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Safe to buy 4tb drive?

J

JES

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 13, 2003
73
3
Hi All,

Does anyone have the new Seagate or Hitachi 4tb drives? The size is very attractive for a media server setup but I worry about being an unwitting beta tester since there are so new. I'm leaning toward the Seagate for the extra cache.

Thoughts? Is it a lot safer to stick with 3tb for now?

Ps--search is disabled so apologies if this was covered recently.
 
JES said:
Hi All,

Does anyone have the new Seagate or Hitachi 4tb drives? The size is very attractive for a media server setup but I worry about being an unwitting beta tester since there are so new. I'm leaning toward the Seagate for the extra cache.

Thoughts? Is it a lot safer to stick with 3tb for now?

Ps--search is disabled so apologies if this was covered recently.
Click to expand...

"Safe" yes. But like all new technology we do not know of longevity. I recently had to decide this same thing and I went with 2x 2tb instead of 4tb HD.
 
JES said:
Hi All,

Does anyone have the new Seagate or Hitachi 4tb drives? The size is very attractive for a media server setup but I worry about being an unwitting beta tester since there are so new. I'm leaning toward the Seagate for the extra cache.

Thoughts? Is it a lot safer to stick with 3tb for now?

Ps--search is disabled so apologies if this was covered recently.
Click to expand...

The only problem I see with a 4TB drive is what will you back that up to? These are not performance drives either @ 5400 RPM.
 
I picked up two of the GoFlex drives, no issues as of yet. I'm "mirroring" them just in case.

Long term hope to use them to back up my NAS, but for now they are holding ISO's of my DVD collection.
 
Just picked up 2 Seagate 4TB GoFlex drives, opened up the enclosures and popped them into my Drobo. No problems so far. Amazon is selling them for $230, which is way less than the bare drive. They're kind of a bitch to open, but not terribly difficult. I wouldn't worry so much about a performance hit on speed since the platter density is so great.
 
MovieCutter said:
Just picked up 2 Seagate 4TB GoFlex drives, opened up the enclosures and popped them into my Drobo. No problems so far. Amazon is selling them for $230, which is way less than the bare drive. They're kind of a bitch to open, but not terribly difficult. I wouldn't worry so much about a performance hit on speed since the platter density is so great.
Click to expand...

Thanks for posting, I am not the thread starter but this is the info that I was interested in seeing if someone knew.

For performance I suspect a pair of WD 2TB blacks in a RAID enclosure is still the way to go, but for a redundant backup drive, the 4TB GoFlex sounds like it might be a good fit.
 
Thanks for all the replies. I'm setting up a home media server (and a backup). I could probably get by with 3TB for now but by the time we get everything on it, it will already be 50% full or more. So I don't think I need serious performance, but I do want durability. Which is why I was worried since the 4TB drives are still essentially in public beta even though it's not called that.
 
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