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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

2.5" Drive Recommendations for Red Station

WD Scorpio Black 750GB 7200rpm. $89 at NewEgg.
 
Same recommendation as Jeff. I also have some of the WD 1TB that also work well. Slower but bigger.
 
BTW, which is better. USB 3.0 or eSATA ?

I have seen some amazing performance on esata, but some people said usb 3.0 will eventually catch up. Any take on this ?

Rivai
 
The 9.5mm thick 1TB is the one to get. It has slower spindle speed than the 750GB unit, but greater areal density. Overall they're about the same speed. You get more capacity in the same space, but it's also $0.015 per GB more expensive than the 750GB. Hehe. Actually it's a good choice too I think. It's new to the market, so its reliability hasn't been tested as much as the 750GB unit. I say go for the 1TB, if you would prefer it.

The 12.5mm thick model is thicker because it uses an additional platter to achieve the capacity. It's noticeably slower all around. And with the 12.5mm thickness, I think it may even be a bit too thick to fit into the RED STATION. It's too thick to fit into a lot of notebook computers too. I think the RED STATION can accommodate a drive up to 12.0mm thick.

@ Rivai, eSATA is better, especially if we're talking about the latest v3 (6Gbps) variety. 3Gbps eSATA, which is typical, and what the RED SSD media and RED STATION modules are based on... is theoretically slower than USB3.0. However, USB3.0 rarely delivers on it's peak 4.8Gbps (SuperSpeed) bandwidth. It also has much higher latency and system overhead when compared to SATA.
 
Michael Kromschroeder said:
the 12.5 mm does fit in the RED station, I use them quite a bit.
Click to expand...

Cool, good to know. I knew the 12mm ones fit, with a little room to spare, had not tried a 12.5mm thick one.
 
You guys got Red Station 2.5"? I ordered one in December 2010 and still waiting....
 
Good post and info. Was wondering about your recommendation of the WD drive. Any thoughts on the Hitachi 2.5 drives? GIven past experience, not sure how much I trust WD drives long term, are the Scorpios built with professional use in mind?
Thanks
 
Pawel Achtel said:
You guys got Red Station 2.5"? I ordered one in December 2010 and still waiting....
Click to expand...

You better contact your bomb rep about that one... something not right there.

JW Lee said:
Good post and info. Was wondering about your recommendation of the WD drive. Any thoughts on the Hitachi 2.5 drives? GIven past experience, not sure how much I trust WD drives long term, are the Scorpios built with professional use in mind?
Thanks
Click to expand...

Hitachi are good too, but the WD black series are beating them in overall performance. Seem about equal as far as reliability. Both are excellent. Haven't had a 2.5" HDD from Hitachi or WD fail in the past couple years <knock wood>. You can't really go off past experiences with hard drives, all the major HDD manufacturers have had their share of models with problems, bad production years, that sort of thing. In the past 3 years I can think of specific models from Hitachi, Seagate and WD that are exceptional in all aspects and I can also think of models from all three that are equally terrible.

Actually, I take it back about not having a failure. I did have a 160GB Hitachi (Apple labeled) in a 2006 Macbook... That drive ate a nut last summer and I had to buy a new one of the same model and swap the platters into the new drive to recover the data. ...Because someone (mom) never made backups of all her family photos, even though I bought her a couple backup drives to use.
 
Elsie N said:
Anyone can figure out a use for this? It's called a RAID Caddy and sits on a PCI-e one lane slot. Says it can hold two notebook drives or two SSDs for storage. It's cheap enough, but I can't figure out an advantage to having one, unless being hooked directly into the PCI-e slot creates some speed advantage.

http://www.ziozone.net/p451/RAID-Caddy-for-Two-2.5"-SATA-6Gbps-Hard-Disk-Drives/product_info.html
Click to expand...

No real use for it at all... It's a single-lane device so in PCIe gen2 mode, it's fast enough to utilize two 3Gbps SSDs at full speed in most situations. But you can get that from regular SATA connections. This product is more for the blade server market or similar focused products where there may not be internal drive bays to use or SATA/SAS connections to connect drives to. But if you have the additional space next to a PCIe slot, you can use one of these. And it would be terribly inconvenient if you needed to swap out a drive or two -- having to open up the system, pull the PCIe card, open the drive housing... ugh.

A good alternative to this would be something like the Patriot-XL enclosure ( http://amzn.com/B002FZJ1K8 ). You can use them externally or install them into a 3.5" exposed drive bay and have access to both slots. I was using these to test 2.5" SSD's for some other purposes a while back. Kept two of them as they were handy for external compact RAID for notebooks. Also use one inside a PC workstation with two SSD's inside it in a RAID-0 as the system/apps drive.
 
Jeff, does this require two SATA cables, or does it have a backplane like SCSI that somehow interfaces with both drives?

This looks like it would be a compact way to hookup to a notebook computer with external eSATA and offload from the RED 1.8 inch dock. It could be setup to rollover to the second drive (I presume it will allow that).
 
Hey guys - can I ask what might seem a bone-headed Q? Slowly been collecting RED bits (for coming Scarlet) and frankly didn't "get" why the 2.5 RED STN existed. Until I stumbled on this thread.
So am I right that my currently-owned RED STN 1.8 would accept my RED SSD and its files are transferred onto a bare drive via the 2.5? This then being the off-load-in-the-field workflow? Or am I missing the point entirely? I bought the 1.8 for in-suite dubbing, but now....

thanks
Stu Aull
Alaska
 
It's just about options. The 2.5" Station module lets you easily use standard 2.5" SATA hard drives or SSD's for whatever you want. You can offload to them or use them for interim backups, handing off to someone else, whatever...
 
So I'll add another bonehead question ;) My assumption is that you still need a Mac (or PC) to manage the transfers from the 1.8 SSD Red Station to the 2.5" Red Station hard drive, right? So the 2.5 RS is just an external storage device for the media. And the 2.5" RS module the same physical footprint as the 1.8 RS module so they make a nice little stack with shared power from the Red Station base, right?

Right now we're using a G-tech RAID with an eSATA express 34 card in the Mac. How would the WD drive speed compare?

M
 
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