My Thoughts On Hard Drives for HTPC and Storage - Page 2

I never have - but I refuse to buy any of the "budget" drives for just that reason. When I see all the reviews with people reporting DOA's and rapid failures, I stay clear - just like I did with Maxtor drives (not just because they were loud).

You get what you pay for. Buy once, cry once.

The sound I get from them spinning up is kinda like a phone modem noise, but obviously much quieter, followed a whooosh. I noticed it to be quieter after the upgraded firmware but it's mostly just a different sound, not eliminated altogether.

I used to, yes. When I was in the market for drives again I was shopping for RE4's but the economy and the floods made them "unreasonably expensive" in my opinion.

I also wasn't building HTPC's or media servers - just games - so I had been buying ssd's for purely speed-based reasons. Random storage was on RE3 drives (which I have and still function to this day, flawlessly) or on velociraptors.

Back when I first started playing with PC builds a HDD was a HDD - the only real difference available to the consumer market was brand. WD was great, seagate was loved by some and hated by others - but generally had higher failure rates than WD, and Maxtor was junk. Hitachi, Toshiba and the others were there but not in the volume or availability of the others.

So, when they started launching black, blue, green and red drives (still recent by my reckoning) I looked at them and bought RE3's and another pair of velociraptors to RAID 0. OS went to vertex2, as did games. Then I updated to vertex3, and vertex4 for my OS in my rig, while moving a vertex2 into my wife's rig with one of the velociraptors that I didn't need raid 0'd anymore.

When i look at the reviews online and I see 50% of the reviews (or even 25%) with DOA or "failed in 3 weeks" or whatever out of 500 reviews and it's 2-3 stars out of 5, I avoid it.

This is why I moved on to hitachi 7200 rpm and seagate 7200 rpm drives for my media server. Maybe I will be ok, maybe I won't - but I can't justify saving $50 per drive with the potential headaches they bring. My time is more valuable to me than that - not even considering the stuff that is stored on them.

While I realize that functionally the risks are the same, and understand that some batches are good and some are bad, I've stuck by the "buy once, cry once" methodology for everything I own and it's done well by me, and in 17 years I've never had a hard drive or ssd fail. My 2gb WD drive did eventually develop bad sectors before I replaced it, but I used it with bad sectors for a couple years.

"They don't make them like they used to" holds true. So now, I shop and learn from others mistakes so I don't have to make my own.

I just wish that enterprise drives weren't $150 over the standard 7200rpm drives. Double the price puts it outside my comfort zone for the sheer number of drives I plan to buy.

I'm sure my opinion would be different if I built pc's for a living and had to make money off drives by marking them up..I'm sure the benefit outweighs the cost in that circumstance. However, the drives I use store stuff I care about, so it's not acceptable to me to just "replace the drive".
Edited by goros - 3/5/13 at 10:21am

I bought three 1TB WD Green drives at the same time and two died 4 months later - within 3 weeks of each other. The third was still working a year later when I replaced it with a 4TB drive.

How were they used ? Green drives have low endurance and reliability in certain set ups.

Thanks for the feedback. I thought this was one of the things I'd get to last weekend, but I was surprised by out of town relatives. After checking power usage, I'm leaning towards never spinning down for an extra $10/yr and by consequence never hearing the "modem" noise anymore

Sorry, since you used so many words I never actually read what you said until just now. But the two quotes above are a big oxymoron. Did you read online reviews about the vertex2?

FWIW, I have used a vertex 2, agility 3, vertex 3, and vertex 4 for OS drives recently. I feel like the prices I was able to purchase them for was a direct result of their poor reviews and bad brand reception. I think the buyer opinions are changing since so many people took advantage of the price differences, and I only had one issue with the agility 3 that was fixed by me

I'll agree with you here. If I see a drive with a poor rating after hundreds of reviews, I'll definitely steer clear.

I have a variety of brands, but have mostly been using greens, and now reds, in NAS and media server. I've only had one drive fail in years. That was a WD green refurb (I was desperate) bought at the height of post-flood prices. As others have said, how the company handles RMA is important. Not only did WD get me the replacement in 2 days, but they also upgraded me to a higher capacity drive. Popped it into my NAS and rebuilt from RAID...that's about as easy as it can be.

HTPC Storage drives for DVD folder rips and BluRay ISOs. I think I just got part of a bad batch...it happens to all makers. They replaced them under warranty.

on side note I just RMA an old vertex2 60GB SSD to OCZ who kindly replaced it with a Vertex3

My second RMA I have done with OCZ. (both were actually vertex2 60GB's)

I own easily 15 Vertex3's and never had issue (yet) Knock on wood. But reputation wise they get trashed all the time. Reputation and actual reality of often very different.

I have just the opposite experience with them. Had two of them for HTPC builds (60GB Vertex 3's), and ended up RMA'ing them. One of the RMA'd drives also was causing BSOD's, so I just sold the other and went with Corsair Force 3's.

There were no reviews, I was an early adopter. In addition, i was going for speed on my gaming rig (a 790i Ultra SLI) and both the 40's and the 120 I purchased are still ticking today without a single issue. I spent a lot of time on the OCZ forums working with Ryder and Tony updating firmware, testing, benching and whatnot, but I also followed their instructions on how to set up the drives to get TRIM commands, make sure all the extra junk in windows was off, and that there were no suspend/sleep/low power states that caused all the issues for everyone else.

The only issue I had with the Vertex3 120 (again, I got the original, not the bait & switch) was that Nvidia did not follow the sata2 standards when implementing it on the 790/780 boards and the V3 would appear and disappear over and over for no reason like I was cycling power. When I put in in my p45 box it worked perfectly, so it stayed there until I built my current rig, which has the V4 256, a V3 120, a V2 120, and a V2 40. I still maintain them and update them as firmware comes out and I've had no issues with any of them.

However, they SHOULD have been plug & play, not "set up your computer exactly like this or your drive will die a horrible death".

Understood, it's hard to steer clear when being an early adopter

I also owned the 790i ultra, and in retrospect it wasn't a great choice compared to the P45 boards

Life is a lot easier now that the standard PCH at least controls all critical I/O

There is early adopter penalty on any new technology.

OCZ got a lot because it was a leader in SSD. They became the test bed for the technology, some called it the sandforce beta program lol.

OCZ was aggressive at getting into SSD market quickly and releasing new products fast. It worked great for sales but when some issues popped up in controller behavior it also worked great on crushing their reputation further.

Today I think it's all mostly just history though. While its often popular and trendy to hate on OCZ I think the relevance of the early SSD issues are small and is highly unlikely someone today would experience any of the early troubles.

Pointing at a first generation vertex 2/or3 and saying you'll get that today on your drive 2 years later is borderline idiotic. Vertex4 doesn't even use the same parts or controller, it actually has the same marvel based controller the OCZ haters love and adopt.

Circling back to make my point which has already been made in this thread is a couple years is an eternity in the tech world. This stuff changes so fast that by the time any reasonable amount if data or feedback can be collected and a popular opinion can manifest that opinion and data is already obsolete and near worthless.

I've had drives fail from just about every vendor, past and present, with but a few exceptions (anyone remember Micropolis or Quantum?). I couldn't even begin to guess how many I've purchased over the years, but I'm sure it's at least 100 or more. I used to upgrade Tivos and went though a crapload of drives. I've never had any RMA issues with getting replacements under warranty from any of them. Aside from a few SSDs and one or two WD green drives, I haven't purchased very many drives over the past year or so. On the plus side I've never had a drive delivered DOA.

I've got an unRAID server with 20 drives (1 parity, 19 data) at the moment. The largest drives in the server are only 2TB, and one is used for parity. The rest are all 1.5TB with a couple of 750GB drives. As time and budget permits, I intend to eventually start replacing the drives with 3TB drives. I'm not sure if my Supermicro SATA controllers can handle 4TB drives, but they will work with 3TB drives with the latest firmware update.

I've been recycling the drives from the server and using them in my PCs whenever I upgrade to larger ones. The server uses primarily WD green, Samsung, and various Seagate drives. UnRAID shows the temps of all drives in the array and the Seagates run hotter than the rest. The Samsungs run the coolest, but that's probably because they run at 5400 rpm. It's impossible for me to tell which drives are louder because the backplane fans drown them out. Fortunately, I keep the array in a closed room so I can't hear it. I had some issues with a couple of the WD green drives, but it seemed to have something to do with the backplane slot they were installed in. When I moved them to another location they seemed to work fine. I currently use a 1.5TB WD AV drive in my HTPC and it's been working great for several years. I don't even remember what I have in my main PC at the moment.
Edited by captain_video - 3/7/13 at 12:49pm

In my experience, the drive at the bottom of the cage is the coolest

Let's see..

I have

2 2TB WD Greens
2 2TB Samsung F4"s
4 2TB HGST Coolspins
1 3TB Seagate external

and even some older 1 TB WD Black and Seagate drives as well as a 2.5" 1 TB Samsung.

The loudest drives are the WD Greens followed by the F4's.

the Hitatchi ans Seagate products are quiet. They all run pretty cool and stream my media. What else do I want?

I'd say nothing

You've made a great point in that any drive will work provided it "works" and remains working. For this reason I always place reliability and cost paramount.

Performance issues are secondary. That includes not just speed, but energy, heat, noise, and all performance aspects.

I'd tend to agree, but I'm using an Antec Nine Hundred case with three Supermicro 5-in-3 SATA backplanes mounted internally and one sitting outside the case. The backplanes allow five drives to be mounted on edge so they go from right to left rather than top to bottom. The three backplanes are stacked inside the case. Each backplane has a huge fan mounted on the back that draws air through the cage and cools the drives. I haven't noticed a trend where drives mounted in a certain slot run hotter or cooler than the rest. It seems to vary more by make and model from what I've seen. Then again, it probably depends on how your server is configured and cooled.

Here's a similar pic of what the server looks like:

http://www.lime-technology.com/products/md-1510-server

Mine uses the exact same backplanes as the MD-1510/LL server on the web page, but a different case.

FWIW, I have HTPC with 5 internal drives and 4 external. 4 years now. Drives are/were a mix of Seagate, WD and Samsung. In the first 2 years I had 4 drive failures. Every single failure was Seagate.

2 of the failed drives I replaced with newer seagates (RMA replacements from Seagate) and guess what? These drives too eventually failed. That makes 6 seagate failures, 0 WD and 0 Samsung in my HTPC (thank heavens for RAID5).

If you think it might be the HTPC's fault, I also have a HP Windows Media Server (HP Mediasmart EX490) that I had 2 seagate drives. In the past 3 years, each seagate has failed and been replaced with either WD or Samsung.

To me that's conclusive. I notice that, according to speedfan, the seagates are on average 3-8degrees Celsius hotter than the other manufacturers and therefore may well be susceptable to heat releated failures. The only seagates I now have are external and even those run hotter than other external drives.

Robin

I tend to replace 3 year or 4 year old drives with newer ones knowing they are getting older. I sell the used drive on ebay often for a decent price and get out from under it before it breaks. They fetch big money as long as they have some MFG warranty on them.

Usually this is as much an updating and upgrading of drive size too. 3 years later drives are much bigger, and better. replacing a 1TB with a 3TB often makes sense. replacing a 750GB or 500GB makes even more sense. At least to me as this point a 500GB HDD is near worthless, it's wasting a drive bay IMO.

I just replaced my two 1.5TB drives with 4TB drives. Pulling HDDs out of external enclosures saves you a LOT of money!

It does until you have to file a warranty claim. Once you pull it out of the enclosure you've voided the warranty.

I tend to replace drives as my storage requirements increase. My server used to house 750GB drives almost exclusively. I have since replaced them all with 1.5TB drives and a couple of 2TB drives. When unRAID increased the number of drives it supports from 16 to 20 I added some of the 750GB drives back into the array. I will probably move up to 3TB drives as the budget permits. I'm uncertain at this point whether unRAID and/or the hardware will support 4TB drives, but that's not really important right now. At some point I need to stop adding more storage because the server already holds more media than I'll ever have time to watch.

It only affects the warranty if they can tell you opened the containers. I have opened in such a way as it appears they were not opened. There are no security seals to break and no sealed screws...it is all just snap locked together and easily opened. Lots of YouTube vids on how to safely do it.

You're rating the sound of your drives? Where are they located? I have my unraid server in a utility room, so I never hear anything from the server. On the other hand, I have a fanless PC for my HT, since I absolutely hate fan and drive noise.

I have all WD green drives of various sizes, depending on what was cheapest per GB when I bought the drive. I have 2-2 TB, 3-1.5 TB, and 1-1TB drives. One is being used for a cache, one for parity, and the rest for date.

I forgot to mention that one of my 1.5 TB WD green drives failed within a year, and they replaced it.

I have had 5 WD GREEN fail on me and they have replaced every one of them without any issues. WD RMA is not bad. I just hate paying the shipping.