A look at refurbished 500GB seagate HD performance

[Babrbarossa]

I thought this article looked promising as I was hoping for an assesment of reliability, but they don't go into very rigorous tesing with them- they ultimately conclude that these should be used in conjunction or as a part of a good backup system if your data is crucial because shit happens.

One thing to keep in mind is that hard drive companies advertise their size with the idea of 1Mb = 1000Kb, same as 1Gb = 1000Mb, instead of the technically correct: 1Gb = 1024Mb. Hence a hard drive rated by them at 500Gb can only hold ~488Gb when we convert it to the actual size. When formatting to a file system you’ll see a further size reduction, hence when we formatted the RAID 0 stripe with 2x500Gb the actual size in Windows was not 1000Gb but 931Gb. For more information about actual HD space check this article.

HDD will fail as a matter of time; it is the level of data importance we perceive individually. Having a backup is the best route; it requires the discipline and careful selected easy to use software. Drive Image was my favorite until I discovered Acronis when I switched to Vista 6 months ago. With large capacity HDDs affordable pricing and low cost external enclosure, it makes keeping a backup copy of your valuable data offsite doable for many home users. So, keep those photos and video clip coming or bring them to your distant relatives and friends.

While this article does not focus on hard drive technology, it is the need for increasing capacity and where the capacity goes.... to my songs, video clips and photos. And, yes, there is another channel of sales and distribution of HDDs; thanks to the expanding DIY market, factory certified repair HDDs at reduced price is available. I am confident that this market will remain strong as demand warrants its existence. The Seagate drives tested today are priced at $99.5/piece, which is quite a bargain, as you can have a redundant 500Gb storage solution when combined with a RAID 1 config, a feature present on most new motherboards.


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