No I havnt actually, I might see whats on offer too, although I think if I go down that road Id want to wait for a sata 3 ready controller...

will sata3 make any difference ?

its not like youre going to max out sata2 anyway ?


havnt looked recently, but last time I did you could get pcie 12port sata cards that were £800 when new, for about £80

with 12 ports, a million featueres, and 256meg of onboard ram etc.... theyve got to remove as much of a bottle neck as youll ever be able to ?

Youre completely right, sata 3 would make bugger all difference thinking about it and it wouldnt be worth the premium either way. Ill have a nosey on eBay later

To highlight just how bad this new Seagate drive is (thank God its going back), heres a S.M.A.R.T data comparison:



The drive seek error rate should be of particular note - every time a seek error has occured, the drive has made lots of unhealthy sounding clicking noises for about 20 seconds...

QuoteRate of seek errors of the magnetic heads. If there is a partial failure in the mechanical positioning system, then seek errors will arise. Such a failure may be due to numerous factors, such as damage to a servo, or thermal widening of the hard disk. The raw value has different structure for different vendors and is often not meaningful as a decimal number.

The Samsung is over 3/4 full and not a single ECC error. That is formidable.

Oh my, that is worrying