Old Disc Drives - SATA Hard Disk Drives

Synopsis

SATA drives are the last incarnation of magnetical drives. These drives have a high speed serial data communication interface. The data cable is thinner and allows for faster transfer rates than any other old parallel data cable.

Western Digital Red 2Tb

This is a modern disk drive, by all means. NAS storage, SATA-3 interface, and 64 Mb cache can only mean a true performer. Disregard the average access time. This hard disk drive outputs more than 140 Mb/sec in read mode. And the figures remain about the same in write mode.

Originally I wanted five of them for my LACIE 5big Network 2 NAS device. But I ended up buying only two. I have mounted them in RAID-1 which means that I can only use 2 Tb from a total of 4. I haven't managed to fill them up, yet. So there's no need to buy more for the moment. However, as technology advances, these could become scarce in a short while. I need to think about this and stock up. The problem is the cost. These don't come cheap and I have other priorities at the moment.

As of 2020 I have retired these disk drives from the NAS device. They have almost 65,500 operating hours, or about 8 years of 24/7 service. I sold one one of them and kept the other one. I am using it for occasional non-important data back-ups.

TECHNICAL DATA

CAPACITY: 2 Tb
ACTUATOR TYPE: VOICE COIL
DISCS: 2
MEDIA TYPE: THIN FILM
RECORDING METHOD: ?
SPINDLE SPEED: 5.400 rpm (IntelliPower)
INTERFACE: SATA-6
AVERAGE ACCESS: 22.71 ms

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