Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB - $90

[Rajahal]

Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

 

$89.99 shipped, no promo or MIR.

 

Comes with free copy of McAfee as well.  These are great drives for any application where you want the read speed of an SSD but the storage capacity of an HDD.  Could potentially make a good unRAID app drive, though I personally haven't used it for that purpose.

[bubbaQ]

I'm looking at putting 4 of those in a RAID-0 array.  I've got some big databases that have usage that churns a lot as it moves through the data.

 

 

[WeeboTech]

I'm looking at putting 4 of those in a RAID-0 array.  I've got some big databases that have usage that churns a lot as it moves through the data.

 

 

I would love to read how it works out for you!

Let us know, I love these drives, I own 4 in various machines now.

[Johnm]

I wonder how good one of these would be as an ESXi Datastore drive or as an unraid cache drive.

[WeeboTech]

I wonder how good one of these would be as an ESXi Datastore drive or as an unraid cache drive.

 

I do not see it being that effective as a cache drive for the caching of writes.

However I do see it being effective as a cache drive where you store persistent data and/or APPS.

The SLC SSD cache comes into play for the most frequently read LBA's.

Since the caching of unRAID writes is write once, read once (to move) then delete.

The only LBA's that will probably be cached are the filesystem tables.

This could be helpful, but I think the $100 spent is better spent on a cache drive equivalent to your largest data drive.

The whole warm spare concept.

 

Now if you were running apps and mail storage like I do on my RAID1 cache, then these drives would be effective.

 

 

For a VMware Data store, I would think it to be effective, but it will probably cache most of the filesystem tables rather then the data. This could be a big help in inode lookups.

 

I know this drive makes a tremendous difference in my laptops.

So I would believe it to make a good performer for VMware.