Recommendation for a system drive hardware (HP N40L)

I have a lot of experience with Toshiba and Western Digital drives. The Toshiba's run hot. I really like the Western Digital Black laptop drives and have never had an issue with them. Mostly have used them to replace slower laptop drives but I've also got one as a system drive in my Windows Home Server 2011. They are incredibly reliable and stable. I've also been very happy with Intel and Crucial solid state drives as well. My OMV is running 64gb sata3 Crucial SSD and man it is nice.

Hi,

I'm in the same position, I was going to use a usb drive but hear of the failures, my intention is to use it to stream bluray to a media player.

Would there be a big performance hit if I don't flash the BIOS? I'm a noob when it comes to things like this.
Are there any flash drives optimised for this so that failure won't be an issue?
Could I use an external USB drive (not a flash disk but an USB 2.5" HDD )?

Thanks for any assistance.

Carnajo, if I was in you shoes I'd probably call a computer repair store and ask how much they would charge to flash the modded BIOS for you. If that is an option for you call some places. To n40l users, could someone please give carnajo the link to the modded BIOS???

Zitat von "KM0201"

First, you seem to be talking about two different things as if they have the same problem.

Flash drive(thumb drives, etc.) -- expect problems. I personally wouldn't do it. I burned a flash drive in 2 weeks just when I was "learning" OMV.

USB drive (ie, a 2.5/3.5 drive in an external enclosure, or purchasing an external drive) should be just fine. A 2.5in external would be better, since it would be able to run off the USB bus, rather than requiring an external power supply.

If you really look, you can probably find a place to put a 2.5in drive inside your case, so you don't have to use an external enclosure.

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Sorry, I just worded it poorly.

I was just wondering if a 2.5" USB drive would be suitable or whether performance over USB would be poor and hence if I may be better off using SATA and flashing the BIOS. Of course USB would be much easier as then I don't have to fiddle with the BIOS. If the performance of using 5th SATA port on an unflashed BIOS is not much worse off then that would also be fine.

EDIT: And to clarify I'm more concerned about performance whilst streaming HD media or transferring data; slower boot times aren't a massive issue.

Zitat von "tekkbebe"

Carnajo, if I was in you shoes I'd probably call a computer repair store and ask how much they would charge to flash the modded BIOS for you. If that is an option for you call some places. To n40l users, could someone please give carnajo the link to the modded BIOS???

Thanks very much for the suggestion, honestly though I'd rather do it myself than trust the average computer repair guy.

Zitat von "ryecoaaron"

How to flash is here and it has a link to the bios.

Much obliged!

Used to have a 4GB microdrive running off a USB Compact Flash adaptor, worked fine. Not being satisfied with things that just work I found a 32GB SSD on sale and swapped that out for my boot drive. Been running that for 8 months without issue in my top optical bay, not even secured.

And it is no rocket science.

But anyhow you do not need it really. It will enable ATAPI for the optical drive SATA port, but you can live without it for the system drive. As the system drive itselve is not relevant for the performance of the NAS I would not overestimate the BIOS improvements.

I was running a MicroDrive for a while myself, but I started doing other things with the server that were apparently hitting the system drive a lot harder than just pulling files over SMB. This is where the MicroDrive unfortunately showed its shortcomings.

Switched back to the first system drive I used, which is an old 80GB SATA drive I had laying around. It still isn't very fast, but handles increased load on the system drive a lot better than the MicroDrive ever did. Didn't bother with the hacked BIOS since the early SATA drives weren't very quick to begin with.

The only issues I've run into thus far have been with vibrations. I tried a few hard drives in the top bay, and no matter what, after a while I would start hearing a buzzing sound coming from the top bay due to vibrations. Since the drive slides in on a track, no matter how I mounted it, it would eventually make noise. The fix I found was to cover the screw heads themselves with a small piece of ordinary electrical tape, (I actually used two pieces per screw, but one would probably suffice) this made the drive fitment a lot tighter and silenced whatever vibration would have remained.