Do It Yourself NAS

George Ou over at ZDNet.com has a blog post about adding a good chunk of storage to his computer. All that is needed to duplicate this is 3 free drive bays, 5 free SATA ports, and a power supply that can handle the extra 150 watts while the drives spin up.

Fast forward 15 years later, and I just bought 2.5 terabytes of hot-swappable SATA-300 storage for just under $730.

X-bit labs benchmarks eleven 160 GB hard drives.

Tom’s Hardware benchmarks a couple of 7200 drives in RAID 0 and compares them against the 10,000 RPM Western Digital Raptor. For fun they put the Raptor in a RAID 0 array too.

Tom’s Hardware takes a look at hard drive performance, focusing mainly on 7200 RPM drives.

This article will give you an overview of all parameters that are relevant to hard drive performance. These are the drive form factor, platter diameter and platter count, recording technology and data density, rotation speed and access time, interface and buffer memory.

X-bit labs benchmarks several different models of 400 GB SATA drives in four drive raid arrays. Tests are done using an Areca ARC1220 RAID controller, probably on Windows.

AnandTech reviews the latest update to Western Digital’s 74 GB 10,000 RPM hard drive.

Over the course of the last couple of years, the 8MB cache drive has been enhanced with minor revisions with one of the latest versions, WD740GD-00FLC0, receiving tweaks that significantly improved its performance in single-user applications.

The Tech Report reviews the Seagate Barracuda ES hard drive. This ES drive is the enterprise edition of the 7200.10. Differences include better performance when dealing with vibration, and a shorter error timeout period so the drive won’t drop out of RAID arrays.

AnandTech has a server guide for SCSI, SAS, and enterprise SATA hard drives.