Buy new HDD or not?

[xkm1948]

I have two WD Black 2TB for my storage. I used to run them in RAID0. However one of the drive is starting to fail. Lots of offline uncorrectable sectors(over 200 ramped up over the course of 2 months). I have been through WD's RMA service and I knew it is too much of a hassle. So I am thinking of upgrading my storage options.

I saw this WD Black 5TB on sale at newegg. If I purchase this I will replace both of my 2TBs with just one big disk. Question is do you think the new 5TB is good enough to invest in or not? I had my fair share of OEM drives and not all of them were good.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...971&cm_re=wd_black_5tb-_-22-236-971-_-Product

Thanks!

 

[MIRTAZAPINE]

I used to be WD person but now I am a seagate person. One 5TB HDD is certainly better than having 2 HDD in raid 0. There is less risk of failure. The 5 years warranty for the drive is good! Rare to see that as most is 3 years only. Drive is likely to fail in year 3 of continuous use.

Just buy that drive and back up your data over as soon as you can to prevent data loss. The failing drive can be RMA, what kind of trouble are you having for RMA? We can have the WD representative in this forum to help you.

I would encourage to have two places to store your same data if you can afford.

 

[xkm1948]

I used to be WD person but now I am a seagate person. One 5TB HDD is certainly better than having 2 HDD in raid 0. There is less risk of failure. The 5 years warranty for the drive is good! Rare to see that as most is 3 years only. Drive is likely to fail in year 3 of continuous use.

Just buy that drive and back up your data over as soon as you can to prevent data loss. The failing drive can be RMA, what kind of trouble are you having for RMA? We can have the WD representative in this forum to help you.

I would encourage to have two places to store your same data if you can afford.

I have a separate Seagate backup plus for safe keeping.

Last time I RMAed my WD Black 2TB they sent me a "fixed" drive which died within 2 weeks of usage. I RMAed that one again and got another used drive. Finally the rep over WD told me they will ONLY send people used/fixed drives for RMA processes. So basically it will be like a lottery hoping to get a working one. WD will never send you a brand new drive. They get your presumably "bad drive" in. The use a specialized software to permanently block damaged sectors and send it right back to the next unlucky man who requests RMA. I was fed up with their attitude and I would never go through their RMA again.

 

[Aquinus]

I would RMA that bad drive and buy another 2TB Black and switch that RAID-0 to RAID-5. The great thing about RAID-5 aside from redundancy is that read speeds scale like RAID-0 does, the only down side is write speeds because it has to write the extra parity information. I say this because even if you lose a drive, the RAID-5 will still work and you can still use it. If you lose a drive in your RAID-0, you might have a backup on an external drive but, it's not exactly feasible to continue using it.

Finally the rep over WD told me they will ONLY send people used/fixed drives for RMA processes.

WD puts refurb'ed drives under much more intense QA than stock drives because they need to ensure that it's working properly. I've never lost a refurb drive that I've gotten back from WD as a replacement for a drive that has failed, so don't let that discourage you. You're getting bent out of shape for no reason, WD is one of the best companies to do an RMA through for HDDs IMHO. I've never had a bad RMA experience with them and I've RMA'ed a lot of WD drives.

 

[MIRTAZAPINE]

I have a separate Seagate backup plus for safe keeping.

Last time I RMAed my WD Black 2TB they sent me a "fixed" drive which died within 2 weeks of usage. I RMAed that one again and got another used drive. Finally the rep over WD told me they will ONLY send people used/fixed drives for RMA processes. So basically it will be like a lottery hoping to get a working one. WD will never send you a brand new drive. They get your presumably "bad drive" in. The use a specialized software to permanently block damaged sectors and send it right back to the next unlucky man who requests RMA. I was fed up with their attitude and I would never go through their RMA again.

Most companies I know only give back refurbished parts for things that are rma. Like Aquines said their are stringently check to ensure they work. You just happen to have a bad streak for those drives it does happen for things like graphics cards and power supply. Certain batches are bad even when they are refurbished. I understand, I would get mad too in that situation. If there are many failures even after a few rma getting a person from higher up can help.

 

[xkm1948]

What about this one? 1TB more and lower price:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178783

 

[Aquinus]

What about this one? 1TB more and lower price:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178783

Higher capacity drives tend to have higher failure rates. Isn't your intent to mitigate the damage of losing a drive, so why not go with a cheaper 2TB Black and go with RAID-5?

 

[xkm1948]

Higher capacity drives tend to have higher failure rates. Isn't your intent to mitigate the damage of losing a drive, so why not go with a cheaper 2TB Black and go with RAID-5?

I am kinda afraid of the WD Black 2TB now. Too much bad luck with those black 2tb and would never ever want to deal with them again.

 

[Solaris17]

I am kinda afraid of the WD Black 2TB now. Too much bad luck with those black 2tb and would never ever want to deal with them again.

If you are too afraid to buy hard drives and you want to buy 1TB HDDs now, then there is nothing mroe we can offer you. We cant convince you your hard drive wont fail thats unrealistic. I also dont think anything can be said about going from a 5TB to a 1TB drive, those 2 things are so different we arent even having the same conversation as the OP any longer.


Just buy a hard drive while they are on sale.

 

[MIRTAZAPINE]

I am kinda afraid of the WD Black 2TB now. Too much bad luck with those black 2tb and would never ever want to deal with them again.

If that is the case you can go for that seagate. I can't guaranty if that seagate would be reliable sometimes bad batches are there. If you happen to get a good batch you would not have any failure until you retire a drive. The only way to overcome this problem is still having enough redundancy of 2 drives minimum. It is much cheaper than data loss and recovery. I still have working 320GB 5.25 inch seagate from 2007, its retire it is reliable enough. If that is anything to go by. It is a different era so can't say much. I now use a 2tb seagate external works good still. My WDs also still work.

Some say would seagate is bad or wd is bad or vice versa. Anecdotes are not data, though it can point to something. Reliable statistic for hdd data is hard to get and control for samples for the model of drives made. All brands I tried have failures. It depends on your luck hugely unless it is a well-known bad batch like deathstar drives.

Get something else beside a wd if you feel bad owning them. I did that to give peace of mind. But on a whole it is just our perceptions.

 

[Aquinus]

I am kinda afraid of the WD Black 2TB now.

I lost 2 of the 4, 1TB WD Blacks I have but the replacements have worked fine for years. I think you're over thinking the problem, losing one drive isn't an indicator of a problem, neither is getting refurb'ed drives back. I personally find your concerns to be unfounded and you seem to be looking backwards if you want a higher capacity drive. As I said earlier, higher capacity drives tend to have higher failure rates. At least running RAID-5 reduces the pain of losing a drive.

 

[RejZoR]

Use a single drive and run Crystal Disk Info as a resident program so it warns you as soon as the drive goes outside of its S.M.A.R.T. specs. HDD's are VERY unlikely to just die for no reason like SSD's, they pretty much always start acting funny and that's when Crystal Disk Info will start warning you. This is also one of the reasons why I'm hesitating to go with SSD's. They are just too unpredictable in this regard. I've seen too many horror stories where power outage killed them just like that or they simply stopped working after a reboot for apparently no reason at all. Never ever heard of anything like that with HDD drives. Eventually we'll have to go SSD anyway, but still.

As for the brand, WD Black for sure. Again, too many horror stories of Seagates dying prematurely. And those WD Blue/Green aren't any better. You hardly ever hear of a WD Black drive horror story however. So that's what I'd go for. That's what I have now as well.

 

[Jetster]

HGST Deskstar if your replacing the drive. Love them And stop buying Blacks. Its not that they are bad drives just not worth the extra cost.

 

[AhokZYashA]

i recommend using WD Reds, as it is designed to work 24/7.
i have a friend that uses 4x3TB reds as an external bare drive plugged in to a docking station, works no problem for at least 2 years now

 

[Jetster]

Great Shell shocker 2X HGST 4Tb for $210

This drive has the lowest fail rate of any drive
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...clear-winners-and-losers-but-is-the-data-good

http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx?cm_sp=Homepage_SS-_-P2_2594287-_-11302015

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey, @xkm1948!

I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience with your current WD Black drives that you have in the RAID array. Unfortunately, mechanical drives are pretty sensitive and tend to be unpredictable sometimes, regardless of the brand! Keeping an eye on your storage devices using their manufacturer's diagnostic utilities every now and then is always a good way to avoid data loss. Either way, backups stored on multiple locations are the way to go, if you want to make sure your data is safe and sound at all times!

I can't advise you about buying and prices, however, I'd strongly recommend you to RMA your current failing WD Black. @Aquinus is right that our recertified HDDs go through a lot of extensive testing before being sent back to you. We also test how they work before shipping them. Since you already have experience with the RMA process, I guess I'll leave these links here just in case:
Warranty Policy: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=KtqU2F
WD Support contacts: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=DFt9WA

As for the WD Black 5 TB model, it's slightly different than the other models from the WD Black family. You still get the 5-year limited warranty and 7,200 RPM with the dual-core processor, but you also have an increased cache size of 128 MB. This upgrade is available only for the 5 TB and the 6 TB models. The WD's Dynamic Cache Technology improves the performance in real time to allocate and optimize cache between reads and writes, which is an additional feature for these particular models. If interested, you can check more details about them here:
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=jB4eFg

Hope I was helpful. Best of luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[taz420nj]

Honestly I'm even less a fan of huge drives than I am of RAID0. All they do is ensure that WHEN a drive fails (and yes, they DO fail out of the blue sometimes) that you will lose a larger amount of data. In RAID 5/6, huge drives do nothing but increase the cost of the parity overhead.

 

[R-T-B]

Great Shell shocker 2X HGST 4Tb for $210

This drive has the lowest fail rate of any drive
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...clear-winners-and-losers-but-is-the-data-good

http://www.newegg.com/Special/ShellShocker.aspx?cm_sp=Homepage_SS-_-P2_2594287-_-11302015

I thought HGST only manufactured Ultrastars now and Toshiba acquired the Deskstar line?

 

[rtwjunkie]

our recertified HDDs go through a lot of extensive testing before being sent back to you.

I've found this to be the case with every refurbished item I have ever owned. I have no problem with them as they have always worked flawlessly, unlike their "new" cousins. I even have confidence in refurbed HDD I have deliberately bought.

I'm still using a 4 year old Refurb HDD, and my motherboard is a refurbished RMA. GPU in HTPC is refurbished.

Bottom line is WD, and any other manufacturer does give alot more attention to refurbished items going out the door than they do new items. Sometimes they will fail, just like any equipment, and I feel your pain and frustration. Don't let that discourage you!

 

[Aquinus]

I also think the OP is forgetting the hardware failure bell curve. Most hardware either fails really early or really late in its lifetime. Considering this statement:

Last time I RMAed my WD Black 2TB they sent me a "fixed" drive which died within 2 weeks of usage.

Is a clear indicator that the OP simply got a lemon. It happens but, I feel like he's overly sensitive because spinning drives are undoubtedly components that are known to fail more often than any other component in a computer. There is a reason why Blacks have a 5 year warranty. What the OP experienced is unusual, even more so for a refurb drive. Honestly, if you can't trust WD, you really can't trust HDDs at all. I would make the argument that WD is the best HDD manufacturer to date after working a lot with Seagate and Hitachi. I don't say this lightly as I tend to now buy strictly WD when it comes to HDDs. The fact that I can do an advance RMA and have a new drive at my door step in 2 days is called service.

I'm not going to deny that the OP's experience was bad but, consider this. I lost two drives in my RAID 5 when I bought two new 1TB drives. I almost lost my RAID as a result but, I don't blame WD for them going foobar because I have realistic expectations for a computer component with moving parts. Not only that but, they both failed within a week of buying them. In fact I would blame myself for not testing them before putting them in my array. Anything with moving parts is going to be more prone to failure but, the simple fact is that when you don't get a lemon from WD, they're great drives that last for a long time.

So consider this:

1. Hard drives fail more often than any other component.
2. WD Blacks have a 5 year warranty.
3. WD's RMA process, for me, has been flawless.
4. I've never lost a refurbished drive from WD with less than 40,000 hours of up time.

I'll leave this here, for anyone who gets pissed off that hardware fails early in its life. Welcome to reality, get over it. It's half of the reason why I suggested RAID-5 in the first place. Shit happens, be prepared for it.

Edit: Also, by buying a higher capacity drive, the OP is basically saying, "My drive failed but, I want a drive that's more likely to fail instead." That's what getting a higher capacity drive is basically doing. So for what it's worth, I have a 1TB green that is still running strong that has 47k hours of up time on it. It's sitting in my gateway server still chugging away.

 

[Jetster]

I thought HGST only manufactured Ultrastars now and Toshiba acquired the Deskstar line?

Yeah I have no Idea, The name has been passed around so much I cant keep up. But the Hitachi 3Tb and 4Tb drives are in the 98% range of still running. So its what Ive been buying lately.

 

[RCoon]

I thought HGST only manufactured Ultrastars now and Toshiba acquired the Deskstar line?

WD owns Hitachi's 2.5" assets. Toshiba owns Hitachi's 3.5" assets.

They're all still Hitachi drives, and are still made in the same Hitachi (HGST) factories. Just a different name above the "Owner" door.

 

[ASOT]

Go with Seagate Barracuda,with one platan,not 2 like WD or other's brands

WD are not anymore good,like old time ..

 

[RCoon]

Go with Seagate Barracuda,with one platan,not 2 like WD or other's brands

I don't understand what this is supposed to mean.

Are you implying that Seagate's HDD's are a single platter, while competitors are multiple platter? If so, you're incorrect. Well, depending on HDD capacity anyway.

More info: Seagate's Barracuda 1TB and Western Digital's Blue 1TB drives both utilise single platter technologies. You just need to buy the ones with specific model numbers. Any drive above 1TB uses a multi-platter design.

 

[Aquinus]

WD are not anymore good,like old time ..

Anecdotes isn't what I would consider evidence.

$ sudo smartctl -A /dev/sdc
smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-4-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   200   200   051    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0027   184   131   021    Pre-fail  Always       -       5783
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1562
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   200   200   140    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x002e   200   200   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   036   036   000    Old_age   Always       -       47017
10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0032   100   100   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032   100   100   051    Old_age   Always       -       0
12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1425
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       245
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       1560
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   115   103   000    Old_age   Always       -       35
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   199   199   000    Old_age   Always       -       1
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   200   200   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x0008   200   200   051    Old_age   Offline      -       0

WD makes fine hardware. People blame hard drive manufacturers when HDDs fail too often. All it takes is your package getting dropped by the mail man to damage a drive.