X-bit labs benchmarks eleven 160 GB hard drives.
Category: Hardware
NAS too slow? Try DAS
SmallNetBuilder takes a look at the Norco DS-500, a five drive eSATA attached drive enclosure.
Cheap RAID Ravages WD Raptor
Tom’s Hardware benchmarks a couple of 7200 drives in RAID 0 and compares them against the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor. For fun they put the Raptor in a RAID 0 array too.
Understanding Hard Drive Performance
Tom’s Hardware takes a look at hard drive performance, focusing mainly on 7200 RPM drives.
This article will give you an overview of all parameters that are relevant to hard drive performance. These are the drive form factor, platter diameter and platter count, recording technology and data density, rotation speed and access time, interface and buffer memory.
The Sytrin SHF1 Hard Drive Cooler
Toms Hardware reviews the Sytrin SHF1 Hard Drive Cooler.
Store, Swap and Organize: Storage Accessories
Tom’s Hardware has a review of some storage accessories, including a dock which turns a standard 5.25″ drive bay into a hot-swap housing for four 2.5″ laptop drives.
Building your own Nas
WhatPC? brings a complete NAS building guide involving Mini-ITX motherboards, Promise hardware RAID, and NASLite commercial NAS operating system.
DIY RAID 5 NAS Server Worklog
This blog contains full instructions, including links and pictures of all hardware needed, to build a 1+ TB NAS. Windows XP is used as the software, while a Highpoint RocketRAID hardware RAID card takes care of the drives.
I did some research into building a network attached storage (NAS) server, and bought the appropriate hardware online. I’ll cover the steps I took to build a homebrew NAS server capable of offering 1Tb of redundant RAID 5 storage.
400GB Hard Disk Drives in RAID 0, RAID 5 and RAID 10 Arrays: Performance Analysis
X-bit labs benchmarks several different models of 400 GB SATA drives in four drive raid arrays. Tests are done using an Areca ARC1220 RAID controller, probably on Windows.
Build a Cheap and Fast RAID 5 NAS
SmallNetBuilder’s guide to building your own NAS device. In it they use a standard PC with an LSI Logic MegaRAID hardware-based RAID card. Included are step-by-step screenshots on setting up the RAID device using the MegaRAID’s bios, and benchmark of the machine while running Ubuntu Linux and FreeNAS.
DIY NAS Smackdown
SmallNetBuilder has benchmarks of file access to Ubuntu Linux and Clarkconnect over Samba. Included are instructions for setting up the software on both systems, and a guide to the hardware used in the project.
Western Digital WD740ADFD: Bottled Lightning
AnandTech reviews the latest update to Western Digital’s 74 GB 10,000 RPM hard drive.
Over the course of the last couple of years, the 8MB cache drive has been enhanced with minor revisions with one of the latest versions, WD740GD-00FLC0, receiving tweaks that significantly improved its performance in single-user applications.
Seagate Barracuda ES Hard Drive Review
The Tech Report reviews the Seagate Barracuda ES hard drive. This ES drive is the enterprise edition of the 7200.10. Differences include better performance when dealing with vibration, and a shorter error timeout period so the drive won’t drop out of RAID arrays.
Server Guide part 2: Affordable and Manageable Storage
AnandTech has a server guide for SCSI, SAS, and enterprise SATA hard drives.
Promise VTrak J300s Review
AnandTech reviews the Promise VTrak J300s SATA/SAS chassis. Up to four of these can be daisy chained to a nice SAS RAID card.