Large hard disks - OSx86 experiences

[naquaada]

Let's open a little thread for hard disk experiences, especcially because there are very big harddisks available. Maybe somebody is using a Solid-State-HD.

I'm using mostly Samsung and have on my Asus A8N-SLI Premium (about 2006) no problems with it. I now got an Samsung HD103UJ and it works perfectly, no BIOS update or something neccessary. Because of the 32MB Cache it is a lot faster than the Samsung HD501LJ I'm using, but still slower than my old Maxtor ATA-133 HDs (7L300D or so) which I used in Tiger.

As I tried to format it with MBR boot block, I got an error when using only one partition, I had to split it in at least two partitions. But I'm using one big partition by using the GUID partition table. The useable size of the harddisk is 931,5 GB.

The price of the Samsung HD103UJ is low, about 80-90 Euro in Germany. For this you get a big, fast, quiet and even cool harddisk. After two hours of formatting (safe format with writing zeroes) I still could hold it without any problems. Try this with an Hitachi HD, I had one which was more than 50°C/122°F in less then 10 minutes!

Has anybody one of these Seagate 1.5 TB harddisks in use?

[nfoav8or]

I don't have the Seagate 1.5TB ... just the 1TB variant. I love it. I am filling it with my iTunes Library (Movies, Music, and TV Shows) and I still have room to back up other hard drives.

My other two drives are WD "Green" drives that I took out of the Fantom Drives external cases and replaced with my old internal ones. These things run so much quieter... its awesome.

No SSDs yet though. I'm still working my way through the 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB flash drives that I use to create new distro-like LIVE versions (that can also be written to CD later) as utility drives... I think for complete mobile computing, the SSD will go far with its rigidity compared to regular spindle HDs.

[lanceomni]

We use a pair of Buffalo 1TB drives at work for archiving images. Ive been impressed all the way around with these drives.

BUFFALO DriveStation Combo 4 HD-HS1.0TQ 1TB 7200 RPM 16MB
I pulled it apart. 12 screws just to read the label on the drive. I guess it beats having cheap plastic clips. Its an all aluminum and steel. The drive is a Samsung HD103US Sata 3.

Its got eSata, USB 2.0, 2x Firewire 400 and Firewire 800.
I wish it had a larger cache but this drive screams on our PPCs via FW800.

http://c1.neweggimages.com/productimage/22-165-097-01.jpg