OT: DVD+R DL

[Fairlight]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 11:05:37PM -0500, Richard Kreiss thus spoke:
> Mark,
> 
> The WD Blue 500GB m.2 2280 SSD cost me 145.99  this is a big price drop
> since last year.

But...but...it's...  It's Blue.  :b~~~

It'll work for business or just personal stuff.  You wouldn't catch me
willingly not buying Black.  :)

I dropped a Black 2TB HD on Thanksgiving three years ago, and my integrator
accidentally replaced it with a Green 2TB, figuring WD, 2TB, close enough.
I was ticked, especially since there -is- a huge performance difference,
not to mention the performance difference.  (Never try streaming 1080p
video on a Green and expect to use the drive for anything else at the same
time, is all I'm sayin'...)

> The 4 TB Toshiba with a 128 Mb buffer, 7,200 RPM cost $119.00 .  I remember
> paying about $650.oo for a 15 MB hard drive.  Storage has gotten much
> cheaper.

I am -very- picky about my hard drives.  For anything
server/desktop-related, I only buy WD.  Used to be Maxtor, before Seagate
bought them.  I don't trust Seagate consumer lines (or pro lines, actually)
as far as I can throw 'em, so I dropped Maxtor for WD.

WD -used- to suck in the 386 days.  These days, they're better than Seagate
ever was, as far as hard drives go.  Don't start me on their NAS units
(avoid EX2/EX4 like the plague; they -suck- like an ElectroLux).  But WD
does overall make good drives, and I've only ever had one die an unnatural
death.  Most vastly outlast their expected lifespan (2-4yrs beyond the 5yr
warranty).

In a laptop, well, you get what you get.  :b~~~

For external storage...  I have two Seagates, one for each of two gaming
consoles.  Both are 2TB models.  The -only- reason I have them is because
they're more readily available, they're cheap, and re-loading games onto a
console isn't a huge hardship, especially on XBox One.  (Nintendo's
downloads are throttled, as are PlayStation's, so that's a bit less handy,
but still, not the end of the world compared to my elaborate server/desktop
setup, where it's not what I consider 'usable' for about four months' worth
of installation and configuration, because I have so much stuff between
music, productivity, and gaming.)

The thing about Seagate is that I once got a twin set of Medalist Pro Fast
SCSI-2 drives.  They died within about two days.  I spent the next month
going through pairs of replacements.  I went through 14 drives total before
getting two working ones.  Halfway through that, they bumped me to
Barracuda, and they were -still- showing up DOA, died within a day, or were
not usable. 

One pair whined like a 747 taking off.  They had a cracked accoustic
casing.  Another pair I put in...it was a twin bedroom converted into one
bedroom, okay?  I had my server on one of those thick particle-board tables
you'd have at a church bake sale or in a school gym at a science fair,
right?  So the bed is across this double bedroom, and I turned on the
server, walked across the room, and I could feel the drives vibrating
-through- the mattress, across the room!  SLIGHTLY out of whack.

The thing about Seagate is that you can buy a brand new drive, find it
defective, and they replace it with a refurb no matter what.  You get zero
say in the matter.  I do -not- like the way they play ball that way, on top
of their questionable QA.  And the refurb factory is in Ireland.  I daresay
I believe that the refurb factory must be across the street from a pub at
which the employees enjoy a few swift pints over lunch, based on the
quality of the replacement units I 'enjoyed'.

I'm done with Seagate for anything that's not tossaway, unless a laptop
comes with one.  If I can avoid it reasonably, I will.

> As for USB 3 memory sticks, these prices have also dropped.  Most of the
> time when I see smallish units they are in multi-packs.  I have no use for
> them except if I want to send someone a few files that are too big to email
> even when zipped.

They're really useful for bootable media.  I think you need at least a 2GB
unit, but I couldn't find smaller than 8 anymore...at least not locally.
Much handier than a scratchable disc, and they're not susceptible to EM
fields.

> Micro Center is selling the 850 EVO series 500 Gb SSD for 169.99 and the 1TB
> for 329.99.  these are SATA drives which don't have the same speed ratings
> as the M.2 2280 drives.

Yeah, that's the right price for the 850 EVO.  The Pro is back up to $449,
I see.  Glad I hit a sale.  :)

> My next purchase will be a NAS.  That is an interesting animal. I really
> only need it for backup purposes for my clients programs and data and some
> of my stuff.  Deciding on what to purchase will take some research to come
> up with what is cost effective, durable and fast enough on the write end.

Avoid the WD EX2/EX4 line.  You will have nothing but pain, suffering, and
torment.  Trust me on this.  I spent two years getting to the point of
finding out that it was really the EX2 line, not anything about Acronis
True Image, despite both companies pointing at each other.  I went through
-three- EX2 housings, two of them with the drives.  I had to have WD data
salvage the first one.  I -still- do not have the data off of the last unit
they provided, because the unit was so unreliable.  Horrible, horrible,
-horrible- units.

I moved to a Netgear ReadyNAS 212, with twin WD Red 5TB drives in it.  I'm
running RAID 0 (intentionally) for the space.  The odds of me dropping both
the server -and- the NAS simultaneously are so slim, I feel comfortable
with it.  I'll bump the drives up within about four years, both for
capacity and preemptively before failure.  I've zero issues with the RN212,
and would actually recommend it as an affordable unit.  I'd say bring your
own drives and buy the bare unit, though.

For backup software, I've dropped Acronis.  Their software is rubbish.  It
can't even give you an ETA for 45min+ any time you start the backup, or
bring up the window again if you've closed it.  It's -horribly- written,
and it's extremely sloppy.  After my arguments with Acronis, I did a lot
of demos of damned near anything halfway reasonable, and I settled into
Macrium Reflect.  I -love- Reflect.  It works, it's stable, and while it's
not as idiotically dumbed down for end-users, it's also nowhere near as
sloppily written.  You can actually tell what it's doing.  Additionally,
it gave me a -great- experience when I just migrated drives.  I was able
to clone all three (2 spinners, 1 SSD) one by one in an external USB3
enclosure over the course of about 12 hours, and then all I had to do was
physically replace the drives.  The physical replacement was the only part
during which my system was down.  That lasted about an hour because I had
to fight with my server's location on the table against the wall (I needed
access to the back, popped the door off the far side of the Cosmos II, but
had issues getting it back onto its hinge rail due to the proximity to the
wall).  It's running so many cables everywhere, I didn't want to move it.
:) The cloning and resizing was all done live because Reflect uses VSS.
Much better experience than using CloneZilla + GParted.  The -only- issue I
had was that I assumed "auto" for the target drive letter meant that it
would use the same letter as the source.  It does not.  It uses the next
available letter at the time you start the clone.  Select your destination
volume letter manually.  That would have saved me an hour worth of reboots
and massaging, but it was basically a documentation vs perception issue.
The docs could have been slightly more thorough in that area, but no hard
feelings.  Other than that, it was as smooth as you'd want.

(I'd like buy a paragraph break, Pat.)

Also, Reflect's bootable recovery media actually -works-, unlike Acronis'.
I could never get Acronis' bootable media to do anything useful, even
during the brief periods the WD EX2 was lucid.  Reflect is awesome about
picking up your drivers, too, including the ones running my extra SATA-3
ports.  It even picks up the ASUS driver for the Rampage IV Black board's
802.11ac, although WinPE is incapable of using WiFi at all.  The driver
detection and bundling is awesome compared to every alternative I tried.

I swear by Macrium Reflect.  I swear -at- Acronis. 

YMMV, but those are my experiences.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.