Which hard drive manufacturer is recommended?

Zascar

I bought a Seagate Barracuda 2tb (internal Sata) about a year ago and with moderate use its already giving me problems. It just sometimes fails to show up or acts weird. I moved to a new PC and it was fine for a while but started doing the same so I've abandoned it.
I want something reliable next time - what would you guys recommend?
Thanks

Xenoronin

Well, i can't say for sure since it's only been a few months since I got my PC, but the WD Caviar Blue is generally recommended to pretty much anyone asking for a new PC build here. I've not seen anyone come back with any problems with it within the first few months, which means it probably won't have problems until late in life (Hardware failure generally only occurs at the start of life or the end, failure between is rare).

It also helps that a 1TB WD Caviar Blue is around €50-€60.

Zascar

Thanks, I was looking at the WD but I was unsure as to the different colours. I see the green ones are good value. I looked at a pdf and they recommend the green for a second hard drive. Not sure why. How is the blue better?
Thanks

Bepolite

Zascar wrote: »

Thanks, I was looking at the WD but I was unsure as to the different colours. I see the green ones are good value. I looked at a pdf and they recommend the green for a second hard drive. Not sure why. How is the blue better?
Thanks

Green = low power, slower performance
Blue = the middle one
Black = premium one

If it's just for storing files and you're not bothered about performance the green would be grand.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=800 (click power of choice)

Zascar

Well I usually operate my pc with two hard drives, one for my OS & Programs and the other for my files. I guess performance is preferable as i move a lot of files around, large images, music & moves etc. The blue does not come in 2TB, only 1TB however. Any idea how much of a difference there is between green and blue?

I could always go for red: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Red-Desktop-Drive/dp/B008JJLZ7G/ref=zg_bs_430502031_20 - higher MTBF.
Thanks

BeerWolf

With regards to the WD Caviar Black, Blue and Green - their sound levels differ as well.

Black's been said to be pretty loud, at 33dB, Blue at 23dB, and Green at 21dB. There's always the option of insulating the sound.



I plan to get the Black for regular usage, and Green for backup.

Drives get faster sequentially as platter density goes up, and WD don't always update their entire product line with their latest platters at the same time.

Last time I checked there is lots of Greens with 1TB/platter whereas only one or two Blues, and no Blacks at all.

So you can have a strange situation where a drive that is supposed to be 'slower' in the performance chain performs admirably compared to one higher up. The latest 1TB/platter greens are pretty fast tbh.

You really need to narrow it down to individual model codes and then find reviews of those specific models.

An important difference between Green, Blue Black (and now Red) is warranty length.

Johnboy1951

I am unsure how accurate this info is, but I read a post about the Green drives ...... use them for backup as they are reported to park the heads and spin down every 8 secs by design.

......... found this which should help .......

http://koitsu.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/wd30ezrx-and-aggressive-head-parking/

Gadgetman496

Are the WD Red drives designed for constant use for scenarios such as NAS or what's different about them?

The Glass Key

Put in a 2TB WD black for a mate and its virtually silent. Its in a case that's on his desk and you can only just hear it if you put your ear to the case.

ED E

TBH there isnt much between brands. HDDs are essentially old tech and they're all good at it now. Chances are you got a lemon, but every manufacturer has lemons. I've several Seagates going for years(Ive just cursed myself havent I) and a WD thats spun up for 12+ hrs a day.

Buy whatever is good value and keep a good backup policy

The Glass Key

ED E wrote: »

TBH there isnt much between brands. HDDs are essentially old tech and they're all good at it now. Chances are you got a lemon, but every manufacturer has lemons. I've several Seagates going for years(Ive just cursed myself havent I) and a WD thats spun up for 12+ hrs a day.

Buy whatever is good value and keep a good backup policy

I strongly suspect that there are more failures due to poor handling (like dropping) of the drives before they are installed. Great to get a really good price for a drive from say Amazon but if its badly packed and then thrown around in transit then it just might be one of those drives that fails sooner rather than later.

ED E

The Glass Key wrote: »

I strongly suspect that there are more failures due to poor handling (like dropping) of the drives before they are installed. Great to get a really good price for a drive from say Amazon but if its badly packed and then thrown around in transit then it just might be one of those drives that fails sooner rather than later.

A little OT but if any you have more than 2/3 HDDs(I suspect 90% of this forum do) then you *NEED* Spinrite. Its a magical program. For recovery but also maintenance. Defragging is all well and good to keep windowze rolling but a pass of spinrite checks the drive itself making sure bits read reliably 100% of the time.

Johnboy1951

ED E wrote: »

A little OT but if any you have more than 2/3 HDDs(I suspect 90% of this forum do) then you *NEED* Spinrite. Its a magical program. For recovery but also maintenance. Defragging is all well and good to keep windowze rolling but a pass of spinrite checks the drive itself making sure bits read reliably 100% of the time.

I bought a copy of Spinrite (Ver 6 I *think*) and never did get any good use out of it, at the time or since. All it ever did was completely destroy three old HDDs which I knew were failing, but was able to use with some management.

I have usually 5 internal HDDs .... presently reduced to 3 in this PC.

Zascar

What exactly does Spinrite do? I'll give it a go on my old dodgy hard drive before getting a new one and see what it says

ED E

Zascar wrote: »

What exactly does Spinrite do? I'll give it a go on my old dodgy hard drive before getting a new one and see what it says

It runs in DOS and reads raw output from the drive, checking that a 0 is a 0 and and 1 is a 1, not somewhere fuzzy in between. It swaps the bits both ways, twice, to check its changing reliably.

TBH if the drive is disappearing completely then its more likely to be the controller, which spinrite would do nothing for.

Gadgetman496

Zascar wrote: »

What exactly does Spinrite do? I'll give it a go on my old dodgy hard drive before getting a new one and see what it says

Watch THIS video:

beauf

Zascar wrote: »

I bought a Seagate Barracuda 2tb (internal Sata) about a year ago and with moderate use its already giving me problems. It just sometimes fails to show up or acts weird. I moved to a new PC and it was fine for a while but started doing the same so I've abandoned it.
I want something reliable next time - what would you guys recommend?
Thanks

I treat HD as consumables tbh. I've had very few fail over 20yrs but it does happen. So I always have multiple backup drives and on other media like DVD.

Then reliability isn't that much of a concern. Other than the time taken to rebuild a machine. Which isn't more than a day usually.

madalig12

Seagate drives have a three year warranty, if its playing up get in touch with them.

gadgetman496

gadgetman496 wrote: »

Are the WD Red drives designed for constant use for scenarios such as NAS or what's different about them?

The main technical difference is they have TLER (time limited error recovery). They are intended for hardware RAID applications.

When a normal consumer drive (non TLER) discovers an error it takes as much time as it needs to fix it (re-reading the sector repeatedly etc). During this time it doesnt respond to the controller. This is no good for hardware RAID because when the drive doesnt respond after a few seconds, the controller drops it from the array.

So drives with TLER only try to fix the error for a few seconds and then give up. They let the RAID controller recover the error instead.

TLER is only a good thing for hardware RAID configs. From a data integrity point of view its a bad thing on a standalone drive. I wouldn't use a Red on its own. You're basically paying more for a Green that has had an important feature removed.

The other main difference between Red and Green is that the Reds have a longer warranty, reflected in the price.

Zascar

Thanks guys, I recon the green will be fine for me. Where should I order it from? I went to order from Komplett as I thought they had free delivery but they want €9.99! Ehh no thanks.

Where do you guys usually order from?

The Glass Key

Zascar wrote: »

Thanks guys, I recon the green will be fine for me. Where should I order it from? I went to order from Komplett as I thought they had free delivery but they want €9.99! Ehh no thanks.

Where do you guys usually order from?

I'm sure you'll get better advice but I always check Amazon.co.uk and look for stuff that is "fulfilled by Amazon" which means free delivery.

Edit> There you go http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Green-Desktop-Drive/dp/B008YAHW6I but I'm sure someone will find a cheaper one somewhere.

smacl

Bepolite wrote: »

Green = low power, slower performance
Blue = the middle one
Black = premium one

If it's just for storing files and you're not bothered about performance the green would be grand.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=800 (click power of choice)

I bought a bunch of WD greens a couple of years ago and they were the worst drives I've ever used. Wouldn't go near them, have a scan of this article or just google WD green problems. I'd been using WD for years prior to this with no issue, but these really put me off. Four out of four of them have since been dumped.

smacl

smacl wrote: »

I bought a bunch of WD greens a couple of years ago and they were the worst drives I've ever used. Wouldn't go near them, have a scan of this article or just google WD green problems. I'd been using WD for years prior to this with no issue, but these really put me off. Four out of four of them have since been dumped.

Small sample sizes are meaningless unfortunately.

We all have conflicting anecdotal experience. Im sure there will be someone here with only positive experience of WD while every Seagate they got died. And vice versa. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

The only way you could really know if one brand was more reliable was with a very large sample size - eg from a data centre. And by the time the numbers were in, it'd be five years later and the new drives on the market are totally different to the ones in your survey thanks to mergers and technology exhanges etc.

smacl

Deleted User wrote: »

We all have conflicting anecdotal experience. Im sure there will be someone here with only positive experience of WD while every Seagate they got died. And vice versa. It means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Just to be clear, I've had good a generally good experience with WD over the years and they had been my manufacturer of choice. I was being quite specific about the green drives, noting a systematic fault documented by a third party which also just happened to be in units I picked up. Having four out of four drives die within six months of use, while being a small sample, is indicative of a systematic problem as opposed to a random failure. If you look at the first half dozen or so hits from this search you'll also see it is a common problem with this particular unit. I'd need to dig out the links again, but from memory the firmware on the green unit was set up specifically that it could not be used in a RAID configuration based on its price, and this firmware was leading to the other issues. It could well be something that has changed since.

For me, if I was buying WD again, I'd go blue or black, but not green. YMMV.

NTMK

smacl wrote: »

Just to be clear, I've had good a generally good experience with WD over the years and they had been my manufacturer of choice. I was being quite specific about the green drives, noting a systematic fault documented by a third party which also just happened to be in units I picked up. Having four out of four drives die within six months of use, while being a small sample, is indicative of a systematic problem as opposed to a random failure. If you look at the first half dozen or so hits from this search you'll also see it is a common problem with this particular unit. I'd need to dig out the links again, but from memory the firmware on the green unit was set up specifically that it could not be used in a RAID configuration based on its price, and this firmware was leading to the other issues. It could well be something that has changed since.

For me, if I was buying WD again, I'd go blue or black, but not green. YMMV.

Theyve changed a few component manufactures since then due to the floods and i havent had a problem with any WD green drives since then

4 of 4 is just rotten luck even with **** manufacturing. i still have 3 Hitachi Deathstars that will boot after 12-13 years even though the things were ****ing donkeys

Capt'n Midnight

ED E wrote: »

It runs in DOS and reads raw output from the drive, checking that a 0 is a 0 and and 1 is a 1, not somewhere fuzzy in between. It swaps the bits both ways, twice, to check its changing reliably.

TBH if the drive is disappearing completely then its more likely to be the controller, which spinrite would do nothing for.

Back in the days of MFM / RLL / early SCSI when you could set things like interleave and bad sector lists in the controller cards spinrite was useful because you could tweak settings to optimise the drive and controller (get the interleave wrong and the head would miss the data sector and you'd have to wait for it to spin round again.)

But IDE drives have been around since 1986 and like ATA/SATA the controller is built in so there is no need to match the drive to the controller and as a general rule you can't.

Another trick of intelligent drives is that you no longer need to maintain the bad sector list you found during the low level format, because the drives re-map them to spare sectors on the fly.

When windows or spinrite is "recovering" bad sectors all they are doing is asking the drive to re-read the sector when it reports a hard error after it's tried a few attempts (error correction code on the drive means it's not just individual 1's and 0's but blocks that are being read , and it's the drive that does the soft error recovery / hard error detection )

Zascar

Worth dragging this up for this article: http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Luck100

Zascar wrote: »

Worth dragging this up for this article: http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

I think those guys having problems are using the drives in raid for NAS. If you run the drive 'normally' in windows I don't think you'll have any problems with the WD green. That's why they have the WD red drives: their firmware is designed for RAID and NAS usage.

I've had a couple of the 3TB WD green drives (WD30EZRX) for over a year now. I use one as a data drive and the other for backup with no problems whatsoever. They're very quiet and very fast. If you check the specs they're pretty much the same speed as the blue and black drives. In fact, the rated speed varies within each family (green, blue, and black) quite a bit - check the specific model. Some of the smaller black drives are slower than the bigger green drives.

I did originally find that there was a bit of lag when first accessing the disk, but that's just the windows power settings. It defaults to spinning the drive down after 20 minutes, and since I'm not using them as system drives they're not spinning up when booting. I just went into the power plan settings and changed it to a couple of hours and no more lag.

Zascar

Zascar wrote: »

Worth dragging this up for this article: http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

And the rebuttal:
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6028/dispelling-backblaze-s-hdd-reliability-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html

"The Backblaze environment is the exact opposite. I do not believe I could dream up worse conditions to study and compare drive reliability. It's hard to believe they plotted this out and convened a meeting to outline a process to buy the cheapest drives imaginable, from all manner of ridiculous sources, install them into varying (and sometimes flawed) chassis, then stack them up and subject them to entirely different workloads and environmental conditions... all with the purpose of determining drive reliability."

They seem fairly amateur. It's the same crowd who were going around buying thousands of external drives to crack open and put in their data farms.

Wossack

I think the current drive de jour for backblaze is still samsung, so wouldnt let the figures put you off entirely. Hitachi / HGST are very well regarded though

marco_polo

Wossack wrote: »

I think the current drive de jour for backblaze is still samsung, so wouldnt let the figures put you off entirely. Hitachi / HGST are very well regarded though

Seagate bought up the up the entire Samsung HDD division a few years back, and Hitachi technically gone as well (they're a subsidiary of WD now)

Wossack

marco_polo wrote: »

Seagate bought up the up the entire Samsung HDD division a few years back, and Hitachi technically gone as well (they're a subsidiary of WD now)

sorry yea seagate

yea, only 2 major players now, not such a good situation

marco_polo

Wossack wrote: »

sorry yea seagate

yea, only 2 major players now, not such a good situation

Definitely not good, something quite similar is going on with RAM manufacturers now as well and it is almost certainly contributing a little to the high current prices (although not the only reason), with merger upon merger over the years now Micron, Samsung and Hynix have over 90% of the market between them.

Wossack

Wossack wrote: »

sorry yea seagate

yea, only 2 major players now, not such a good situation

There's still 3 players, WD, Seagate and Toshiba.

Until recently Toshiba only did 2.5" and enterprise drives. They were given part of the Hitachi 3.5" business and IP as a condition of the WD/Hitachi merger. So their current 3.5" drives are effectively the 'old' Hitachi's, they're still making and selling them.