# Hard drives



## whiteskunk (Dec 9, 2009)

I've always prefered Western Digital HDs. And will probably purchase a new one soon. The question is: are the newer 1-2 tb (black) as good as their previous drives? 

Anyone have either of the 1 or 2 tb drives? Honest opinions please.


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## yak (Dec 9, 2009)

Western Digital 1Tb RE3 (blacks) are, as far as I know, the fastest 7200rpm SATA drives right now. Like, they kick the crap out of everything else.
1Tb "green"  drives share the quietest, coldest and most power efficient HDDs pedestal with 1Tb Hitachi.
Caviar Blues are mediocre and I wouldn't recommend them.

I always trusted WD over all other brands, and never had a drive fail on me. Went through 120Gb, 500Gb and 1Tb. 
Moreso, my 120Gb drive has an inch long puncture through the isolation between the top plate and the drive itself, yet it still works fine, 3 years and counting.

Admittedly I don't know what is the situation with 1.5 and 2Tb drives, I only investigated a 1Tb drive market.


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## Aden (Dec 9, 2009)

yak said:


> Admittedly I don't know what is the situation with 1.5 and 2Tb drives, I only investigated a 1Tb drive market.



I wouldn't trust that much data on one disk anyway.


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## SnowFox (Dec 9, 2009)

Aden said:


> I wouldn't trust that much data on one disk anyway.



You mean not any more you wouldn't.


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## dietrc70 (Dec 9, 2009)

I definitely recommend the 1TB WD Black.  I have two of them and they are great drives.  Possibly the best drive WD makes at the moment.


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## Captain Spyro (Dec 9, 2009)

I was wondering about external drives myself. I'm needing one to complement the 250gb that my mac already has, so I'm in the market for one; preferably 1TB.

WD sounds good. Are they reliable HDs all around? What I have read here sounds good, but I'm being cautious.


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## Yaps (Dec 9, 2009)

Is this internal or external? I have an external 1TB Seagate and it works perfect.



Captain Spyro said:


> ...WD sounds good. Are they reliable HDs all around? What I have read here sounds good, but I'm being cautious.



I wouldn't say they are too reliable... I bought a new WD Green Caviar 640 GB and it failed right away out of the box. It couldn't run a Short Drive Self Test, now I have to wait 30 days because it had to be sent away. Tsss...


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## ToeClaws (Dec 9, 2009)

Can't go wrong with Western Digital - they've been my hard drive of choice for 20 years.  Statistically speaking, the bigger the drive, the greater the chance of bad sectors, so regardless of make that will always be a factor.  It's way RAID 5 is sort of a dying data redundancy strategy.  I have a 1 TB WD now, been using it for about 18 months, no issues so far.


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## Grrxyn (Dec 9, 2009)

After buying a WD and getting it DOA three times in a row then demanding a refund, I'll never use them again...

I trust Seagate, Hitachi, and Samsung.  Currently I have 3 Samsung 1TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration and have not had any issues...

I wouldn't trust a single 1TB drive to any amount of data alone unless you have it backed-up elsewhere...


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## yak (Dec 9, 2009)

Captain Spyro said:


> I was wondering about external drives myself. I'm needing one to complement the 250gb that my mac already has, so I'm in the market for one; preferably 1TB.
> 
> WD sounds good. Are they reliable HDs all around? What I have read here sounds good, but I'm being cautious.



You're going to hear a lot of mixed opinions on this. Some people never had problems with drives from one manufacturer, while others had nothing but nightmares.

As for an external drive, I'd recommend 1Tb WD Green. It's not the speediest drive around, but it makes up for it by being very quiet and cool, to the point where it requires neither active nor passive cooling at all.

Alternatively, you can get a 1Tb Hitachi. Arguably the same features of WD Green, but with a noticeable positive speed difference. I'm running both of them.




Yaps said:


> I wouldn't say they are too reliable... I bought a new WD Green Caviar 640 GB and it failed right away out of the box. It couldn't run a Short Drive Self Test, now I have to wait 30 days because it had to be sent away. Tsss...


First of all, there are no "Green Caviar" drives, there are either "green" or "caviar". As I've already said, I wouldn't recommend Caviars because they're mediocre.

On a side note, you do know that most of the time the drive manufacturer doesn't really make a difference on the stability or workability of the drive you receive as much as shipping and handling does. The things get thrown around like bricks with no regard for their fragility.

There are exceptions, of course - like the now-ancient Hitachi Deathstar drives or 1Tb Seagates with wonky bios. Those were bad by design.




Grrxyn said:


> After buying a WD and getting it DOA three times in a row then demanding a refund, I'll never use them again...
> 
> I trust Seagate, Hitachi, and Samsung.  Currently I have 3 Samsung 1TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration and have not had any issues...
> 
> I wouldn't trust a single 1TB drive to any amount of data alone unless you have it backed-up elsewhere...


See reply to above post regarding DOA.

And you typically don't trust a single drive that much. You either put two  of them in a mirror, or 3+ in RAID5. That way, you're much more safe from the drive failure. I prefer a mirror myself because that also significantly protects me from the possible RAID controller failure, which would leave a RAID5 useless a lot of times while with RAID10 you simply have two drives with identical data. 

Unless of course you don't really care about the data stored there, like tons of torrented HDTV movies.


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## whiteskunk (Dec 9, 2009)

Yaps said:


> Is this internal or external? I have an external 1TB Seagate and it works perfect.
> 
> 
> 
> I wouldn't say they are too reliable... I bought a new WD Green Caviar 640 GB and it failed right away out of the box. It couldn't run a Short Drive Self Test, now I have to wait 30 days because it had to be sent away. Tsss...



Internal variety. And I read much the same things at amazon regarding the green caviar line. Also read about the packaging nightmare thing. And how the black caviar line are quite noisy (all I'd need to p.o. my neighbors with a loud hard drive). I may just go with a 750 gb drive.


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## Carenath (Dec 9, 2009)

Western Digital.. my first computer in 1996 had a 1GB WD Caviar drive... and it failed around 4-5 years later, sudden catastrophic failure.
I had a 30GB WD drive, that had a reported SMART failure, and it worked solid for another 2-3 years without any problems. And even though it had died.. I was able to get it to power up again by leaving it sit for a few days and get my data back.
I have had people warn me away from Raptors, citing them as failure-prone.

Hitachi, I use 4x 500GB Hitachi drives in my storage server in a RAID5 setup.. and I can't complain about how they perform, they're running constantly since I almost never turn that system off. I might replace them.. I might build a different array and do some sort of 1+0 setup.. either way I keep regular backups just in case the worst happens onto an external drive that has a Seagate drive in it.

The average person, I am reasonably convinced, will not be able to fill a 160GB drive, to say nothing of 360, 500 and 1TB drives available today. If you're one of the people though, that wants a lot of storage space, then build a RAID array. A pair of 1TB drives in RAID1 will mean, one drive failing will not destroy all your data. Many modern mobo's have 'FakeRAID' which will handle this rather handily.

This might seem like an off-topic tangent, but, my point is that you could and should build a RAID array rather than relying on a single drive to hold all your data.


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## Runefox (Dec 10, 2009)

Seagate used to be king, lost all credibility after firmware issues bricked high-end drives and denying it, then releasing drives with ineffective firmware upgrades. Really, it's been since they bought out Maxtor - Those guys were the bottom of the barrel as of around their 40-80GB drives onward.

Western Digital is the top of the pile right now. Best warranty, best performance, good price, and just plain pretty good. I wouldn't recommend a MyBook or anything if you're looking at external, though - I've seen so many of those things just randomly die for no reason and refuse to work in any way for recovery. Really, I wouldn't recommend ANY external drive - Grab a desktop drive and toss it in an enclosure. Unless there's some kind of data guarantee within the warranty period.


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## dietrc70 (Dec 10, 2009)

Runefox said:


> Really, I wouldn't recommend ANY external drive - Grab a desktop drive and toss it in an enclosure. Unless there's some kind of data guarantee within the warranty period.


 
This is good advice.  You're better off getting a good enclosure (just check reviews on Newegg) and a good WD drive.

FYI, if you want really good speed, then you need an eSATA connector.  There is a huge bottleneck on both Firewire-400 and USB interfaces.  Many of the eSATA enclosures have a eSATA bracket that will plug into a free SATA port on your MB.  The only downside to eSATA is that you may have to shut down the computer to safely remove the drive.  The benefit is that the drive is as fast as if it were physically installed in the computer.

My Rosewill enclosure has eSATA and USB, so I can use it easily with other computers.  Enclosures also let you make use of a smaller drive that you are replacing but still works.


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## Captain Spyro (Dec 10, 2009)

dietrc70 said:


> This is good advice.  You're better off getting a good enclosure (just check reviews on Newegg) and a good WD drive.
> 
> FYI, if you want really good speed, then you need an eSATA connector.  There is a huge bottleneck on both Firewire-400 and USB interfaces.  Many of the eSATA enclosures have a eSATA bracket that will plug into a free SATA port on your MB.  The only downside to eSATA is that you may have to shut down the computer to safely remove the drive.  The benefit is that the drive is as fast as if it were physically installed in the computer.
> 
> My Rosewill enclosure has eSATA and USB, so I can use it easily with other computers.  Enclosures also let you make use of a smaller drive that you are replacing but still works.



From reading this, I presume an enclosure is pretty much a device that allows an internal drive to work outside of a desktop? If so, first I've actually heard of those.


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## Runefox (Dec 10, 2009)

Captain Spyro said:


> From reading this, I presume an enclosure is pretty much a device that allows an internal drive to work outside of a desktop? If so, first I've actually heard of those.



Yeah, an enclosure is basically an openable version of what an external hard drive comes in - A case with a USB connection and such designed to house a hard drive. Little do some know, inside those MyBooks and FreeAgents are actual, real life normal hard drives (3.5in or 2.5in, depending on the form factor of the case), with a stripped warranty.

The best part about enclosures is, when it's time to get a new drive, just go buy a desktop drive on the cheap and shove it in. And data recovery is more straightforward since it's easy as pie to get the drive out (couple screws here, a sliding panel there, oh, look, a hard drive - Unlike the nigh-impenetrable MyBook cases that almost require you to destroy them to get them open if you don't have the special tools to do so).



> The only downside to eSATA is that you may have to shut down the computer to safely remove the drive.


Not entirely true. If your motherboard's SATA controller is using AHCI (settable in the BIOS, but I don't recommend switching over if you're running your OS from a SATA drive - Unless you like reinstalling/repairing), it supports hot-swap, and you'll get the option to remove it like any USB device. Hell, my "Safely Remove Devices" applet shows my two internal SATA drives' volumes as removable.


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## ToeClaws (Dec 10, 2009)

Carenath said:


> This might seem like an off-topic tangent, but, my point is that you could and should build a RAID array rather than relying on a single drive to hold all your data.



^- This.  With drives being as affordable as they are nowadays, and RAID abilities being built into most motherboards, it's much, MUCH safer to use a RAID1 (hardware drive mirroring) than go with a single drive.  This, of course, does not negate the need for backups; it just adds a lot more of a safety net should the drive have problems.


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## Runefox (Dec 10, 2009)

ToeClaws said:


> ^- This.  With drives being as affordable as they are nowadays, and RAID abilities being built into most motherboards, it's much, MUCH safer to use a RAID1 (hardware drive mirroring) than go with a single drive.  This, of course, does not negate the need for backups; it just adds a lot more of a safety net should the drive have problems.



RAID has its own problems, and like you said, the need for backups is still there - RAID's major advantage is mitigating drive failure as a single point of failure. However, if the RAID array is broken and needs to be rebuilt, evidence suggests that the actual process of rebuilding a RAID array as the capacity increases into the TB range increases the risk of an unrecoverable read error and the destruction of the other drive(s) in the mirror before it can be rebuilt. I can't recall exactly which article I was reading on the subject, but this gives a brief overview. Reliability of RAID with high-capacity drives is questionable at best. Of course, that's what the backups are for!


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## capthavoc123 (Dec 10, 2009)

I would go with Seagate, myself. As long as you stay the hell away from Maxtor, you're good.


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## Runefox (Dec 10, 2009)

capthavoc123 said:


> I would go with Seagate, myself. As long as you stay the hell away from Maxtor, you're good.



Seagate IS Maxtor. Seagate owns them (as of 2006). And they use their plants. And they've had an increasingly high failure rate ever since they bought them. The 7200.11 and higher series has had poor reliability in the 1TB region mainly due to firmware issues, but also due to the manufacturing plants they're using. In light of this, they've reduced their standard warranty from 5 years to 3 years, too. People are still complaining about failures and firmware issues (just take a look at the desktop Seagate drives' reviews on NewEgg for example), and until that mess is cleared up, I have a hard time recommending Seagate. For that matter, their drives haven't been doing well in competing in the performance bracket, too. If that weren't enough, there are also reports of major issues trying to run the drives in a RAID configuration. Buying Maxtor was the worst thing Seagate could have done to itself - They were just fine up to then; in my opinion, better, in fact, than Western Digital.


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## ToeClaws (Dec 10, 2009)

Runefox said:


> RAID has its own problems, and like you said, the need for backups is still there - RAID's major advantage is mitigating drive failure as a single point of failure. However, if the RAID array is broken and needs to be rebuilt, evidence suggests that the actual process of rebuilding a RAID array as the capacity increases into the TB range increases the risk of an unrecoverable read error and the destruction of the other drive(s) in the mirror before it can be rebuilt. I can't recall exactly which article I was reading on the subject, but this[/b] gives a brief overview. Reliability of RAID with high-capacity drives is questionable at best. Of course, that's what the backups are for!




Yep - that's why RAID5 is pretty much a BAD idea nowadays.  RAID6 isn't far from being useless too.  But again, yeah - that's why backups are still important.   At the consumer level RAID1 is basically what I'd consider a "better than nothing" solution.  

With drives at the 2TB mark, the average chance of a bit-error or defect increases to the point where you're nearly guaranteed an issue if you try doing RAID5s with them.  That reliability stat may well be what helps make the push to get other more reliable forms of storage developed, like SSD, 3D optical or so on instead of platter-based systems.


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## net-cat (Dec 10, 2009)

dietrc70 said:


> This is good advice.  You're better off getting a good enclosure (just check reviews on Newegg) and a good WD drive.


Or, if you're not technically inclined, buy the enclosure from the hard drive manufacturer. (I doubt you're going to find a Seagate drive in a Western Digital branded enclosure.) Stay away from the off-brand external drives, as you have no way of knowing what you're getting unless you crack it open.



dietrc70 said:


> The only downside to eSATA is that you may have to shut down the computer to safely remove the drive.


As Runefox said, make sure the controller is in AHCI mode and not "Compatibility" or "Legacy" mode. RAID mode might work, depends on the controller. But you should only do that if you're actually using the RAID features. (Which I don't recommend. See below.)

If you're using Windows, *don't change this setting.* You'll have to reinstall Windows. Windows Vista and Windows 7 will have no problems running in AHCI mode. (You might need to load the drivers off a CD or thumb drive, though.) Windows XP will require the "F6 drivers" and a floppy disk to work in AHCI mode.

Ubuntu, since its /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst is UUID based, will have no problems figuring it out. (This is true as of 9.04. Not sure how older versions do it.)

Other Linux distributions will likely require that you change /dev/hdxy entries to /dev/sdxy entries in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst

For Mac OS X, as far as I know, Macs use AHCI anyway. Never messed with it much. (Not like you can change it if it's not, anyway. And if you have a Hackintosh, get a life. )



ToeClaws said:


> ^- This.  With drives being as affordable as they are nowadays, and RAID abilities being built into most motherboards, it's much, MUCH safer to use a RAID1 (hardware drive mirroring) than go with a single drive.  This, of course, does not negate the need for backups; it just adds a lot more of a safety net should the drive have problems.


I don't trust consumer RAID gear for one very simple reason: You can't necessarily get a replacement.

I've got a server with a Dell PERC RAID controller. If it dies, they'll send out a tech with a new PERC card, install it, and it'll find the old array and use it.

What happens when the JMicron controller on your cheap-ass ASRock motherboard dies? Well, fine, it's less than a year old, you'll just RMA it. Oh, sorry, they don't make that board anymore so here's a newer revision of it with a slightly different version of that chipset. Too bad you can't use your old array. Good thing you used RAID1 and you can just plug in the drive without the controller. Whoops, RAID1 still generally has a proprietary on-disk format.

(And yes, I realize that that's a worst-case scenario. But it's not as uncommon of an occurrence as you might think.)

If you want redundancy on consumer level hardware, you can't go wrong with rsync.


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## Aden (Dec 10, 2009)

net-cat said:


> If you want redundancy on consumer level hardware, you can't go wrong with rsync.



If on OS X, I've been using SuperDuper! and it works wonderfully.


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## Carenath (Dec 10, 2009)

net-cat said:


> I don't trust consumer RAID gear for one very simple reason: You can't necessarily get a replacement.
> 
> I've got a server with a Dell PERC RAID controller. If it dies, they'll send out a tech with a new PERC card, install it, and it'll find the old array and use it.
> 
> ...


In saying that.. the drive in my external, is a Seagate drive, I use it exclusively for backups however, and plan to replace it with a cheap NAS and a pair of 1TB WD drives in RAID1.

I also do not trust consumer equipment in general.. you might pay orders more for enterprise/business counterparts but generally you will get what you pay for.. and in some cases there are inexpensive alternatives that do an adequate middle-of-the-road or better job.


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## Captain Spyro (Dec 10, 2009)

Runefox said:


> Yeah, an enclosure is basically an openable version of what an external hard drive comes in - A case with a USB connection and such designed to house a hard drive. Little do some know, inside those MyBooks and FreeAgents are actual, real life normal hard drives (3.5in or 2.5in, depending on the form factor of the case), with a stripped warranty.
> 
> The best part about enclosures is, when it's time to get a new drive, just go buy a desktop drive on the cheap and shove it in. And data recovery is more straightforward since it's easy as pie to get the drive out (couple screws here, a sliding panel there, oh, look, a hard drive - Unlike the nigh-impenetrable MyBook cases that almost require you to destroy them to get them open if you don't have the special tools to do so).




Awesome! Thanks for the advice!


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