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Seagate, WD, or...?

FordGT90Concept said:
WD Black (7200 RPM) is good.
WD RE (7200 RPM high reliability) are good.
WD VelociRaptor (10,000 RPM) is good.
Seagate Barracuda (7200 RPM) is good.
Seagate Constellation ES (7200 RPM high reliability) are good.

The rest be garbage.
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To be honest, All Mecanical drive are not as good as it was before, for me..

But you miss alot of thing.. The rest is garbage so red drive are garbage? Nahh, they are quite awesome for storage. Nothing to say about these drive, I have a couple and we sell alot for small NAS at work.

The only drive I didn't bought for a long time is a green drive, but I have a 1TB which is still working perfect. Blue drive also, I have a couple running for customer.


The only bad luck I have is with those seagate 7200.14, but they are quite fast. I do not think anymore onto reliability for hard drive, which is why I have a couple of backup.
 
I buy whatever is cheaper which often means Seagate.

Haven't had problems with any brand, only dead drives I've got is a 10 year old 40GB Maxtor and an even older 400MB Quantum.

The only drives I avoid are the Caviar SE because of the 2MB cache.
 
newtekie1 said:
The Blackblaze study has absolutely no use for home users. Their operating conditions and what they consider a "failure" are totally different from home use.
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Which is why I said "when used that way". I should have phrased it better.
 
Octopuss said:
I haven't bought a HDD (for myself) in over 5 years. I assume it's still mainly WD and Seagate people are buying the most. Too bad Samsung is no more, I love my Spinpoints.
Anyway, what should one buy these days when performance and reliability are the key requirements? I was thinking WD Black, but that might have changed over the years...
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Is it for Operating system? if yes, any 7200rpm.

If you can afford, personnaly, I would buy an SSD and a storage disk..
 
Here are my two cents. I got a brand new PC a few years ago with Seagate in. My parents used it, no torrents, no movies, no games, just browsing and skype. The drive failed in 3 months. I got it RMAd. After the RMA it has been rock solid for years. I got myself an external WD Black Scorpio 2.5 inch 7200rpm. I am pretty happy with it. I'd say I am reluctant to buy Seagate lately, since I've had other occasions dealing with their failed drives. It could be temporary, I don't know. I am not trashing them, but I'd say get WD, Toshiba or even Samsung (they are still here and there).

About SSD's I disagree about the cost. Especially! on black friday, which is now across Europe as well. Two days ago you could snatch Kingston Hyper X 240GB SSD for 450 danish krona in Denmark, which is amazing price no matter where you live in EU. There are really good deals on Amazon as well from Sandisk and Crucial MX100 256GB (which received the Value Award in TPU for a reason!). There is no reason, for OS and work to not be able to fit into 240gb on most occasions. Now if you want to download torrentz, and keep your Steam library on the same place- yeah then cost is a big issue, but other than that, I am always for SSD's- they are so amazing :).
 
Frick said:
Which is why I said "when used that way". I should have phrased it better.
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I wasn't arguing with you, I knew what you meant. I was agreeing with you.:toast:
 
I've noticed an increased number of modern drive failures in the last few years from all the major drive manufactures; lost a lot of the faith I used to have in spinning storage in recent years that's for sure! Although not best for speed, Toshiba seem to have quite a good reliability rate for their drives.
 
TOSHIBA PH3300U-1I72 3TB 64MB Cache are fantastic drives ! I've always had great luck with IBM>Hitachi>Toshiba.

Still have IBM's from the early 90's, got 6 Hitachi's, 2 Toshiba's.
Have/had Seagate's 2of 3 corrupted themselves and a WD was an USB External, power chip quit, so just removed it and put in the PC that is still working data storage.
They were really noisy............:banghead:

The biggest thing of the Hitachi and now the Toshiba, pretty fast, but most of all Quiet, very quiet and superb reliability for me for over 10 years.

Our IT guy told me back in the 80's, IBM's or nothing, and lol the asshole was right about that.............:toast:

As for SSD's, Intel be my only choice after the MaxPC tour with {Knudson?} they trash ton's of SSD's testing reliability, mainly to eliminate "Soft" Errors which turns out are the death of SSD's.........
 
FordGT90Concept said:
Doesn't really beyond the fact that every sector has to be written to.
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I think you don't know what advanced format means. It has nothing to do with formatting (as in format c: or so) a disk.
 
Indeed, it doesn't meant what I thought it meant but Western Digital is extremely vague on the details. Seagate is far more thorough. "Advanced format" means change sector size from 512 bytes to 4096 bytes.

But I was right that the reason RE drives would not support it is because of RAID. Sector sizes are handled by the RAID hardware/software, not the drives themselves. RE and ES drives are expected to find their way into RAIDs so they don't bother trying to sell it as a feature.
 
Ah I get it. We both learned something then :D
Too bad, 4k sectors would be nice I guess, considering I'd use the disk as storage for movies and other data.
I'll get it anyway, the price difference is not that big compared to Black, and the theoretical higher reliability is nice. That being said though, my 500GB Spinpoint which I've been torturing for like 5 years and which has almost 30000 hours on record is still going strong. So maybe...
 
You can set a RAID to use 4096 byte sector sizes. 512 byte is the default though (what I still use regardless of OS).

My server has a drive that has been running continuously since 2007. It's just a normal Barracuda. It's brother already died. :(
 
Hey there, Octopuss!

Quite the discussion you got here.
I can suggest to take a closer look at a couple of WD drives, see what suits you best.

In the opening of the thread you mentioned that your key requirements are performance and reliability.
This is something I believe you will find in the WD Black, indeed. It comes with a 5-year warranty and the 64 MB cache and 7200 RPM should surely satisfy your performance needs.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=760

However, I followed the whole thread and later on you mentioned you will be using it for movies and data storage. In which case I'd recommend checking out WD Green. It provides massive storage capacity but it's not really a performance drive, it's pretty reliable though and often preferred as a backup storage solution.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=780

Also here's a link that explains Advanced Format in details:
http://www.wdc.com/global/products/features/?id=7

I hope you find what you are looking for! :)
Keep me posted if you have more questions!
SuperSoph_WD
 
Thanks for the tips. I don't want any greens, because despite using such disk mostly as films storage, I do need some speed. Partially (maybe primarily) because I am an extremely impatient person, and partially because it won't just be films. I sometimes capture some footage from games and upload it to Youtube or whatever, and working with 50-100GB files is pain in the ass :D
I might continue with the same setup I have now, though: one large disk where photos, films and similar stuff is, and a smaller one where videos are being captured, installation files are stored etc. I wanted to do away with using two disks, but maybe I shouldn't. Of course, two disks are more expensive than one, so...
 
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Octopuss said:
Thanks for the tips. I don't want any greens, because despite using such disk mostly as films storage, I do need some speed. Partially (maybe primarily) because I am an extremely impatient person, and partially because it won't just be films. I sometimes capture some footage from games and upload it to Youtube or whatever, and working with 50-100GB files is pain in the ass :D
I might continue with the same setup I have now, though: one large disk where photos, films and similar stuff is, and a smaller one where videos are being captured, installation files are stored etc. I wanted to do away with using two disks, but maybe I shouldn't. Of course, two disks are more expensive than one, so...
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I agree about no Greens. Reds are better for movie storage and streaming (have never had one hitch, so speed isn't a problem), because they have the good features of the Greens, but with a better controller, so reliability is improved. They still don't beat the reliability of a Black or RE though.
 
I wouldn't expect Reds to be less reliable than Blacks. I mean, they have all the features to make them the most reliable, no? Reds are also pretty expensive. I don't want to imagine what will I have to pay once I decide to upgrade the NAS and grab pair of 6TB Reds :D (plus the price of DS214+ itself)
 
Octopuss said:
I wouldn't expect Reds to be less reliable than Blacks. I mean, they have all the features to make them the most reliable, no? Reds are also pretty expensive. I don't want to imagine what will I have to pay once I decide to upgrade the NAS and grab pair of 6TB Reds :D (plus the price of DS214+ itself)
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I see Reds on sale all the time. I know 2TB Reds are frequently on sale for $90USD or so, which I consider a good deal. Of course, all our opinions vary on what is a good deal. I don't know if they are as reliable as blacks. They serve as the movie storage drives on my server, and have run 24/7 for 2 years (3 of them have, the other 3 are a year), and no sign of impending death!
 
Octopuss said:
Thanks for the tips. I don't want any greens, because despite using such disk mostly as films storage, I do need some speed. Partially (maybe primarily) because I am an extremely impatient person, and partially because it won't just be films. I sometimes capture some footage from games and upload it to Youtube or whatever, and working with 50-100GB files is pain in the ass :D
I might continue with the same setup I have now, though: one large disk where photos, films and similar stuff is, and a smaller one where videos are being captured, installation files are stored etc. I wanted to do away with using two disks, but maybe I shouldn't. Of course, two disks are more expensive than one, so...
Click to expand...

I understand, especially the patience part. :D
Like I said, whatever suits you best. Nothing lasts forever either way, so just make sure you have off-site backups to avoid future headaches caused by your storage solutions.

Hope I was helpful though.
SuperSoph_WD
 
@SuperSoph_WD I'm glad to see you're still checking in with TPU!
 
Oh it was an official WD guy posting here. Didn't even notice, lol!
 
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