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Archive 2014 · Which Hard Drive

  
 
Perdu
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · Which Hard Drive


I had a couple of hard drives die on me this year and I'm wondering which drives you find the most reliable? I'm looking for a internal and external drive and have been using Seagate and WD for my graphics, but like I said, not with much luck.


Oct 06, 2014 at 10:37 AM
wtlloyd
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · Which Hard Drive


WD Black

"Ya, well, y'know, that's just like, uhhh, your opinion man."

For those who need it:




Oct 06, 2014 at 12:05 PM
15Bit
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · Which Hard Drive


Just pick one - they're all much of a muchness. It is generally worth getting models with longer warranties though, as it suggests the manufacturer has more faith in the product.

For what little it is worth, i am currently buying WD RED's for storage and Samsung SSD's to boot off. The next poster along will probably be buying Seagates.

If you've really had 2 drives dies in close succession, it might be worth having a critical look at your PC. It might be that you have insufficient cooling in the case. Also, one of the symptoms of a failing PSU is hard drive errors.



Oct 06, 2014 at 12:37 PM
aubsxc
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · Which Hard Drive


WD Black or WD Enterprise if you can afford it.


Oct 06, 2014 at 02:05 PM
socaltyger
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · Which Hard Drive


WD Black or RED for internal storage. Samsung SSD for OS.


Oct 06, 2014 at 11:55 PM
OntheRez
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · Which Hard Drive


The "enterprise" grade hard drives are "supposed" to be longer lasting, more durable, make coffee, etc. Compared in their entirety "consumer grade" vs "enterprise grade," the enterprise drives will likely have longer lifespans. On the other hand, I have never seen any real studies or data demonstrating this. The Backblaze people have several posts in which they have been following drive life of thousands of drives over several years and their observations are worth a read. Their blog has several articles discussing this with lots of local comment. At the moment the Hitachi drives seem to do better, but if you read their studies carefully it becomes obvious that all drives fail and death is unpredictable.

Frankly - assuming no infant death syndrome - most drives will give reasonable service for 2-3 years assuming they aren't over loaded and not in some heavy use - say massive online query to a database. Look for a good price and good supplier (I always go with OWC, www.macsales.com) because of their service. Backup religiously (and to multiple sources) and define the life span of your drives replacing them BEFORE they fail.

Robert



Oct 07, 2014 at 11:32 AM
wtlloyd
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · Which Hard Drive


15Bit wrote:
Just pick one - they're all much of a muchness. It is generally worth getting models with longer warranties though, as it suggests the manufacturer has more faith in the product.

For what little it is worth, i am currently buying WD RED's for storage and Samsung SSD's to boot off. The next poster along will probably be buying Seagates.

If you've really had 2 drives dies in close succession, it might be worth having a critical look at your PC. It might be that you have insufficient cooling in the case. Also, one of the symptoms of a failing PSU
...Show more

Excellent points. To elaborate, is your power supply up to the task of supplying clean, steady power? If you don't have one, consider a healthy sized UPS that will act as a power modulator, evening out power spikes and lows with filtering through it's battery.



Oct 08, 2014 at 09:24 PM
Perdu
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · Which Hard Drive


One of the drives that failed was connected to my PC and the other on a network, but good point, I will get a UPS. Thanks everyone for the suggestions.


Oct 09, 2014 at 08:44 AM
15Bit
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p.1 #9 · p.1 #9 · Which Hard Drive


I was actually referring to the internal power supply unit in the computer. But if the drives were USB or network connected then this doesn't really apply.

I'm not sure if a UPS isn't overkill, unless you live in an area with unreliable power delivery. I used to run one for a few years, but in truth i had little need for it and when the batteries died i didn't bother to replace them. I don't miss it.



Oct 09, 2014 at 09:48 AM
phcorrigan
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p.1 #10 · p.1 #10 · Which Hard Drive


OntheRez wrote:
The "enterprise" grade hard drives are "supposed" to be longer lasting, more durable, make coffee, etc. Compared in their entirety "consumer grade" vs "enterprise grade," the enterprise drives will likely have longer lifespans. On the other hand, I have never seen any real studies or data demonstrating this.


Enterprise drives really aren't designed to replace desktop drives. The two primary differences are that enterprise drives, which are designed to be used in multi-disk arrays, will limit the number of retries on an error condition and report the error sooner. This is something that is desirable in a disk array but not in a single drive. Also, most enterprise drives have a greater degree of vibration resistance, something that is important when you have hundreds of drives in a rack.



Oct 09, 2014 at 11:51 PM
pw-pix
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p.1 #11 · p.1 #11 · Which Hard Drive


The WD Black are good, reliable and offering good performance in a PC.
The WD Red are intended for NAS use and work well in that role.



Oct 10, 2014 at 05:00 AM
kabraxcis
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Which Hard Drive


WD Red for RAID/NAS
WD Green for non-RAID/non-NAS

as far as I can tell most HDD companies have the same failrate.



Oct 13, 2014 at 08:29 PM
GOVA
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p.1 #13 · p.1 #13 · Which Hard Drive


To answer your question: Hitachi.

That said it does not mean it will not fail. It will as all HDDs will fail eventually.

End of story.

Do backups. Backups are only HDD brand that will do what you are looking for.



Oct 16, 2014 at 08:36 AM
Alan321
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p.1 #14 · p.1 #14 · Which Hard Drive


Whichever brand you get, get a big one and use the first half of it for maximum performance. There's a chart comparing big drive performance at http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html

My experience is that any and all brands can die on me.

I just recently looked up WD enterprise grade drives and WD recommend you use RED drives for NAS and RAID rather than the Enterprise drives. The REDs are slower but vibrate less and cooperate better with others when in the same RAID. In the end it was all too complicated





Oct 18, 2014 at 03:16 AM
15Bit
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p.1 #15 · p.1 #15 · Which Hard Drive


Alan321 wrote:
In the end it was all too complicated

It is rather complicated, especially now that the manufacturers are segmenting their product lines in so many ways.

In short though, the major differences between drives are:

1. Construction - enterprise drives may have higher tolerance components, better motors, higher inertia platters, spindles anchored at both ends, more internal sensors and faster/more processors. Basically, features to improve reliability and reduce and compensate for vibrations in all axes. Enterprise drives will also ship with ECC cache RAM, and plenty of it. Desktop drives will miss a lot of these features, NAS drives will lie between, having some features but not others. For the consumer, the quality of construction will be reflected in the length of the warranty.

2. Firmware - Increasingly, drives come with firmware optimised to an application: Different drive applications come with different mixes of read and write, and different mixes of random vs sequential transfers. The firmware reflects this. So drives aimed at Desktop PC use (enterprise or consumer) may be optimised to give good overall performance for both sustained transfers and random i/o at relatively low queue depths, whilst media drives will have firmware optimised to sustained and stable transfers. NAS and enterprise array drives will come with firmware that works well when there is a lot of data queued to be read/written, gives good interplay between several drives and gives good hotplug and RAID rebuild characteristics. These differences between these might be things as simple as how aggressively a drive pursues a read/write error - on a desktop drive (consumer or enterprise class) you want the drive to try very hard to recover any errors, but on a media streaming drive (or one of the new "surveillance" grade drives") you don't want your live video recording to be interrupted for 30 secs whilst the drive devotes all it's efforts to reading a bad sector and then remapping a spare from it's cache. Same for a drive in an array - a bad sector doesn't matter because the data can be reconstructed quickly from the checksums/mirrored data.




Oct 18, 2014 at 03:55 AM





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