Hard Drive Choices

[Bubblez]

Hey Everybody!

 

I'm looking for an Internal Hard drive (3TB or greater) to store all my movies and TV shows on, currently I have 2TB worth of video. I'm setting it up to work with plex, and since it will be my media hard drive there movies will be written to it, and then left there and not deleted. But it will be getting read a lot, sometimes from more then one source as I share my Plex files with my family members.

 

So, question... Which Hard drive would people here recommend for my needs?? Which hard drive is reliable?

 

Also, Could somebody help me understand what Hard drive Cache does? I've seen hard drives with 64MB and some with 128MB? What size would fit my needs?

 

I appreciate the help everybody.

 

Thank-you.

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hi there @Bubblez!

 

Since you're looking for a secondary mass storage drive I can recommend WD Green drives since they are energy efficient, cool operating and designed for such usage. The main benefit is that they save power and wear by spinning down when they can, this means they're basically best for things like backup drives which are only in use periodically (e.g - once an hour). You can check them out here:

 

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=EJ6zBb

 

As for the HDD cache,it is a buffer where data is kept in transition from the drive platter and being requested by the processor. In terms of performance it will hold files in memory that are used quite often or for prefetching. Memory transfers will always be faster than reading off hard drives. So the more cache you have the more files can be held in memory, the faster the drive will be for those files. Once it has to pull off the hard drive you're back to normal speeds. In that matter, the drives with larger caches will perform better since they can temporarily store more and larger files in their memory for repeated access. For mass storage I would say that 64MB would be plenty.

 

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have! 

 

Cheers!