Promise FastTrack and "twin" WD Expert 18 Gb drives.

[Patrick]

A few months ago I bought a Western Digital Expert 18 Gb 7200 RPM drive to use as my capture drive. My intention was to eventually buy a Promise FastTrack and a second Expert 18 GB drive to stripe to the first one I bought.

Problem... Western Digital apparently has already discontinued this drive and it seems to be unavailable here in Vancouver.

Question (1) - Does anyone in Canada (or the States) know where one of these drives would still be available?

Question (2) - If I can't get hold of a new one, does anyone out there who has upgraded to a larger drive want to sell me their "puny, old" Expert 18 Gb drive?

Question (3) - Is it absolutely necessary to get an identical drive for the second drive? I realize that a larger drive would be wasted because only 18 Gbs of it would be used in the raid array, but is that the only drawback?

[This_Idiot]

Hi Patrick,

The use of 2 identical drives is "only" a recommendation from Promise. It is possible to use drives of different sizes and/or manufacturers although (as you are aware), the array will be limited to double the capacity of the smaller drive. It also opens the door for possible compatibility issues.

Cheers

Chris

[Elie]

Hi guys,

I think your gonna run into some problems not only because the drives are different in size but also because the seek time's & max data through puts could vary.
I think if the drives are identicle in specs except for the size than as Chris mentioned it should be ok.

I'll check here in Toronto for the WD and I'll let you know.

Regards,
Elie

[Rick6612]

Hi Patrick,

I can tell you that I have been running my Promise Fast Trak for quite some time with one IBM 10 GB, 7200 RPM drive and one Maxtor 10 GB, 5400 RPM drive - and it has been working perfectly for me. Despite the difference in RPM, both drives individually were showing nearly identical transfer rates in HD Tach. Combined in a RAID, I get up to 27 MB/sec out of these drives!

Of course, this is no guarantee that a different combination of two non-identical drives is going to work.

And, I do happen to be using an 18 GB WD 7200 RPM drive for my boot drive now. I wasn't really thinking of selling it or replacing it any time soon, though. Of course, if the price is right...

Rick

[Joe DeFuria]

As luck would have it, I happen to own a WD 18 gig 7200 RPM drive.

I was planning on keeping it though. (When I upgrade my system, I was going to keep this as system drive, and I was going to buy a larger capacity drive for A/V.)

However, if you find yourself really in a bind, let me know, I'm sure we could work something out!

-- Joe

[Patrick]

Thanks guys. As usual, there are differences in opinion. I better research this some more before I make any final decisions.

Elie, don't go through a lot of trouble, but if you have a favorite source there for computer parts, it would be interesting to see what they say.

Rick and Joe, thanks for the offers fellas, but hang on to those hard drives for now. If it turns out that I can safely use a new 20.5 Gb WD Expert drive, I may go that route. With the price of the newer drives continuing to drop, it may not be to my advantage to buy the older 18 Gb Expert drive (whether it be new or used). It might also be difficult to agree on a fair price for a used drive. However, if it turns out that I absolutely need one of those drives, we may still be forced to work out a deal...

[Emmanuel]

I'm living in Montreal, Canada and I have this WD Expert 7200, 18Gb. I would sell it for a fair price...

[Laurie]

Hi Patrick,
Is this what you're looking for? http://209.53.43.3/aspert/caculate.a...36&cid=storage
A friend at work just gave me the link to Aspert today. I'll be in Vancouver next weekend to pick up all the parts to fill my new empty case (PIII 500, Asus P3bF and a G400 Max if I can find one).
Laurie (in Victoria)

[Patrick]

Wow, I've gotten responses from you guys here in this thread, I've gotten emails from more of you fellas coming over the net. I've gotten offers from people wanting to sell me their 18 Gb Experts, I've gotten offers from people wanting to buy my 18 Gb Expert. Some people think it's fine to mix the drives, others warn of possible problems....

You guys are so helpful that I'm more confused now than before!...

And now to top it off, an out of towner informs me that there may actually be some of these drives in Vancouver after all...

Thanks Laurie, that's definitely the right drive, but now after all my research, I'm beginning to wonder if I really need to stick to using the same drive. I've come to this conclusion for two reasons. First, from most reports, it's fine to mix the drives. Second, the prices of the newer, faster, larger drives are LESS than those listed for the 18 Gb Expert. It hardly seems worth while to pay MORE for an older, slower, smaller drive.

If someone really really wants to sell me their 18 Gb Expert for an attractive price, I'd still be interested, but if that doesn't happen, I'm starting to lean towards simply getting a newer model to use along with the 18 Gb Expert drive that I have.

Thanks to everyone who has responded, and by the way, more feedback on this topic is more than welcome...

[Emmanuel]

Or sell your current WD Expert and buy two shiny new top-of-the-line drives ;=)
Try www.storagereview.com for some more information about that.

[hippie91]

a reason you should buy the WD expert is that if your drive screwes up, it's the only brand of IDE drive that leaves a little extra space on the drive so it can remap and not have any bad sectors. if it didn't do it everything on both drives would get screwed up

[shaqdaddy]

heh, cant resist my 2cent...
like, really, i think the bottomline for hd's is that they just need to be fast enough to write whatever ya capturing to the hd. when ya editing, the speed factor tend to like depend on ya speed of the cpu can calcuate the funky effects... and basically, capturing rate tend to be no more than 5mbyte/s compressed. uncompressed video at reasonable rez is not exactly in our league. and like, any decent 5400rpm hd's can do 5mbyte/s realistically if ya aint doing anything disk intensive. so, like, my theory is, even your yester year 5400rpm screaming grannie hd would do. and you're running raid too.

btw, i got 2x 20gig 7200rpm maxtor...=) heh

shaqdaddy

[shaqdaddy]

point is, after that initial 5mbyte/s to get the job done, hd speed aint really that much of a performance booster... and i suck at jokes


shaqdaddy