Industry Figure Tom Chappell

I have a groovy 2 terabyte RAID array on order, and as part of that, I had ordered a nice Hitachi Deskstar 7200 RPM, 500 GB (actually more like 465 GB) Serial ATA drive, featuring a 16 MB data buffer, and (especially!) a three-year warranty.

But then my old friend, Industry Figure Curt Welch, who has apparently owned and operated hundreds of such drives, issued stern warnings to only use similar drives in RAID arrays, and I already had two Seagate Baracudas and this Hitachi Deskstar on order. Rats!

On the other hand, the Users drive on my PowerMac was almost full, so it was a great excuse to swap in the new Deskstar there. It actually replaced an earlier, smaller Deskstar, which had given perfect service.

The PowerMac and the drive are both so well designed that the whole operation was pretty effortless.

Actually, this is perfect, because I trust the Hitachis a little more than I do the Seagates, so it’s nice that the Hitachi is being used in the non-redundant application, whereas, if one of the Seagates fails in the RAID 5 array, I’ll just pop another one in.