[NBLUG/talk] Good hardwar vendors (was Missing ReiserFS superblock!)

Lincoln Peters petersl at sonoma.edu
Mon Jul 24 19:07:53 PDT 2006


On Jul 24, 2006, at 2:15 PM, Troy Arnold wrote:
>
> That's a great question.  I started to ask it myself, but didn't  
> want to
> hijack your thread...
>
> For me personally, there's another issue -- newegg doesn't have even a
> remotely reasonable shipping option to Hawaii.  So I'd definitely  
> like to
> hear about other good, ethical vendors.  Tough to beat or equal  
> Newegg on
> those counts, though.
>
> p.s. you need a nickname -- something like 'Lincoln "The Disc Slayer"
> Peters', but more catchy ;-)

Except this time, it wasn't a hardware failure.


Anyway, I checked ZipZoomFly and Buy.com (as per the suggestions of  
Bob and Troy, respectively), and I think I found an external hard  
drive on Buy.com that would suffice for backups (500GB, USB 2.0  
interface, $254.95):

<http://www.buy.com/prod/WDG1U5000N/q/loc/223/202418917.html>

Although this item on NewEgg also looks good (it's identical except  
it also has a FireWire port and is about $15 more expensive, totaling  
$269.99):

<http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136030>

I also found that, using some items on sale at CompUSA, I could get a  
pair of 250GB hard drives and the appropriate enclosures, and then  
make them into a RAID-0 (striping) array, for a total of $234.95.  Of  
course, that price tag goes up to $284.95 if the rebate defeats me,  
and since I don't trust rebates, I think I'd rather go with the drive  
I found on Buy.com.


I do have one concern about this hard disk: one reviewer on NewEgg  
said that the 500GB are "salesman's" gigabytes, meaning 1,000,000,000  
bytes instead of 1,073,741,824 bytes.  That means that the size is  
actually about 465GB!  That leaves about 35GB that, if I remember the  
output of "df" correctly, might not fit on this external hard disk!

Then again, chances are that the missing 45GB could be made up for  
using compression, but I'm in no position to test this right now.


--
Lincoln Peters
<petersl at sonoma.edu>

Gary Hart:  living proof that you *can* screw your brains out.



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