Upgrading my Data Drive

I was looking at a post by steviejones and it got me thinking about my situation so I thought I would put it to everyone for their opinion.

Currently I am running an EVO 840 512GB SSD as my boot drive and it is running fine and I still have nearly 200GB free but my data drive only has 150GB free and is filling up fast and because I intend to keep the computer for another 12 months I either have to start moving stuff off my data drive to a storage drive or increase my capacity.

The easiest option to increase would be to just install a bigger drive but the only HDD drive I could find that was bigger was the Western Digital Green Power WD20NPVX 2TB. Has anyone had experience with this drive and if so what were your impressions?

The second option would be to get a 512GB mSATA to use as a boot drive and another Hitachi 1TB Travelstar and raid them for a 2TB data drive. This would be the most time consuming because it would involve replacing my current mSATA and then cloning my current boot drive to the mSATA, then setting up the RAID and at the end I would have a 512 GB EVO sitting on my table not being used J

Cost wise the single Western Digital will cost approximately $250 - $300 and the mSATA + Hitachi would be approximately $350 so cost either way is not an issue. I am leaning towards the single 2TB WD as the simplest way to fix my problem but would like some feedback on the drive before I commit or an alternative that I am unaware of.

 

That WD 2TB drive is 15mm tall, are you sure that would even fit in the laptop?

There is a proper 9.5mm 2TB drive available and it's cheap ($127), I bought two if these and raided them for a 4TB internal solution. It's an external drive enclosure but you can just tear it apart and use the drive inside your laptop. If you're careful you can even reuse the enclosure for any old drives you have sitting around. Both of mine are being reused.

*oops I forgot the link

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FRHTSK4

 

You are right. That WD will not fit. After I made the post I started looking harder and found a site that mentioned that they were 15mm tall.

How have you set them up in your computer; are they in raid0 as a boot drive or are you using a mSATA as a boot? I am really curious as to how quickly they perform as compared to the Travelstars.

 

I can't give specifics without benchmarking them. Yes, they are in RAID 0 as my data drive so they work great for my data/music/movie drive in a NP9377 sager. I have RAID 0 mSATA as my boot and gaming drive and it has been flawless so far.

 

I have the same drives in my M18xR2 in RAID0.

Remember, these are running on SATA2 ports in my M18xR2. (My two SATA3 ports are being used by my SSD RAID0.)

 

I'm so temped to grab a couple of these. Moving 1.5tb's of data and spending my Maxwell money is stopping me lol.

 

I really need to up my storage too, I have filled 3tbs worth of hdd and a good chunk of my msata 256gb.

I really want to get 7 1tb msatas and 3 dual msata to 2.5 enclosures... make my self a 6tb raid + 1tb boot

But, I dont have 4,000$ laying around to spend on storage.

 

I honestly impressed how well HDD raid 0 with a SSD performs. I'm a big fan. I'd sooner upgrade my HDD drives than my SSD drives right now.

 

You have the same hdds that I have, the 7200rpm 1tb hgst drives are dreams.... thats what keeping me from going with any of the new 2tb drives.. too slow.

 

Yeah, it's a shame they don't have good speed options for 2TB yet. Faster 7200 RPM is awesome, but my Steam and Origin game libraries chewed up too much space for 2TB. I have plenty of room now with 4TB, and did it for only $200. For now, having to trade off faster in favor of bigger... cheap made it less painful. It doesn't matter a great deal since my boot volume is SSD RAID 0 and caching the 5400 RPM drives makes up for the slower "real" performance. For 5400 RPM drives attached to SATA2 3.0GB/s ports these are faster than I expected them to be.

 

Yeah the HGST's have been very solid, I'd recommend them to anyone. I've been waiting to see if Hitachi release a 2TB HDD since they are readily available here and I'm all for supporting a brand that's worked well. As for the speed of 7200 vs 5400rpm, to my surprise it's a little much of a muchness once a SSD cache drive has been thrown into the mix. I've sighted some of Mr Fox's benchmarks against my own similar setup and the speeds are extremely similar. I'll go even further and add to that, I've found there is little perceivable difference booting up a game with this setup vs a mighty SSD raid 0.
Had my mSata port been sata 3 I would have liked to had raid 0ed that with a SSHDD and gone for a greed 3 x 2TB raid 0 cached.

UPDATE

Thought I'd upload a benchmark. This is the 2 x HGST 1TB with a 64gb SSD cache

 

Yup, that's why Samsung RAPID is so effective. With memory caching the "perceived" read/write performance is a test of memory speed more than drive performance. I think the 5400 RPM drives might run a little cooler as well, which is a plus. You just have to remember to temporarily disable the caching when you are doing extreme overclocking because STOP errors and hard shutdowns cause all kinds of problems with data loss and corruption when you are running drives with memory caching. (This is one of the reasons I keep drive images backed up. I have needed to use them more than once because of this.)

 

Yikes I'll be sure to do that now. :thumbsup: I've been fortunate so far.

 

I have decided to go for the single 2TB drive and look to a possible raid setup next year when I update my computer. Thanks all for the great input.

 

There are instructions around on youtube and in the amazon reviews that give pointers how they come apart if you want to reuse them. Just take your time and you will be fine. The easiest thing to mess up is bending the metal top too much where it wont snap back together. If you aren't going to reuse them then just rip them apart lol.

 

Thanks for the feedback .... and the tip. I will try and open it up softly because a SATA 3 enclosure would come in handy

Am I the only one here that thinks it is just plain stupid that these 2TB drives are available but no one is selling them for installation in a computer? I mean what is Seagate thinking?

Thanks dajohu. I found the you tube video and it seems simple enough. Nothing me and my angle grinder can't manage.

 

I bought both of them without any enclosure. The funny part is they are usually cheaper in the external enclosure. I got lucky and found them cheaper as bare drives. Search eBay and Amazon for ST2000LM003 for bare drives.

 

That is interesting. I searched on eBay Australia and could not find any not in an enclosure. They may be available elsewhere but I always try and buy locally if I can. l have now bought three of them One I had purchased a couple of days ago as a backup drive and now another two; one for my computer and another for movies.

 

I'd recommend doing a software RAID 0 setup. Never had a moment's trouble with my RAID 0. Of course, I have filled up about 75% of my Data volume, but I can always pull out the 750GB WD Scorpio Blacks and replace them with larger drives in the future.

 

Radji, I have decided at the moment to just use the single 2TB drive for data and when I replace my computer next year set it up with a large mSATA as the boot and then RAID a couple of HDDs for the data.

I am curious about your statement to software RAID 0. How is that different to a normal RAID 0?

 

Well I got the HDD yesterday, used Norton Ghost to disk copy my data drive to the new portable drive and pulled the Seagate apart easily to remove the HDD. It only took 10 minutes to swap the new 2TB drive into my computer and turn it on and that is where things started to go a bit 'pear shaped'. All of the programs worked fine except the mSATA disk cache. Intel RST noticed the change and said the data drive was missing so I went into RST and selected Performance / Disassociate and I had to do a restart. During the next start it I got an error message saying Disk 2 (mSATA) was missing "something" (I can't remember the actual message) but I needed to select MBR. The computer did a restart and now I can't use the mSATA as a caching drive for the Data Drive.

How do I get the mSATA to cache my D Drive. The mSATA shows up in disk management as unallocated and it does not have a drive letter and it shows up in Intel RST but I do not have an accelerate button.

 

This was likely caused by not disabling the caching and marking the mSATA as available prior to changing the drives out.

Have you tried accessing the Intel RST Option ROM at POST (Ctrl+I) and confirming the mSATA is not listed as a cache drive there? If it is, remove the acceleration there.

Back in Windows, go to the Disk Management Utility, format and assign a drive letter to the mSATA. Then see if RST will let you create the new cache.

 

Ah dear the things we do sometimes

Okay - in IRST at post all three disks SSD, 2TB HDD and mSATA are listed as non-RAID. I have formatted the mSATA and assigned a drive letter but when I open RST there is no 'accelerate' tab and there are no drives listed under the 'Performance' tab.

 

I thought I would update this in case some else has the same problem in the future.

When I replaced my data drive I first used disk copy to copy my D Drive to the new (replacement) drive and then did the physical swap where I put the new drive into my computer and this is where my problem originated. It seems you can't accelerate a drive that already has data on it. To accelerate the D drive I disk copied the data again (all 1.5TB) to a portable drive then formatted both the mSATA and the D drive and on a restart was able to use IRST to accelerate the D Drive. Then copy the data back ..... again. The end result is that things are working the way I want them to and I have a 2 TB data drive