toronado455: "The drives were visible in the BIOS of the add-in card, but beyond that nothing worked. Windows actually could see the drives but couldn't do anything with them - couldn't partition, format or mount them - nothing." Where did you see them? Device Manager? Or Disk Management? If it was...

"Yes, I would need the 44-pin to (40-pin + power) adapter, but those are fairly straight-forward pin to pin physical conversions with out any drivers needed to use, correct?" Indeed correct. But there's always possible 48bit LBA problems (i.e 137GB (128GiB) barrier) with any old motherboard. I have...

- PATA 3.5" are 500GB max. No technical reason, it just seems more like a conspiracy that no manufacturer seems to offer bigger. - these 500-giggers may be of old tech... that is up to 3 platters instead of 1. PATA -> SATA transition happened when 500GB drives were among the biggest drives available...

A word of caution on WD20EARS (or moar liek OVER 9000 words, amirite?) WD20EARS... that's 64MB cache drive... 4th generation GreenPower. I was fourth, because while it probably has the same number of platters as WD20EADS, it uses completely different low-level formatting. It's the first mass-produc...

I don't know if Pipeline is affected by potential issues arising from streaming feature set. Pipelines most likely have the feature set like AV-GP and Cinemastar but it might be disabled by default. And who knows AV-GP and Cinemastar might also have it disabled by default as well (which means there'...

infrasonic: "I was wondering about noise comparisons between a 2.5" laptop drive (i.e. WD10TEVT) and a 3.5" standard size drive (i.e. WD10EVDS). Both are 1TB drives, but (naturally) the laptop drive costs more than a 3.5" 2TB drive (WD20EVDS) also." WD10EVDS is Western Digital's Audio-Visual GreenP...

God damn time to go beyond 512 byte sectors! If it was just HDD manufacturers, they would have done it ages ago, but they had to respect the customers, the OEMs, which obviously didn't want to make any architecture changes to their own products. Now, at 2 TiB barrier (current biggest HDDs 2 TB = 1,...

From personal experience, 1.0TB (2-platter) Samsung F2 Ecogreens have quite a bit quieter and smoother idle than WD10EACS-00ZJB0 (4-platter), WD10EACS-00D6B0 (3-platter), WD20EADS-00S2B0 (4-platter). Granted, it's an unfair comparison, with Samsung having less platters than any of my other high-cap ...

Holy FFFF.... I have to take that back. I was looking for "OEM specs" for 7K2000 but apparently they call the full specs documentation by name "7K2000_A7K2000_Spec_r1.0.pdf" now. No wonder I missed it since usually they make the full specs available to all public no sooner than half a year after rel...

"Why speculate when Hitachi has quite good documentation on their drives available for download? The 7K2000 is indeed a 5-platter drive." Is that stated in some document? It used to be but for some time, number of platters and heads haven't been publicized. From power consumption and noise specs, i...

It's 5-platter quite likely. It does have fast sequential transfer rates like 500GB/pl drives but this drive has very low access times as well, which would imply that it uses linear densities typical for 500GB/pl but with lower track densities, since it reduces seek settling time (speeds up seeks). ...

"The disk measured 82.4 F under light load, and 85.9 F under heavy load. (SMART said 26 C and 28 C, both lower by 2 C) So in my system, with very little airflow, under heavy load, a 500GB F2 runs 8.6 C above room ambient." Are you claiming 8.6 degrees C = 3 degrees C ? You just proved SMART tempetu...

sloeer: "Are any of the 5400rpm F2 or 7200rpm F3 going to be heard over my intel stock cpu fan? (the case is an Antec P150 with some rubber standoffs for disk drives)" Rubber standoffs are too hard to properly decouple a HDD. As fot Intel sock HSFs, I only have experience of some P4 and early C2Q. ...

Nice short tutorial. "Now my only problem is that using SpeenFan it triggers SMART values, which spins up the drive even if the partition is unmounted. I need to solve that" That's the easy part. Just disable temperature monitoring of selected hard drives. Temperature monitoring of HDDs is performed...

A couple of? Why do you need several? More than one computer? If you have only one computer, buy a single 1000GB instead. It's better than having two 500-giggers. Except for performance. And if performance was not an issue with Barracuda IV, it would not be an issue with F2 Ecogreen, even if there w...

toronado455: "F3 vs F2... what exactly, specifically is the noise that is worse on the F3?" Idle noise is much worse on Spinpoint (F1 (333GB/platter) or F3 (500GB/pl)) than Ecogreen (F1 (333GB/pl) or F2 (500GB/pl)). F2 and F3 are SAME generation of HDD with different spin rates. Like F1 Spinpoint (...

Just curious: which store? Since usually Hitachi HDDs have cost extra here in Finland. I'm not in a hurry to expand my capacity (just swapped a dead 1TB Greenpower to 2TB Greenpower so I'll be happy with my capacity for a while) and I know for sure that 5-platter 7200rpm certainly cannot be comparab...

Backing up 256 at speed of USB2.0 (usually around 25...30 MB/s practical usable bandwidth of 60 MB/s theoretical, but I've seen some reach 35 MB/s and some others less than 20 MB/s (what a waste!)) will take 2 and half hours, not "overnight". If Kingston takes overnight, it ain't bottlenecking even ...

cmthomson: "The Samsung F2 500GB SATA drives (HD502HI) are ... Probably a bit slower than your old Baracudas, but not much." Nope. I don't think so. Samsung F1 Spinpoint (7200rpm, 333GB/pl) has same transfer rate as Samsung F2 Ecogreen (5400rpm, 500GB/pl). 1st generation WD Greenpower (5400rpm, 250...

Potential condensation problems: - You have a HDD indoors, use it normally. The relative moisture inside is well within acceptable limits of 5-95% as HDDs are typically rated. You power it down, transport it outdoors where it's 20 deg C below zero. Air may be dry as hell, but the air is pretty much ...

Lol at recommendations: 7200rpm desktops and 5400rpm laptops mixed. Where's the middle ground? Oh yeah, one 7200rpm laptop too. Why pay extra when you can get same performance with smaller price or higher capacity with 5400rpm desktop? If you need capacity, Greenpower or Ecogreen is the way to go. I...

One of my WD went south at 360000 cycles. Too many (1265) bad sectors that appeared out of nowhere suddenly. Haven't grown in number since but because it fails SMART, the HDD has probably entered some failsafe mode and write speeds have dropped to below 10MB/s. It probably verifies each write which ...

"Mine never burst into flames." I've never had any computer component burst into flames. This means that I could have had each of my computer (half a dozen so far, including retired ones) in a cardboard box, and NONE of them would have burst into flames. True story. Yet, when the first one does bur...

How about using a big fan for case intake, and remove all exhaust fans from the case AND your PSU? Duct tape all exhaust opening close too. That way you would cool the entire case with single Nexus Real Silent 120mm or Scythe S-FLEX or Noctua NF-P12 (high-pressure variant as you're pushing air throu...

I don't think the scalability is the biggest problem but it would be a problem as well. Even with full-sized Dyson "bladeless" (has blades but they are hidden) has a relatively slow sized high-rpm fan hidden inside. Scaling down would make the internal fan ridiculously small. But the bigger problem ...

Thank you for the power consumption data, bircoe. I was aware of the fact that stand-by doesn't save electricity. I guess the idea is that it disables the HDMI interface so if you have connected WDTV to a desktop computer monitor instead of TV, the monitor goes into stand-by as there's no input to m...

"I need something that will be able to use linux easy probably" Well, this thread was about WDTV (and to a lesser extent other devices with same purpose). "a netbook using Tegra 650 that from my knowledge is not available for now" Why bring up a product that does not exist as an alternative to WDTV...

If you have a computer already, any kind of computer, why not try WDTV? It does not have all the functionality of a HTPC due to lack of CPU power, keyboard and mouse, but it does what it's designed to do pretty darn well. WDTV is basically a small computer with a remote control as only input device....

electrodacus, but again, if you run stuff on generic OS, you need proper players. Granted, vast majority of Tegra based products will come with some player. If the OS of Tegra system doesn't prevent installing of "non-approved" software to run on top of it then it not a futile attempt to try make it...

WDTV is not a replacement for a computer but neither is Tegra 650. Try running XP on it, doing video-editing on Sony Vegas. Not much use for CAD, compiling programs or image editing either, not to mention occasional gaming. And as Tegra doesn't quite qualify as a normal computer but rather just a co...