Four 3 TB Hard Drives, Tested And Reviewed

[youssef 2010]

[citation][nom]WyomingKnott[/nom]Umm, how many platters? Am I the only one who cares?[/citation]

BTW, The WD drive has 4 platters only? this means 750GB per platter is now possible. I wonder how much more can we cram onto a single platter or are we already close to the limits imposed by material properties.

 

[Wish I Was Wealthy]

Overall I'll go for the Cavier Green WD. I'v used them for a while now & I have not had any troubles so far,so I'll just stay with Western Digital.

 

[Gman450]

I'm using a 500GB Seagate HDD as of right now.
I might get something better like this Seagate 3TB HDD, since 500GB seems too low right now, for me.

 

[Guest]

A warranty is only good if the vendor comes good. My 2Tb Seagate drive lasted 8 weeks; as far as they're concerned the drive doesn't exist. Most expensive paper weight I ever bought. Seagate suck. Stay well away!

 

[blackbirden]

Can anyone tell about noice levels of these hdd?

that is of great intrest for using in htpc/mediaplayers

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]youssef 2010[/nom]BTW, The WD drive has 4 platters only? this means 750GB per platter is now possible. I wonder how much more can we cram onto a single platter or are we already close to the limits imposed by material properties.[/citation]

Actually, 1000GB/platter is now possible. 4TB 7200RPM drives are starting to come out.

We are not approaching the end of density increases. 100TB drives are possible, just have to wait maybe 8 years. Shingled magnetic recording, heat assisted magnetic recording (hamr) will help make this possible.

 

[danwat1234]

[citation][nom]blackbirden[/nom]Can anyone tell about noice levels of these hdd?that is of great intrest for using in htpc/mediaplayers[/citation]
The Hitachi 5K3000 is the quietest drive I have ever owned. The seeking is very quiet, and the spindle motor is very quiet too.

 

[yumri]

why did toms hardware leave out 3TB SAS HDDs? they are also out there and i would be interested in how they would preform compared to the SATA HDDs that were tested. Due to the lack of SAS HDDs on Toms Hardware i think that the interface is more expensive due to lack of demand by the people who buy the parts often. So why not make another review of SATA, SAS, and PCI-express 3TB drives even though the PCI-express one would logically come in first it will still give us a good thing to compare to when making judgments about the different interfaces.

 

[yasir siddiqui]

WD is best choice.

 

[jacemace]

My stopped working working right away. This is the WD elements external hdd storage. Opened the case, and wouldn't you know the circuit board wasn't directly connectible with a 39 pin ribbon cable. That's fine, because the power is provided with a secondary circuit board along with usb compatibility. But then, I went to transfer a 39 pin circuit board from another WD hdd, and it didn't match. I guess it's too old. So now I'm looking for a 39 pin circuit board and/or adapter, to put it in my tower. Hope it will work then.

 

[Lantz]

Hello guys.
I need some advise here. I have long awaited some replacement disks for my faild 1TB WD green. After it failed, I bought a 60GB SSD which I run win7 on. Now I finally got me two brand new 3TB WB greens, that I planned to run in RAID 1 to avoid ever loosing my files to hardware error again. installed the disks, and found out that my P7P55 Pro MB only reported them as 750GB each and didn't want to boot win after I set the HDD from AHCI. So I set i back, and booted up again to read up abit, and find all this about TLER and such...

So... What do I do now? I bought this drives to get a more secure and "bullit proof" system, but now it seams that by arranging them in RAID I can assume to get in all kinds of trouble.

I use my computer for watching movies and processing RAW pictures (Photoshop and Lightroom). My intentions was to run win 7, PS and LR on the SSD, and use the two 3TBs in RAID 1 for picture and media storage (lost some photos in the 1TB crash). But do you guys think I'm better off setting them up individually and then setting up some kind of automatic back-up, or is this RAID problems with the WD disks only a real risk when you run striping RAID configurations?
Can I for instance just configure back to ACHI if one disk fails, and have all files available again? And will I then be able to zero-write the faild in ACHI mode and reconfigure to RAID again and automatically mirror the sound drive bak to the zero-written one?

I'm a noob to RAID and these things, so any advise will be appreciated. Prefferably quikly as my external MyBook is showing signs that it intend to resign.

 

[Guest]

Bought 4 Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000, running them in Windows Server 2008 R2, as single GPT, default allocation size volumes. 3 run fine, but the fourth keeps fragmenting the data at half capacity. The bios and OS report no errors. Ran 2 long re-format's and then restored the data, but still have corruption.

 

[Pooua]

I am about to RMA my WD Caviar Green 3 TB WD30EZRS HDD that I bought last year (it still has a few months of warranty remaining on it). It was GPT formatted as a single volume, to store my photos and videos. I went out of town on June 22, leaving my computer turned off. When I returned on June 23, my computer on boot up found corrupt and unreadable file record segments and corrupt attribute record on the drive. I was unable to access the drive, even after CHKDSK ran. None of WD's support steps or tools helped. Fortunately, I found software that was able to recover my entire directory and file structure, which I backed up to an external FD Gforce 3 TB HDD. My internal drive remained generally inaccessible to the OS (though I could access it through Drive Management) until I deleted and recreated the partitions on it. WD's Lifeguard S.M.A.R.T. tool reports the drive is healthy, and all drive metrics look strong. I don't trust this drive, anymore, though, so I'm returning it. WD sent me a WD30EZRX as replacement.

I am curious what caused the errors? File record segments 64 to more than 100 were unreadable by Windows 7 (64). What caused that? I actually used 2 data recovery tools, by 2 different companies. The first one recovered most of my data, but many of the files were corrupted. The second was able to recover everything intact, but it took 2 days to do it. Now that I've wiped out and restored the drive, it appears to be working normally, in perfect health. What would do that?

 

[mister_twister]

It is my presonal 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), see here http://www.harddrivesforsale.com/ssd.html. 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.