Looking for best HDD to use

I was also initially wary of all the mixed reviews of 2tb drives but Samsung had slightly less negative reviews than other brands. I have 8 of the 2tb f3 ecogreen models and have been very pleased with them - they are quiet and run cool.

Samsung has also just come out with a 2tb drive (the F4) with three 667 platters so that may run even slightly cooler. They are also currently on sale at the egg for 95 dollars a piece.

Keep in mind there a lot of people that their drives work fine and don't post a review.

the best enterprise class drive is the WD.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136579

They aint cheap.

I would not get caught up in statistics like that. The fact that 20% of people who write reviews on the drive write bad reviews have nothing to do with whether or not 20% of the drives you buy will have a problem or be DOA. Also
most people who buy a product that works just fine do not write reviews on newegg stating the product works great.

By the way, the new Spinpoint F4 2tb drive has 4 or 5 egg ratings from 92% of reviewers.

I also have three of the hitachi deskstar 7200rpm 2tb drives - I have not had problems with them either but they don't run as cool as the samsungs.

I have not run any diagnostics on them.

none of the drives mentioned so far are enterprise drives and those samsung drives are 5400 rpm and I doubt you want them running in an array since you are unintentionally crippling your potential speed.

The only other enterprise drive on newegg is this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148610 they also have it in a 6gb/sec model.

IMO, it's interesting to run a HDD diagnostic, but likely not worth putting too much weight/faith in the results. Let alone spending money on a HDD diagnostic program.

I've run two *free* diagnostic programs this past 4 or 5 months, on my Windows machines (same programs seem to run OK on both WinXP/32 and Win7/64 (my W7/64 experience only spands the last 2 months)): HD Tune ver. 2.55 www.hdtune.com and a free screen capture program to capture the results and print them out Screen Hunter 5.1 www.wisdom-soft.com

The screen capture program also comes in handy with N.E. pricing (my very recent FireFox browser won't print out N.E. web pages that have price/review info), when I want to track price info for awhile, to see what kind of price games N.E. is really doing.


Cheers

I wouldn't put much faith in Newegg reviews, other than 1) ideas, and 2) maybe to a lesser degree when a LARGE number of reviews have been done on an item (and even then I'd do a 2nd ck of *recent* N.E. reviews)

Also, the above are 3 platter drives; and maybe also some are 4 platter?




Why spend the extra money for enterprise drives???

The point of RAID arrays is to use *cheap* drives. With the exception of maybe a business server setup.


Cheers

There's also been recent speculation (on this AVS Home Theater forum) of upcoming 750GB platters. But unknown as to when. Even when that shows up it'll take a while before the HDD manufacturers ramp up.

I've got my eye out for 2 platter 1.3GB and 1.5GB HDD to start showing up.


Cheers

AFAIK, if the drive lasts for at least a week, it'll likely (99% ?) last 3+ years.




"3" (out of 12 1.5/2.0 GB HDD) strikes me as likely a good estimate.

e.g. This past 12 months I've bought 15 1TB inexpensive HDD; all from N.E. and all are 7,200 RPM w/13 at sale price of $60 to $70; only 2 are WD Black Label drives at $80-$90 (one SATA2 and one SATA3) and these 2 Black Label drives don't seem to be tagged with the "enterprise" word.

Of these 15 1TB drives, 3 were DOA; BTW, this does not surprise me; what did surprise me was that N.E. charged me shipping for my return of them.

Price of doing business .

Three ideas:

1. Come up with an *easy* way to test a few drives at a time.

2. Do NOT screw them into any kind of enclosure until you've checked them out.

3. Figuring that you only do this part time, only buy 2 or 3 drives at a time.


Cheers

If they are not already out, they cannot be far behind. I am not sure if the new 3tb external drives use four 750gb platters or five 600gb platters. I am pretty sure it is the latter, though.

i do not imagine that latest drives are worse than older , they are mostly colder and faster than them .
the big question about drives is buying model with 512 byte sector or 4k sector
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/librar...579-771430.pdf

i bought 6 x 2 To 4k last week at about 100 € each and will install them this week .
i ll know soon what is it worth compared to 512 byte , especially the gain of space as i will do some 1:1 copy

Why are you doing this?

My one guess is that it's a home setup. Right?

Meaning that business would likely not use RAID 10 with 12 HDD.

Meaning, with a 12 HDD RAID setup, why aren't you using one of the others like RAID 5 or other?

Anyhow, I like the current 1TB drives with now 18 of them (SS, SG, WD, and Hitachi), and see that Newegg currently has SS (Samsung) 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB cache for sale at $60 each (free shipping). Which is a good current deal, without any annoying "rebate" issue. Probably a 2 platter drive, but have never bothered to be sure on that. What I know for sure is that it's a good all around HDD and has a top current sequential transfer rate, which I time myself for my clone backups, where I pop the side off the case and temporarily plug in a raw drive at the side of the case to do a clone backup of one of the two internal HDD of a current PC.


Cheers

Quite frankly, SATA and "enterprise" don't go together very often at all in practice. At least not IME. We use all SAS drives. If its truly mission critical and you're wanting enterprise quality, you're going to find it in SAS drives.

Brandon

Agreed.

But a 12 SAS HDD RAID setup is major big buck money; which is why I asked him if he's only doing a home setup.


Cheers

It would definitely be expensive... that's for sure.

It just seems to me that he's looking for a near perfect HDD in the consumer sector. Doesn't make much sense to me.

Brandon

I would look into an online storage solution because if its irreplacable then raid isnt really a solution for that. mozy works well.

SATA is Serial ATA. SAS is Serial Attached SCSI. They run on the same cables, but SAS are enterprise. The problem with SAS is cost. BUT, the reliability and speed (they can be bought as 15k RPM drives) are why.

A lot of the enterprise RAID solutions (particularly Dell PERC 5 and 6 series) can do either/or SAS and SATA. The PERC cards are relatively inexpensive, too... PERC 5s are around $100 and PERC 6s are around $150 or so. PERC 6s are a bit faster... maybe 50MB/s to 100MB/s on transfers. Not a ton to worry about if you're just looking for redundancy. Great cards for the money. And they are true hardware RAID as well with battery backups if need be.

How much irreplaceable data do you have? You don't necessary need to backup EVERYthing online... maybe just do your most valuable data.

If you can use Win Server 2008 R2, there are some very neat cloning options. You can maybe setup a server at a friends house that's near identical to what you have and setup the machine cloning so that if you have any disasters that destroy your server, you have another backup in a different geographic location. It means twice the hardware cost, but if your data is as valuable to you as it seems to be, I would think it may be worth it for you.

Just a few thoughts.

Brandon

I've said this probably 10+ times on this forum...RAID is NOT a replacement for a backup. I've seen arrays go bad...Everything lost! RAID is for uptime...Not a backup. What if you have a brain fart and accidently delete your files or they get corrupt. With RAID it's GONE BABY GONE!


MIke

Great point, Mike.

And I'd like to reiterate what I was trying to say, but didn't come out and say it... backup at a completely different geographical location (even states away is good) is definitely a way to go for irreplaceable data.

Brandon

I just lost about 4TB of data and managed to recover some of it. Something happened on the array and then within windows something happened losing a few major directories.

Ironically, I think my RAID array on my server may have died, too... heh...

W00t for redundant backups.

Brandon