Something unexpected happened with the Toshiba DT01ACA300 drive

I had two 3TB drives in my PC before migrating the system to the Silverstone SG13. The SG13 only has room for only one of them so I removed the Western Digital Caviar Green 3TB drive because it is the slower of the two. I originally planned to buy an enclosure for it and transform it into a portable hard drive. However I couldn't find a decent one that doesn't scorch the drive inside so I decided to sell it and buy an off the shelf external drive. (Note: I have a SATA to USB converter cable but it is not an elegant solution.)

I exhibited it on Rakuten Auctions and last Tuesday someone bid for it. Now I have to send the drive to him before next Tuesday and I started searching for portable drives. I did find some reasonably priced drives but unfortunately none of them came with the 240V support that I would require when I go back to Sri Lanka.

For a second it felt as if proceeding to sell this drive was a mistake. I can of course refrain from sending him the drive but I would receive negative points and would cripple my chances of selling something in the future. So I am going to send it after all. That’s not going to change.

Ideally, I don’t want any HDDs in my PC. I plan to equip it will only SSDs in the future but that would take many years. Technically though, I can do it right now too, because if I remove the Toshiba DT01ACA300 drive, which is currently installed inside the case (yes, that’s the faster of the two), the only remaining drive would be the Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSD. Of course it would probably take decades for SSDs to catch up with HDDs in terms of capacity and price, so I cannot throw away the HDDs yet.

[Rant] How to upgrade my hard drive setup?

I've never liked having a lot of hard drives in my PC. I don't like partitioning either. In my PC, I currently have three drives. One of them is a 250GB SSD. The other two drives are hard drives, 3TB a piece. And each of them has only one partition.

I only use one of the 3TB drives because the other one is used solely for backup. I never touch it. The backup happens automatically using Microsoft Sync Toy. I could have setup the drives as RAID-1 but I didn't want to go into the complexities of RAID. I am fine with manual backing up. Well, it is actual automatic - just not real-time. (I do use real-time online backup using Carbonite but I’m thinking about dropping it because it is too slow and you can never upload 3TB data within 20 years.)

The backup drive is a 5400RPM Western Digital Caviar Green drive. The other one is a speedy 7200RPM drive made by Toshiba. But in reality, you cannot tell which is faster and which is slower. The WDC Green drive is pretty fast. The main reason for that is both drives have the same platter density - 1GB per platter.

Before upgrading to these drives a year ago, I had two Samsung F3 1TB drives in RAID-0 and a 2TB Samsung F4 Eco drive for backup. That setup was pretty fast, but I was running out of space. I didn't know what to do. I already had 3 drives. I would always want the backup drive to be as large as the data drive. So 2TB in a RAID-0 volume and 2TB in a single drive satisfied that condition just fine. But where to go from there? I didn't like to see dozen drive letters in Windows Explorer. I wanted to keep it simple and partition logically, using folders. That not only makes things easier, but also allow me to fully utilize the free space. It is also easier to organize data as well. Ideally, I should have bought 2TB x 2 drives for data (setup in RAID-0) and a 4TB drive for backup. The 2TB drives are fine, but a 4TB drive would have cost an unjustifiable amount of money. Besides, I felt that I didn't really want RAID-0 for data. I don't access the data all the time. I wanted a hassle free storage solution.

Thinking of replacing the drive setup

I currently have the following drive setup in my PC.

• OS/Application (including games):
• Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD
• Data/Work:
• 2x Samsung HD103SJ 1TB 7200RPM drives in RAID-0
• Backup:
• Samsung HD204UI 2TB 5400RPM drive

I was thinking about replacing all of them with larger drives which might even give better performance (especially, random access performance). Not to mention, the RAID-0 setup is twice as probable to go kaput than a single drive setup.

I have the following drives in mind.

• OS/Application (including games):
• Samsung 830 series 256GB SSD
• Data/Work:
• Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB 7200RPM 1TB/platter drive or
• Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB 7200RPM 1TB/platter drive
• Backup:
• Western Digital Green WD30EZRX-1TBP 3TB 5400RPM 1TB/platter drive