Replacing a disk drive

August 12, 2007 by
Filed under: Uncategorized 

The disk that was sick last week and I thought died on Tuesday night was briefly resurrected but bit the dust again yesterday, so I’m looking at options to replace it.

Unfortunately it’s not the one drive that’s still under warranty (no surprise – that’s usually how it goes) but it’s also not the biggest of my drives – it’s a 250Gb Maxtor DiamondMax10 SATA drive. It’s the only SATA drive I have, so I don’t even have a temporary replacement so I’ve shuffled some other stuff around to make space for the server backups that shared that drive with my MP3 collection.

So the big question is what to get to replace it? Obvious first thought is another 250+Gb SATA drive – BestBuy have a 500Gb Maxtor for $200. But maybe I should look to upgrade the features, not just the size, and there are some nice RAID/NAS boxes out there, e.g. Infrant’s ReadyNAS NV+ and Buffalo Tech’s TeraStation – not cheap but it would definitely keep our data safe.

I think as a compromise I’m going to get the Maxtor 500Gb drive and order a D-Link 2-Bay Network Storage Enclosure ($255 at NCIX), then at some point in the not-too-distant future I can get another 500Gb and set up RAID1 (mirroring). It looks like an equivalent (but more extensible) option from Infrant would be ~$1300!

Are there better alternatives which won’t break the bank?

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One Comment on Replacing a disk drive

  1. Trevor on Sun, 12th Aug 2007 12:35 pm

    2. Don’t go to Worst BUy for drives .. way too expensive. The only thing they’re good for is keyboard/mice and some networking stuff.

    PCCanada has 500gb Seagate SATA2 drives for $119.

    And I’m sure all the usual suspects competitors (Infonec, Logic, etc) will have similar pricing

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