I had been holding off buying hard disks for a while because the price went up after the floods in Thailand but while I was having a quick look at eBay recently I found a guy in Victoria selling a number of 2 TB WD drives at $99 each so I bought 2 of them. They turned up today and while the part numbers said from the WD site that they were WD Green drives, neither disk had that marking on them. Put in the 1st one and backed up a partition onto it, then put in the second replacing 2 x 500 meg drives I had put back in after 2 disk caddies had stuffed a matched pair of 1tb disks.
The 2 new ones are SATA 3 6gb spec and on the SATA 2 on this Intel board they benchmark at a bit over 125 meg/sec so they are fast enough, the last WD green drives benchmarked at just over 100 meg/sec.
Now the catch is I am moving another partition of about 400 gig from one of the loose disks that came out of the box and it has to be done through a USB2 plug in gadget and the OS estimates put it at just over 3 hours to transfer that much data. One of these days when I get some money to waste my next box will have USB3 and SATA3 which should alleviate such long data transfer times. Time to go and cook myself something to eat, have a coffee or three or just plain do something else for a while.
