What to Buy on Amazon : SSDs and HDDs - Updates

In a previous article about SSDs, I list out a few options of the possible value-for-money SSDs you can buy. The scene has changed somewhat. It looks like Crucial is going the offensive and keep lowering the pricing of their M500 series. As of today -

• Crucial M500 240GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal Solid State Drive CT240M500SSD1 - $114.99
• Crucial M500 480GB SATA 2.5-Inch 7mm (with 9.5mm adapter) Internal Solid State Drive CT480M500SSD1 - $229.99

If you check the camel3 price tracker data, you'll realized that the prices have been hovering around this level. I can only postulate that there is a somewhat downward price pressure on the SSDs. The Crucial M500s are good enough for your average workload and is now more affordable than ever. Also, there's no reason to buy locally anymore. If you went to the most recent show, you'll realize that the local pricing are a total rip-off.

Let's turn our attention to Intel. Previously, the Intel 530 Series 240GB 2.5-Inch Internal Solid State Drive (Reseller Kit) SSDSC2BW240A4K5 is attractive because of their strong 5-year international warranty. However, if you consider the price differential today, I will probably just go for the Crucial ones. Also, recently Intel introduced the 730 series as a brand new in-house designed enterprise-classed SSD. Now, before you rush out and buy this spanking new drive, do note that it draws power from the 12V rail, making it unsuitable for mobile use. Don't ever think of putting this drive in a USB-powered case. It will not work. In any case, I'm sure you'll be put-off by the initial pricing as well.

Lastly, Seagate NAS HDD 4TB SATA 6GB NCQ 64 MB Cache Bare Drive ST4000VN000 is now at it's lowest price point of $169.99. It's a pretty good deal at this price point. My guess is that it's priced similarly to the standard 5900RPM 4TB locally.

Amazon Prime Price Hike

OK, for the very first time, Amazon is hiking the Prime membership fees from $79 to $99. I have a write-up on what it is. At this juncture, you can start your free Prime Membership Trial to 'lock' in the old price of $79 for the first year. Do remember to cancel the auto-renewal if you don't have the intention to pay.

Is it still worthwhile to sign up at the new price? Well, it very much depends on what you're going to do. Personally, if the Prime video library agrees with you, it's probably ok to sign up. Even so if you like the free 2-day shipping.

Good luck.

Current Deals : 2nd Mar - Lord of the Rings BD Set

It's been a while since The Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring / The Two Towers / The Return of the King Extended Editions) [Blu-ray] had a price drop. As of today, the price is $44.96 for the one sold by Amazon. However, it is temporarily out of stock so you have to wait.

I spotted this compilation The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music going for $3.99. I happen to have this and it's good value at this price. It contains most of the more well-known pieces and it's performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. For casual classical listeners like me, you should add this to your collection.

While I'm at it, I noticed there's a recent release by the Bach Guild, Little Big Box of Romance, for the literally next to nothing price of $0.99. Then again, most of their compilations are being offered at this price. I have personally bought quite a number of their releases. For $0.99, you can't really fault it for anything.

Lastly, from now till 10th March, All You Need Classics is offering their releases at $0.99 as well. I haven't tried these so I don't know how they fare. Then again, it's $0.99...

Happy downloading!

On the FileServer : The Disk Drives

In the first part of the series, I briefly touched on some of the hardware that are either necessary or good to have in order to build your own NAS. Right now, I'll go on to talk about the disk drives.

There are many types of disk drives (appreviated HDD from now on) and are mainly differentiated by the following parameters -

• Form Factor. Either 3.5" or 2.5"
• Interface Type. Either SATA or SAS.
• Spindle Speed. How fast the disk platters spin.
• Capacity. How much the disk can store.

Form Factor

This mainly tells you how big (or small) the disks physically are. Most desktops use the 3.5" form factor. If you opt for this, you don't have any other physical parameters to worry about. All 3.5" HDD comes in the same height of 1" today.

If, for some reason, you want to use 2.5" HDD, then you need to be aware that they comes in several different heights. The most common today will be 7mm and 9.5mm. A few high capacity ones come in 12.5mm height. Lastly, some enterprise drives, such as the Seagate Constellation 2 series comes in at 15mm height. You have to take note of the height, especially if you want to use a hot-swap cage.

You might have also heard of 1.8" HDD, primarily manufactured by Toshiba. I'll suggest you leave these alone.

Interface Type

This describes the interface the HDD supports when connecting to your computer. The mainstream today is Serial ATA (SATA). We are at its 3rd revision, supporting 6Gbps link speed. Version 2 supports 3Gbps and the first version does 1.5Gbps. The later versions are usually backward compatible with earlier versions.

HDD today are mostly SATA3, supporting 6Gbps link speed. If you have the unfortunate task of connecting these HDDs to a computer that only supports SATA2 running at 3Gbps, your HDD will then run at the same link speed of 3Gbps. However, you don't have to lose sleep over this. 3Gbps is the link speed between your computer and your HDD. None of the HDDs sold today is able to saturate a single SATA2 link. The only devices that can transfer at more than 3Gbps today are SSDs, SAS/SATA expanders and SATA port multipliers. If you don't know what these are, it's fine as they are not that common and their use is pretty specialized.

You will also have to think about how your computer can support these HDDs. When the SATA standard was first ratified (sometime in the early part of the 21st century), there is a need to slowly transit from the older ATA/ATAPI/IDE/EIDE interface to this new one. As a result, most computer during that time run your SATA interface in the dreaded 'IDE' mode. This basically means the computer is still speaking the older language of IDE despite the HDD is using the new connector. You can find out which mode your computer is using by going into the BIOS and see what mode the BIOS is using. If it's using 'IDE', then you're being short changed. If it's running in 'AHCI' mode, then you're all good. You might also see 'RAID', which means your controller is capable of running some form of RAID. All the newer Intel ICH can do RAID.

The other type of interface which you might see is Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). This is mostly reserved for enterprise deployment in servers. The link speed today is also 6Gbps. I wouldn't recommend this for your home setup since the feature might not benefit your type of workload at home.

Do note that SAS is considered a superset of SATA. If you have a SAS controller, you can connect both SAS and/or SATA drives to it. However, if you have a SATA controller (like most Intel based consumer motherboards), you will not be able to connect a SAS drive to it.

Spindle Speed

This describes how fast the disk platters are spinning. The faster it spins, the higher the performance of the HDD. This is the direct result of the fact that a faster spinning disk takes a shorter time to get to the data. This is known as the disk latency. The lower it is, the better.

Mainstream HDDs today sold over the counter spins at 7200 revolutions per minute (RPM). Some higher performance consumer class drives and entry level enterprise drives spin at 10000 (10k) RPMs. The highest performance drives spin at 15000 (15k) RPMs. You are not likely to see 15k RPM drives sold over the counter.

That said, there are some drives that spin at 5400/5900 RPMs. These are slower than the mainstreams. However, they have 2 clear advantages. First, since they spin slower, they make less noise and vibrate less generally. Second, they almost always consume less electricity.

Capacity

This is the easiest to understand. The highest capacity today (Feb 2014) is 4TB. Only 3.5" form factor drives is capable. 2.5" drives maxed out at 2TB. Also, the higher the spinning speed, the lower the maximum capacity available. You won't find any 2TB 15k RPM Cheetahs anytime soon, maybe never.

OK, so what's best? As a NAS, I want it to be as cost effective as possible. That means I go for the best GB/$ metric. I don't care if the drive spins at 5400 or 7200 RPM. But usually the faster the HDD spins, the more costly it will be. These are the drives I use personally

• WD Green 2 TB Desktop Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD20EZRX
• Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB SATA III 64 MB Cache Bare/OEM Desktop Hard Drive - WD30EZRX
• Seagate Desktop HDD 4 TB SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST4000DM000

So basically, I picked big capacity drives. The 3TB and 4TB are at the best price sweet spot today. Lastly, I'll like to touch a little bit about the WD Red (WD Red 3 TB NAS Hard Drive: 3.5 Inch, SATA III, 64 MB Cache - WD30EFRX) and Seagate NAS ( Seagate NAS HDD 4TB SATA 6GB NCQ 64 MB Cache Bare Drive ST4000VN000) drives. What set these apart? Apparently, these drives are tested to run correctly in those off-the-shelf NAS products (like Synology DiskStation 4-Bay (Diskless) Network Attached Storage DS412+ (Black)). One of the feature most advertised is that it has a shorter error timeout. The technical intricacies of this is quite complex and I won't go into the details. Suffice to say that if your normal consumer drives developed a problem, say a bad sector, and the OS attempts to read this sector, it will take a very long time (sometimes forever) for the drive to come back and say 'Sorry, I tried but I couldn't read the data.' This cause mayhem in RAID controllers and sensitive OS. I have had Windows Server totally crashed when it attempts to read a flaky consumer class drive.

Happy hunting. In the next part, I'll talk about the software that links all these parts together.