hard-drives are all experiencing artificially jacked up prices now because of the flooding in China, and even though western digital was the only one hit really hard, everybody's trying to get a little extra pie right now.
Those samsung drives are cool too, and quiet, the baracudas's aren't very quiet from what I understand, and even though I have a separate tracking room, keeping the noise down in the control room is always a good thing where critical listening happens.
Caddy's have always been a good idea even when you had to screw a piece on to the drive, and when i couldn't get another one when they were sold out, I got an esata external caddy instead as another option.
That's good too, and it also acts as a usb caddy.when hooked up as esata, it acts just like an internal drive, the computer doesn't know any different.
the only difference in esata is the kind of connector, it terminates in a sata connection inside the machine anyway.
so, how ever you do it, your golden.If the bios really does go away soon, usb 3 may end up being as good as a sata connection as they claim bi directional transfers and if we don't have to deal with hand off routines between windows and the bios, then usb will be an easy boot option instead of having to rig things to get it to happen in windows.
Casper can make a usb bootable drive, but it's not something I'd trust except to resore backups.
I actually had xp running off a thumb drive once just for funnies. It ran slow, but it ran.I don't know what voodoo casper is doing to make that happen, but this is where having to mix and match and make older and newer technology work together didn't work so well.
In some cases, it's beter to let the bios handle things, in others, let windows deal with it.
for instance, leaving ahci mode turned off in the bios makes it a hell of a lot easier to install xp without having to deal with textmode drivers,
allowing your sata connectors to immulate ide which windows knows about.I think with windows 7, daw vendors are starting to allow windows to handle that stuff since the performance is slightly better, but many daw vendors still like to turn off ahci mode.
Also, translation issues since these drives are getting so big, it's simply not possible to store the big numbers in the bios with small memory, you should go read about this stuff sometimes, it'll make your head spin and wonder how any of this stuff ever worked in the first place?
It truly in a crazy situation where we have 1980s technology trying to play with 2011 technology and just sort of half assed working.
At 10:54 PM 11/25/2011, you wrote:
Since Chris told me how fast his SamSung SpinPoint F3's are, I looked into them, and they're revolutionary for sure. The F3's were the first to put 500 gigs on a single platter, so the 1 TB drive only has 2 platters, while others have 4 or 5. 2 platters means less spinning mass, fewer mechanisms inside, smaller motor, way quieter, quicker seek time, and possibly longer life. They are shown for $59 to $79 at various places, but when you go there, they're on back order, with no certainty as to when more will come in.NewEgg says they'll ship today, for $169.99.Gee Thanks, I think I'll hang on a bit and learn what happens,as SATA 3 drives impact the market. There's already a new SATA 3Barracuda for $120, with 6 gigs per second transfer, not 3 like SATA 2 drives, and 64 meg cache.Today I found a SATA 3 compatible header that goes in a PCIA slot.I don't know its price yet, but what if you could get the sata 3 drive plus the sata 3 adapter for the price of a sata 2 drive. All the stuff advances every day, and sellers will often price older technology at higher prices than the latest stuff. I found 5400 rpm F1 and F2's at $160 to $170, as much as the 7200 rpm F3's, and F3's with 16 meg cache priced as high as F3's with 32 meg cache.One thing I'm convinced of now, even a single caddy, or docking station is a great and very affordable idea, then you can pick up extra drives as you find them at good prices, do backup images like Ross McGregor is doing, and, most of all, isolate Reason 6 and that nasty Code Metor on a drive by its lonesome, so it can't screw up everything else. Even though I don't really mind Unplugging the mouse and keyboard, Reason ignition key, monitor plug, power plug, removing both case side panels, that's 4 screws to take out and put back in, removing 4 more screws that hold the drive, that's 8 more moves, unplugging stubborn cables from the drive's back and plugging them back into the new drive, replacing both case sides, replacing all the cables, how can all that compare to a couple of seconds for plugging the bare drive into the caddy?Indigo L
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