Areca

I am about two thirds done archiving my entire CD, DVD, and BD collection to network storage. I have been ripping on a part time basis for about 5 months, and so far I’ve ripped over 700 discs. I have considered archiving my media collection for some time, but just never got around to it. Recently our toddler discovered how to open discs and use them as toys, so storing the discs safely quickly became a priority. I’d like to give you some insight into what I’ve learned and what process I follow. ...

In my previous post I talked about Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB drive problems. In this post I present my test results for 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi. The test setup is the same as for the RE4-GP testing, except that I only tested 4 drives from each manufacturer. Unlike the enterprise class WD RE4-GP and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP drive is a desktop drive. The equivalent should have been a Seagate Constellation ES drive, but as far as I know the 2TB drives are not yet available. ...

In my previous two posts I described my research into the power saving features of various enterprise class RAID controllers. In this post I detail the results of my testing of the Western Digital RE4-GP enterprise class “green” drives when used with hardware RAID controllers from Adaptec, Areca, and LSI. To summarize, the RE4-GP drive fails with a variety of problems, Adaptec, Areca, and LSI acknowledge the problem and lay blame on WD, yet WD insists there are no known problems with the RE4-GP drives. ...