Question Ironwolf or Barracuda

ayazam

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Jun 22, 2013
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so... i need a new hard drive

i have a pc that mostly turned on 24/7 from 2014, only turned off when moving or a power outage (less than 20 over the past 5 years)
right now i have 5 internal hard drives with 3 more slots in the case

from top to bottom
  • ST4000NM0033 (2016) (media) Constellation ES
  • WDC WD10EARS (2011) (seed drives) WD Green
  • WDC WD30EZRX (2015) (media) WD Green
  • WDC WD10EZEX (2014) (games) WD Blue
  • none
  • Hitachi HDS721010KLA330 (2014) (booting and programs)
  • none
i need a new hard drive because my external 3.5inch 2TB Seagate Expansion (2012) just died

the purpose of the new drive is for gaming and media while seeding (upload rate max 300kBps)
i only seed for the seed time, not for the seed size
and i never turn off my pc at all, that's the reason im still not getting an SSD till now
and im in a tropical country... so its hot, boot drive could reach 55c

which one would be a better choice... considering the usage and the condition of my stacked drives
an ironwolf or a barracuda or should i getting a harddrive like the constellation LOL
with a size atleast 4TB might getting the 8TB if possible

and yes... ill be getting 250GB SSD too while getting the harddrive

thx for the help and sorry for my bad english
 
Last edited:
D

Deleted member 14196

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Do yourself a favor if you get sn SSD and get a 1 TB at least 250 GB is too small. I’m kind of partial to the iron wolf drive myself for your other needs
 

ayazam

Distinguished
Jun 22, 2013
43
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Do yourself a favor if you get sn SSD and get a 1 TB at least 250 GB is too small. I’m kind of partial to the iron wolf drive myself for your other needs
the thing about the 'small' size because large ssd is still an exclusive thing...
even hard drive that size more than 4TB is considered an exclusive thing :cautious:
like... barracuda pro 12TB in my country is... ~$600 compare to newegg $460 HAHAHAHAHA :ROFLMAO:
a good 1TB ssd in my country is ~$220 compare to newegg $147
a good 500gb ssd in my country is ~$100 compare to newegg $78
love my country and its import taxes... so much

and since im still a student with an allowance (for living alone) about $150 a month im about to hunger myself... :ROFLMAO:
ill probably just getting a 500gigs 860 and a 7200rpm 4tb hdd

thx
 

jmw.ppr

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Sep 26, 2017
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In my experience, Seagate disks have (again) become far more prone to failure than their equivalent competitor's drives. I have not had a single drive failure since I bought a cheap Conner 1.2 GIGABYTE drive back in . . . yeah, had to be around 1994?

Seagate had just gone through a big change-up and it was well known in professional circles that they had become really lax in their class 100 cleanrooms. People were going in and out in their street clothes, which is a HUGE NO NO. Sure enough, huge problems started showing up in their products. Failure rates went through the roof. Prior to that, Seagate was the gold standard, but when that big corporate take-over happened, Western Digital quickly became the new "go to" company for reliability.

Those Conner Peripherals 1.2 gig drives that suffered huge mortality rates came out just a couple months after Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals, and sure enough, problems started becoming evident IMMEDIATELY once Seagate took over.

In the last 10 years all of the drives I have bought have been either certain Hitachi drives, (though I would not bet on a new Hitachi right at the moment), or HGST. HGST is the ONLY brand new manufacture drive I would currently recommend.

I don't know what the availability of quality used drives is where you are, so what I am currently shopping here may nor apply to your situation. Huge data centers, (BackBlaze being a prime example) retire huge numbers of fully functional drives with lots of power on hours and very few starts, and ZERO bad sectors. A used HGST 4TB drive can be bought here in the USA for around $65 WITH a solid warrantee from large outfits with great customer service track records. GoHardDrive is one example that sells refurbished "A quality" (zero bad sector) 7,200 rpm HGST Ultrastore SATA III drives.

I of course, am sorry that your Constelation drive died, but sure enough, I saw that coming! lol I too have about the same amount of money in my monthly budget, and learned many years ago, It's way less expensive to buy good products the first time than to go for to 10 or 15% savings the first time, only to find myself buying the product that does NOT break in a year or two later. ;)

Back Blaze has published failure rates of all the drives they have run. If you search, you can find those reports too. You will see that HGST drives are far and away the most reliable. The fact that you don't power cycle your drives a lot is actually good for them, especially if you also don't allow them to spin down either. The "kicker motor" that gets the platters spinning from a dead stop are often the cause of drive failures for home users, because the wear out when they are used all the time, then suddenly, one day, the drive simply won't spin up any more. Everything else is still good, and the data is fine, but you can't read a drive that won't spin.

My two main SSDs are Samsung 840 Pros, and still going strong. The other SSD I have is an old Intel x25 series I bought from a university medical student who was upgrading. That still reports 100% health too, and is also really super-fast.

Good luck in your hunt. I hope you find really great drives that never fail!
 
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ayazam

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Jun 22, 2013
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well 1994 im not even born yet hahahaha

yeah i know... i too prefer HGST, i atleast read it online how good they are... sadly no HGST here in my country
there are only 3 major drives... WD Seagate Toshiba, hitachi is either rare or gone....

im sorry to correct you, but its my 3.5 inch external expansion from seagate that died
you know because the harddrive get moving a lot turned on and off
and i commuting with a bike so...

i think, or i dont find it yet, theres no certificate used harddrive from a storage servers in my country... :(

when i look at crystaldiskinfo, most of my harddrive have a power on count ~500 and power on hours ~35k hours
is the power on count a lot considering im a home user?
and i forgot to count how many restarts ive done to my pc or because BSOD overclocking my PC/GPU

i hope i can get a 'big' ssd soon

Good luck in your hunt. I hope you find really great drives that never fail!
this not gonna happen anytime soon in storage technology haha

thx for your response
 

jmw.ppr

Prominent
Sep 26, 2017
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Western Digital was around before Seagate even was, BUT, Seagate just bought Western Digital. When Seagate bought Conner Peripherals, guess what happened. The quality of Conner's next hard disk (A 1.2 GIG drive at a cheap price) was SO bad that EVERYONE's 1.2's died within a year, with most not making it past 3 months before they filled with bad sectors and became comepletely un-useable. The drives that were sent back to the customers who DID RMA their quickly failed brand new disks were even worse than the original drive, because they were DOA or full of bad sectors, and the bad sector counts were climbing substantially every moment they were even running, just like the drive they sent in for repair or replacement. Some even sent drives back 3 or more times before they gave up.

Conner then bankrupted and closed, but I guess Seagate made out okay. In fact, they now not only had one less competitor, but had used to profits from the faulty drive sales to off-set a good portion of what they paid to acquire Conner. The next company Seagate bought, which like Conner, had a very decent product BEFORE Seagate bought them, was Maxtor. I'm sure you never heard of them either. Yup. You guessed it. Seagate did the same thing there, only just not as fast this time. Maxtor also went out of business after their drives slowly began to fail more and more frequently.

The Federal Trade Commission looked into this mess, but apparently "did not find evidence of any funny business," as everyone THOUGHT the certainly would. It was just a coincidence I guess. (Really?)

Guess who Seagate now owns. :) Western Digital.

Given the three options you have, my next questions is, what is the price difference between a WD hard disk and an HGST?

Now, as far as your statement about great drive that never fail being unlikely in the foreseeable future, your right, but there are an awful lot of VERY old drives that still run fine with ZERO bad sectors. The trouble is, a 40GB drive is useless!

I run Windows 7 on a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro with the programs I need to launch often and quickly installed on the C drive, and stuff that doesn't require SSD speeds or that I don't use often installed on Drive D. My Desktop is also NOT on drive C, because I tend to sort files on my desktop in folders before moving them to their final archive locations on a regular HDD, and some of the files I sort though are quite large. (Uncompressed wav audio tracks and large video files being the largest) So, there really isn't a great reason to hammer the SSD with huge files that are only going to be there for a short while before they wind up in a directory on a hard disk anyhow.

The same can be done for all the "MY" folders is you use those. You know, like, "My Music," My Videos" "My Documents" etc.

That allows you to run a good FAST SSD that boots SO FAST you actually travel backward in time without a need for a Terabyte drive. It's not really FOR storage you know! Movies and music don't play so fast you need them on an SSD! :) Games and other programs, however . . . yeah. Fast is definitely good.

I'm poor too, and when I have to eliminate food from my budget, I find that if I rinse my socks out and ring them into a bowl, it makes sort of a broth if I get crazy and start longing for some sort of nourishment! It's sorta salty! :eek:)~ Add a couple carrots and a little onion and like magic, <<<POOF>>> IT'S SOUP!

Seriously though, I have never had much money beyond what I need to pay my bills, adn that's still the way things are. So the few things I DO buy to make life a bit easier or more enjoyable, be it a pot to cook my "soup" in, or a new HDD, that will be all I can afford after saving for several weeks if not a few months, I tend to make sure I buy things that will last as long as possible. I can't afford to buy things that break quickly only to buy the quality I SHOULD have bought in the 1st place.

As far as the Seagate being in an external case and transported, if it's not running, the heads are parked, and in that state, a drive can endure shocks of something like 200G's. If you carry it in a backpack that's certainly better for it than in a basket or on a bike rack, but even at that, yeah, it definitely can "help" a drive fail sooner.

As for your power on count, it is actually quite low for a home user. Many people turn their computer off every time they walk away from it for more than an hour, and they have very high counts. I, like you, leave my machine on unless I need to restart or shut down to do something, or unless I am not going to be home for several days.

My 2 2TB drives show 1601 power cycles and 60,832 hours (2335 days) on one, and 1682 power cycles and 41,817 hours (1,742 days) on the other, and my 4TB seems to have SMART turned off. Hmmm. I think I turned SMART off on that channel when I had my little 1TB Samsung in the box. That drive has a known issue of falsely reporting that it is failing under Windows when it is not. There was never a firmware update for it, so most just shut off SMART reporting under Windows on that drive, because it's fine. Windows has been saying that "that drive" "might fail" and warning me to "BACK UP NOW" for something like 8 years. It still runs fine and has never lost any data. So, go figure. It's a known false report.
 
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so... i need a new hard drive

i have a pc that mostly turned on 24/7 from 2014, only turned off when moving or a power outage (less than 20 over the past 5 years)
right now i have 5 internal hard drives with 3 more slots in the case

from top to bottom
  • ST4000NM0033 (2016) (media) Constellation ES
  • WDC WD10EARS (2011) (seed drives) WD Green
  • WDC WD30EZRX (2015) (media) WD Green
  • WDC WD10EZEX (2014) (games) WD Blue
  • none
  • Hitachi HDS721010KLA330 (2014) (booting and programs)
  • none
i need a new hard drive because my external 3.5inch 2TB Seagate Expansion (2012) just died

the purpose of the new drive is for gaming and media while seeding (upload rate max 300kBps)
i only seed for the seed time, not for the seed size
and i never turn off my pc at all, that's the reason im still not getting an SSD till now
and im in a tropical country... so its hot, boot drive could reach 55c

which one would be a better choice... considering the usage and the condition of my stacked drives
an ironwolf or a barracuda or should i getting a harddrive like the constellation LOL
with a size atleast 4TB might getting the 8TB if possible

and yes... ill be getting 250GB SSD too while getting the harddrive

thx for the help and sorry for my bad english

Check out this link as it will help you understand what drive to use for the right job. This way you get a drive that is compatible with what you need. We do have a drive that is designed for 24/7 usage but it is more intended for surveillance.