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View Full Version : staples sale again


BuzzKillington
05-31-2009, 01:54 AM
Western Digital 500GB Network External Harddrive - $25.50
MAMEMAN
05-31-2009, 09:20 PM
awsome thanks!
Zephik
06-01-2009, 12:11 AM
Thats a pretty great deal! Even if its the Book ones, thats still worth the measly $25! The HDD inside alone is worth that much. Just invest into a better enclosure, the Book enclosure's have always been pretty buggy for me. Random system freezes while the E-HDD starts up randomly, the entire hard disk disappearing or failing randomly but when you use a different enclosure it works fine, etc.
Oneslowz28
06-01-2009, 11:52 AM
just my luck. Staples here is out.
Trace
06-01-2009, 03:24 PM
Looks like a cheap RAID setup to me :)
NightrainSrt4
06-01-2009, 11:12 PM
Is this like clearance YMMV? Printed anywhere? Either way, I will check the two local stores here. The target 1tb one's were all 139$, maybe I can find these this time. /crosses fingers
TheGreatSatan
06-01-2009, 11:25 PM
Damn! Good deal! +Rep!!
NightrainSrt4
06-02-2009, 11:23 AM
Went to both staples near me and none for me =(. It's okay. They just had the Network 1TB, no 500's here.
Luke122
06-02-2009, 11:28 AM
I was thinking about building a cheap RAID setup last night. 4 - 1tb drives + a PCI-E 4x SATA II Raid card would be under $700, and if you go Raid 5, you get speed + security.

I have no budget for this right now, but it's a cool thought nonetheless.
BuzzKillington
06-02-2009, 05:19 PM
RAID5 would be a nice setup. It's unfortunate there's not a 3rd slot in my laptop. I'm enjoying RAID0 though... I just have to backup every now and then, depending if anything new is important enough that I wouldn't want to lose it.

With RAID5 do you continue to increase speed with each drive? Would 4 drives in RAID5 be any faster than 3 drives in RAID5?
Luke122
06-02-2009, 06:36 PM
That's a good question, I'm not sure. Anyone here who can answer that?
NightrainSrt4
06-02-2009, 06:51 PM
AFAIK it really depends on what you are doing. Reads should keep getting faster, to a point, much like raid0. But writes, because of the parity calculations can be quite slow, even worse than just one of the drives on their own. Raid5 has good read speeds, but write speeds are lacking. But, the key here is in the redundancy, which is more important than the write speed if your just storing large amounts of data.

Edit: And you are really going to be limited to which controller card/raid card you are using, and its capabilities and processing power.

Edit2: I know Tom's isn't looked at in the best of light by many people, but here is a page with some simple graphs showing the scaling of Raid5 and Raid6. Toms Raid Scaling (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/RAID-SCALING-CHARTS,1662-6.html) You can see the speed difference compared to a single drive. In this case writes are better than the single drive, but the areca 1220 is quite a nice card, so that is quite understandable.