2T 3T 4T or 6T??

[brannsiu]

A friend of mine told me that different capacities of hard drives have different build structure and quality and will in turn have different stability and performance, in addition to the size alone. He said 2T and 4T drives are better than 3T drive in its reliability.

Another someone told me that we should never go for the higher capacity, his claim was that higher capacity drive is always newer, and newer technology is often unstable with bugs or problems...

Are they right or just bullsh....??? Cost per GBs for 4TB and 6TB WD external drives here is approx. the same. Would 4TB or 6TB more reliable????

 

[4745454b]

There are different build structures, but it's more complicated then that. Inside of a hard drive is a spinning metal disk, similar to a record, or a CD if you are to young to know what a record is. Usually each newer generation of drives is able to pack more data per square inch onto a disk. What this means is that before when you needed to stack 5 of these plates together to reach 4TB, you can do it with only 4 plates because you have increased how much data can be stored on each plate/disk. So usually newer tech CAN be better/more reliable, though not always. Sometimes firmware bugs or other issues can happen and reliability goes down. You really can't just look at a drive size and say this 4TB drive will be better then this 3TB drive.

I've been running two of the newer 4TB drives. I've had some issues with them, but I think I've traced the problem down to my PSU. (or more correctly the SATA plugs on them.) I've had these two drives for nearly 2yrs I think, and they've been great. More so when you consider they are 5900RPM drives. But I only use them for data backups. I have SSDs for things that need speed.

 

[Mr Kagouris]

In a nutshell, it's absolute bullshit. As long as you buy from brands like WD, Seagate and Hitachi, HDD stability is the absolute last thing you'll have to worry about. Pretty much just go for whatever capacity you think you'll need.

 

[R_1]

the higher the capacity generally the more platters are in the drive, platters are the actual magnetic disk inside the drive. a simple example so you get the gist.
imagine a 1 TB hard drive with 1 platter inside, having 1 platter means a density of 500GB per side, this drive would need 2 heads, 1 for each side of the platter. the 1 TB drive has 3 main parts
imagine a 3 TB hard drive with the same density as our 1 TB drive. the drive now has three platters, and 6 read heads.
the 3 TB has 9 major parts.
newer higher density drive are using shingled magnetic recording, which increases density while adding to failure possibilities as SMR is relatively new and will be improved upon (reliability speaking) in the coming year or two. despite using a higher density new high capacity hard drives will have up to 7 platters and 14 heads.
the more the parts the higher heat generation and higher chance for failure.

 

[Shaun o]

Of coarse there is one down side to buying a very large capacity drive, of the mechanical type.
Yes great storage space.
And that is if you fill it up, or have lot`s of data on it.

Then its wise to also make a backup of all the data stored on it, on a regular basis.

As if the drive does fail in a catastrophic manner, it will take much longer to replace all of the data lost on it.
I just thought I would throw that in as a precautionary reminder.

I mean if I had a 4Tb drive almost full, and it crashed it would take some amount of time to install everything that was stored on the drive. Pain in the royal ass as it can be.

 

[xoiio]

Personally I'd rather get two 2tb drives than one 4tb drives, two 4tb drives instead of one 8tb, etc, purely because if you have the thing full and it dies, it's a whole lot worse. Of course you should back up, but I'm sure plenty of us are guilty of not having double redundant backups of files. I'm probably nearing he end of my luck.