Four 3 TB Hard Drives, Tested And Reviewed

[Guest]

Hard drives able to hold 3 TB of data need to be considered carefully because they might not always work as expected. This round-up of four high-capacity disks compares products from Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital, then covers their caveats.

Four 3 TB Hard Drives, Tested And Reviewed : Read more

 

[agnickolov]

Three terabyte hard drives remain premium products, not only because they're best handled by enthusiasts who know what they're doing, but also because they're the largest disks available and you always seem to pay more for the largest, fastest, coolest...well, you know the drill.

Well, that's no longer the case:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/GoFlex-Desk-4TB-3.5-inch-industrial-design-USB-3.0,13371.html

 

[The_King]

Seagate 5 year warranty FTW

 

[vdr369]

Seagate barracuda is pulling my heart with it's performance, but punching my pocket with it's price,

 

[salb99]

the hitachi 5k3000 at max throughput uses less power than at idle, is it correct? also, video power consumptions here are the same as idle for all drives.

 

[dww]

I don't see the point of 3 TB drives. Too big to use in most current systems, but too small to be a useful gain over 2 TB for those that CAN handle larger sizes. At present they're also too expensive, and once 4 TB drives come out in volume they'll be superseded. So I guess they're just a short term stopgap.

 

[excidium]

Graph labels for the 7K3000 are incorrect ( 5400RPM ) on page:
Benchmark Results: Throughput And Interface Bandwidth

Haven't finished reading the rest of the article.

 

[Guest]

WD30EZRS recommended for NAS?
how about TLER ? and the issue with frequent head parking ? Though the later is correctable with wdidle3.exe..
Considering each green drive might have different rotation speed are you sure about your NAS recommendation?

 

[monkeysweat]

i know 2TB is cheaper per GB,, however i only got 4 HDD slots in my case,, and 3 are in use already,, 1.5, 2.0 & 2.5 TB model drives + 1 SSD tucked under my card reader,, either i gotta spend more on a new case + drive or just spend a little more on a nice drive...

 

[chesteracorgi]

With 2 Samsung 2.0 TB F4 Ecogreen (SATA 3.0 & 32 MB cache) and 2 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda Green (SATA 6.0 & 64 MB cache) drives installed in my home server, it is my experience that HDDs are no better off on SATA 6.0 than on SATA 3.0. If you are looking for performance then look for a faster rpm rate: the 640 GB WD Caviar Black (SATA 6.0 & 64 MB cache) kills all of the above in speed. However, none of these HDDs can touch an older generation SSD like the Crucial C300 (128 GB).

The most important characteristic of the HDDs is reliability. So far, since 3/11, all of the HDDs have proven reliable, while the SSD had to be RMA'd after a couple of weeks.

But the story is not complete on any of this hardware as it is still premature to talk about long term results. I believe that reliability is the biggest issue with 3 TB drives and would like to see more on failure rates and reliability.

BTW the average feedback at Newegg on large HDDs is about 60% positive (4 or 5 eggs) on large drives. I made a decision to buy only drives with a rating of at least 80% aggregate positive.

 

[nforce4max]

I went with three 2TB Hitachi drives instead.

 

[nordlead]

[citation][nom]imnoone[/nom]WD30EZRS recommended for NAS? how about TLER ? and the issue with frequent head parking ? Though the later is correctable with wdidle3.exe..Considering each green drive might have different rotation speed are you sure about your NAS recommendation?[/citation]
I'm using a WD Green drive in my NAS and while it should be a consideration the simple solution to the head parking was to put the drives to sleep after an appropriate time interval. One of the drives is used as a backup drive and is put to sleep after 5 minutes, and the other is used for media and sleeps after 20. This eliminates the head parking problem without having to use wdidle and uses less power due to the disks being spun down. The 5-sec delay with starting a movie isn't a big deal and the backups are automatic so I don't notice it anyways.

 

[hixbot]

Are these 512 byte sectors or 4k?

 

[bobjones003]

My main file server has large amount storage space. I still buy 2 tb hard drives when it needs more stoarge space. That will only work once more it only has single 1 tb hard drive left. The board supports 6 sata and 2 ide. Everything is filled boot drive is old 250 ide from 3 years ago and uses a ide dvd drive.

 

[mikeangs2004]

@nforce4max; CoolSpin came later than IntelliPower, so did the corresponding HDD's

 

[geekapproved]

Warranty isn't important? Seagate now only offers 2yrs on oem drivers

 

[CaedenV]

[citation][nom]GeekApproved[/nom]Warranty isn't important? Seagate now only offers 2yrs on oem drivers[/citation]
That's great news, they use to only warranty 1 year on OEM drives (not drivers), but they have always had 3-5 years on retail boxes, which really don't cost that much more

 

[animeman59]

Got 2 of the 3TB Hitachi 7K3000 drives. One for my Steam and game installs, and the other as my backup drive, along with two 1TB drives for additional backup redundancy for the more important stuff.

Great drives overall. Runs really well, and I have more than enough space for all of my media, documents, and games. These drives will last me for several years as far as space is concerned. Whether they'll be reliable enough for that time period is another issue. But that's what backups are for.

If you have the cash, then the Hitachis are a really good investment. Last storage drives you'll ever buy for a couple of years.

 

[thepregnantgod]

I have 4 3TB WD Greenies and I doubted everyone else's comments about the TLER problem when using in RAID. If you're trying to RAID something at those amounts of storage you're going to be very sorry when the array keeps dropping your Green drives due to TLER timeout/conflicts and you have to rebuild or lose the data. I lost about 6 TBs of media trying a 4x3TB RAID 5 array on a RocketRaid 2300. And yes, it's fake raid which was supposed to be kinder than true hardware RAID on these drives.

Bottom line, they are great storage drives - individually.

 

[Antman56]

I have been running 4 3TB Hitachi 7200's in Raid 5 on a AMD 790GX motherboard for half a year now! The transfer rates are straight nasty! I am getting over 600MB/s on reads! I have never experienced a fault... so that is what I'm sticking with

 

[lp231]

[citation][nom]The_King[/nom]Seagate 5 year warranty FTW[/citation]
Didn't they reduce the 5 year HDDs down to 3 years and
3 year HDDs down to 2 years?

 

[lp231]

[citation][nom]thepregnantgod[/nom]I have 4 3TB WD Greenies and I doubted everyone else's comments about the TLER problem when using in RAID. If you're trying to RAID something at those amounts of storage you're going to be very sorry when the array keeps dropping your Green drives due to TLER timeout/conflicts and you have to rebuild or lose the data. I lost about 6 TBs of media trying a 4x3TB RAID 5 array on a RocketRaid 2300. And yes, it's fake raid which was supposed to be kinder than true hardware RAID on these drives. Bottom line, they are great storage drives - individually.[/citation]

WD has HDD designed for RAID called "RE" drives

 

[WyomingKnott]

Umm, how many platters? Am I the only one who cares?

 

[thepregnantgod]

Yes, WD does make RE drives. I'm not maligning WD. The RE drives though cost a premium - when back in the day by simply modifying the TLER settings on the drive one could make a green drive more RE-like.

 

[youssef 2010]

Great article. Segate seems to be the best 3TB drive for me.

Can't help but notice the increased number of typos and technical mistakes in the latest TH articles. What's going on, guys?