Upgrading hard drives

So this post will be about my new hard drives, which arrived today. I got one 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD, and two Western Digital Red 1 TB drives. They will replace my current drives, which are a mixed bag, topped off with a 128GB Samsung 830 SSD.

The 830 obviously is still one of the better models out there, even compared to later models (though it gets a beating from the 840 Pro), and would be good enough for years to come. But, I wanted more space, and I didn’t want to switch to something that’d be slower than the 830, ergo, I ordered the 840 Pro for around 220 euros.

As for the Western Digitals, they will be running in RAID1. My storage is elsewhere, this is for local stuff, which doesn’t need much space, but which would benefit from redundancy. So instead of having the current two 500GB, one 1TB drive (a WD Green, ugh), I’ll have the 1TB RAID1, and the 256GB SSD. Less drives, more modern drives (less power consumption), and faster drives. All around good deal. For future reference, the WD’s were like 80 something euros apiece.

I will start out with using the on-board RAID card, which comes with my Asus P8Z68 motherboard. It’ll probably not be that good, but it’ll work. Then, once I get the SFF-8087 cable that is on backorder, I can move to the LSI M1015 RAID card that I bought. It’s a PCI-express x8 card, that does RAID 0 and RAID 1, and uses two SFF-8087 connectors, that can each support four sata / sas drives.

And yes, I realize I’ll have to wipe the drives when moving from the internal to the discrete RAID-card. This doesn’t bother me.

More on all of this later, once I have things installed. Meanwhile, have a picture.