HDD Health

[LIQUIDHERION]

My concern today is hard drive integrity. We all know that the information held on our hard drives and for raptor and cheetah owners, the physical drive itself is very important to us. There fore I’m wondering what you do to ensure the best environment for your hard drives. My chief concern is the DATA on the hard drive but the 2 go hand in hand.
In terms of storage I considered water-cooled but the 1500 rpm 92 fan I use is quiet and keeps them at 30c or lower.

Also how well does windows “treat” your hard drives….Am I correct in thinking that Linux has a better mode of managing your drives. My thought was to have 2 desktops- 1 with a simple O/S hard drive windows and the second desktop would have all my other large capacity hard drives. I would network them and use the linux desktop to help ensure that my storage drives are kept in a optimal state. Because the information transferred through the network cat5 cable would be mp3 and mpeg only …speed would not be a concern. I archive all my data in a hard copy form (blank dvds) though I still want to make sure I give my HDD’s the best environment to serve their purpose.

Besides using registry fix-spy/mal/vir/programs-defrag-as well as the many hard drive monitoring programs. - S.M.A.R.T. What do you use to ensure the stability and long-term lifespan of your hard drives?

[crackhead2k]

large HDs run hotter.. I recommend getting western digital drives to store since they have a good reputation of not dying my raptors are 1 year old adn still running fine @ 35c >incase temp<
Consider this:
1. large hard drives run hot
2. fast rpm drives need a bit of active cooling if you want it to run 24/7 with reliability.
3. higherformance storage with high io use raid 0 but drives need to be identical.. tehse drives will kinda combine and form a single large storage... for example if you combine 4 500 gig drives on raid 0 ... in windows it will show up as a 2 tb Drive
4. high performance with redundancy - use raid 0 with a spare for backup
0+1 setup
5. For best reliability use raid 5 i uses multiple disks mut can stand disk failure but less disk space.

Windows will do just fine to manage your data....
My HDs copy data all the time to all my other computer by using mapped drives and I have not esperienced any failure yet needing any rebuilding of a raid array. Im using a gigbabit lan so it will transfer files faster.

If you are a heavy video multimedia downloader and a storage freak.. raid 0 on a seperate computer that act as a server for teh rest of your comuters will do just fine... occasional backups are recommended though.