity and performance gains.

So what are my SSHD choices? The Seagate 1TB drive with 8GB of NAND (Model: ST1000LM014) can be found for around $115 online. That’s a little pricier than I would like.

So for now, I will wait.

7 Jul 2013

Checkpoint: Not According to Plan Edition

by | posted in: Editorials & Features | 1

checkpoint-not-according-to-plan-edition

Don’t you hate it when things don’t fall into place?

With the new PC wrapped up (post about it tomorrow) and all the hard drives in, I decided to work on the home server. My plan to use NAS4Free running in a Hyper-V VM didn’t pan out. I didn’t realize that NAS4Free/FreeBSD didn’t have the necessary SCSI drivers for Hyper-V.

My fall back plan was to use VMWare Player or Oracle VirtualBox. The former worked but I couldn’t map to physical disks. Oracle VirtualBox allows all five physical disks to be mapped but it seems to crash often. I performed a factory reset and will perform the ZFS pool creation one more time. If it causes me grief I may have to resort to using virtual disks on individual drives.

This sucks.

I am tempted to scrap the whole NAS4Free/FreeNAS idea and look into unRAID, FlexRAID or something along those lines.

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I was hoping to either wrap up Persona 4: Arena or Fire Emblem: Awakening this weekend but made little progress towards that goal as well. There’s a lot more grinding involved in Fire Emblem than I originally anticipated.

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