SPCR

Hey guys. Im planning on building myself a nice quiet server to house all my files and such, and was wondering what would be a good 2tb hard drive to get. I was thinking of something like
this.

I remembered there being problems with the drives a while back. Are the sector sizes not an issue anymore? Any defects or recalls, are they the best bang for your buck?

Also this is going to be for a server running windows server 2008 (or wtv the latest server version i can get from my schools MSNDAA)

Thanks!

For a home server build, the WD Green drives are just fine. I would recommend that you do not install Server 2008 R2 on the GP drive, but instead use it as storage. A small SSD will do miles for the performance of the server and you can get away with a 40GB SSD for the OS itself with room to spare.

As always, make sure you have proper backups.

Hey Nick, Thanks for the advice. I was planning on installing Windows server on a spare 320gb 7200rpm seagate. Wont be the fastest thing in the world, but should still be faster than the other drives. I've heard that the drives are slow. Im planning on putting everything in raid 5, and maybe using it to have torrents running, and access it to watch some videos in 1080p. Should that be any problem?

syrian_gamer wrote:I've heard that the drives are slow.

This depends on what you're measuring, and who it is saying that they're slow. Their random access times aren't anything to get excited about, in sequential read they can sustain 100MB/sec quite easily. So I wouldn't install a performance-critical database on one, but for streaming video they're fine.

Even torrenty/download stuff - unless you have gigabit broadband you're going to have other bottlenecks, don't forget that the OS will do a lot of write caching for you.