Staples is offering a 500GB SATA internal hard drive for 5$ less than
a 1TB SATA drive. Both Seagate and 7200RPM. I wonder - is a more
tightly-compressed larger hard drive more likely to fail? Seems
likely to me, so I am asking. If so, then the larger drive may not be
the better choice?
Thanks
Grumpy
Pull the data sheet, and examine the construction.
The datasheet will tell you "platters" and "surfaces".
A 4TB drive might be 4 platters and 8 surfaces, with
1TB platters for each. Platters are double sided, and
you can get a half-capacity solution from a platter,
by ignoring one side of it. That side will still be
polished, and there will still be a head floating
over top of it (for balance), but they don't have to
use the electrical signal coming from it. If the platters
after polishing, only one side is "good", then they can
make a 500GB drive with the good side.
So in fact, there might be no different in the "compression"
at all. And studying the data sheet for the thing
can give a few hints.
What is more important, is to read the reviews on
Newegg or Amazon, looking for "issues" with the design.
The last Seagate I bought, the issue at the time was
certain models that were spinning down four hundred times
per day. If a drive has obnoxious behavior, and the
firmware upgrade doesn't properly fix the issue, then
I'll not be buying it. And the reviews are important,
when sniffing for trouble. "Compression" is further
down the list of things to worry about. If a drive model
has a high rate of "DOA" reports, then that counts for
a lot. There's a lot of things to check, before a purchase.
So when you see the drive on Staples, take the model number
and look it up on Newegg and Amazon. You might also want
to do a site search against, say, forums.seagate.com, and
see if there are any whiny customers over there raising
a stink. As well as pulling a datasheet, to see how
it is put together.
For example, in your search engine, you could try -
site:forums.seagate.com <seagate_model_number> DOA spindown ...
The "site:" field allows you to focus the search on
just the one website.
Paul
