Is it video storage as in serving videos on the web from that disk or as in storing them and sometimes copying / watching from the disk?
In the latter case, seek time shouldn't be a problem. I've got an usb 1tb drive sitting here and it's working just fine for the usual usage. As far as prices go, the upgrade isn't really that big, so instead of buying two 500gb, I'd just take two 1tb and have a backup.

Thanks for the feedback. It's not for web delivery, purely for home use.

Methinks I might take the tb disk.

I just can't believe how cheap they've become!

Like jan said if its just for storage seek times don't really mean much.

If you want to serve the videos you can take care of seek times with RAID

also remember now you need more backup storage :-P

engine, buy two and make them RAID 1 or better yet buy four and make them RAID 10.

You'll never notice the seek time issue until you're down to about 33% capacity left.

seagate 1.5TB has a 7200rpm spindle speed and 32MB of cache

keep and eye on the specs cause im finding alot with 16MB and 5900 RPM

Video files are usually large and highly contiguous. This means that seek times are more or less irrelevant (unless or until overwriting causes significant fragmentation). Even for a video server, if read-ahead caching is employed, a very heavy load would be required to make the seek time an issue.

Kaled.

The inadvisability of "keeping all of ones eggs in the same basket" is the base of certain homilies that have echoes in most cultures ..with good reason ..

You are walking the sata cable of delusion ..

Somewhat like backing up data to another partition of the same HD ( just because there is the space to do it )and it's cheaper than buying a second one ..(I just bought 3 acer machines that are set up in raid 0 with only one HD and one DVD multiwriter per box ..out of the box they actually set them up that way ~:o !...needless to say I bought them for their hardware spec and the included monitors ..not the flaky "backup"..and they were all vista 64 and no install discs ..only recovery partitions on the second "part" of their only HD ..and for acer that is a "selling plus point" :)) ..but the price was good for the boxes and 22 inch lcd's included ..and then one junks the OS ..and the "raid" ..

( acer desktops are very very quiet ..important when you have 3 or 4 or more in a small home office space all working at over 70% of cpu most of the time ..and they are cheap ..if you intend opening them and customizing from day one )

The answer to your question is a "toaster"

^ I wouldn't call acer desktops cheap, its no different then the trash dell tries to sell you.

I can normally part together a machine with better parts and better specs for the same price or LESS everyday of the week.

Thanks for the responses.

For the record, I already have a backup solution in place. I have been using belt and braces approach to backups for some time, although, TB drives bring their own challenges, especially when stuffed with data.

Where I live ..France ..acer ready assembled ..vista installed ( which I can then open and add Hd's ..rework and dual boot with linux ) are way cheaper than you would pay in the USA for the parts to build your own ..and they are quieter than dells ..

here mobos, cpu's, psu's .. are 2 to 4 times USA price ( depending on what you are buying )..hd's are 1.5 to 2 x USA price ..so "gutting a pig and adding lipstick" is a better deal than shopping for parts to build your own gazelle :((

IMO ..video backups are best done on optical media ..and redone every 5 years ..

could I ship you one cheaper? hahaha