Which Brand HDD

[snakenobi]

I am buying 1tb and 2tb storage

Should be 7200rpm and SATA 3.0


1)Which brand?

2)What in-brand series? - like cavier blue,green,black

3)What all options are there? - 1TB,1.5tb.2tb.3tb,etc

4)Reliability

 

[tlmck]

If you are just using them for storage, the Caviar green series is fine. They are slower, so I would not use them as a system drive. You can certainly get the blue or black drives as well. The most reliable of the consumer drives would be the black series with a 5 year warranty. The most reliable would be enterprise level drives, but they are expensive.

You also have a drive shortage still due to the flooding they had in Taiwan where all the hard drive factories were. It seems so far, Western Digital is faring better than most in supply. They also happen to be the best drives.

The best prices and supply I have seen lately is Amazon.com.

 

[ram1009]

I strongly recommend an SSd for your boot drive, however I have used WD exclusively for over 15 years and only recently had my first data loss. That is what prompted me to buy my first SSD and I love it. The WD greens are fine for data storage.

 

[tlmck]

^ It was Thailand and not Taiwan.

Seagate HDDs are equally good. Samsung SpinPoint HDDs are known to be quite reliable.

In general though, it can be a hit or miss affair with HDDs. You either get one that lasts really long or one that faces sudden death.

Backup you data and you will have nothing to worry about.

Seagate is crap these days and Samsung is very good but they are out of the HDD business. Once the Samsungs are gone they are gone. The ones you find for sale these days are very expensive.

 

[toms_34]

So, which is the best these days for a system drive? Shouldn't be expensive.

 

[tlmck]

So, which is the best these days for a system drive? Shouldn't be expensive.

Unfortunately, all are expensive these days due to the shortage. You can still get some 500gb WD SATA 3 drives on Amazon for about $80.

 

[toms_34]

So, you suggest to buy WD then? Anyway I have to spend some money.

 

[toms_34]

My existing Seagate 1Tb drive have more than 4k relocated bad sectors. Is it because of brand or any drives works about 1-2 years? Also Seagate doesn't provide warranty on OEM drives

 

[someguynamedmatt]

Seagate used to put out some really nice drives. Emphasis on used to. I have a Barracuda out of a Dell from 2005 and it's still running strong without a single thing going bad. I've also had a newer model of the Barracuda burn out in about one year. They just don't make drives like they used to, and it's showing.

I'd recommend Western Digital. My absolute favorite hard drive of all time is their RE4 500GB Sata3 model - it's a single platter enterprise drive, which means it's about the most reliable single drive that's practical to buy. You'll also pay a price premium for them, though... my second favorite probably goes to the Samsung SpinPoint F3 500GB, although you probably won't be able to find one anymore. After that comes the WD Caviar Black lineup... they're all basically comparable depending on how much storage you actually need and how much you want to spend on a new hard drive.

 

[Nimos]

I would suggest that you can try the Segate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s 1-TB Hard Drive and also i have founded some more information about the hard drive so you can go over here and get more idea about it

 

[farsuka]

I believe the prices are going to be dropping even more soon, I've heard newegg is getting a decent amount in stock.

 

[vollman1]

prices in general or prices of a particular brand/model?

 

[FireCat]

Hope this helps a little;

With four desktops to maintain ...

Purchased a dozen or so sata, 74gb, 10,000 rpm, WD Raptors just for the operating systems and programs that default to them like MS Office and of course, the anti-virus programs
They still can be found, but they are mostly refurbished or reconditioned
The most I've gotten out of them is 40 months, the least, 14 months
Haven’t seen a new old-type Raptor in a few years
I very rarely go into the OS drive to do anything, and rule #1 is NEVER intentionally store anything on them
They are faster then 7,200's but not as fast as a SCSI

All other minor programs are loaded on a second drive
The second drives are usually Maxtor (IDE or sata) 7,200 rpm drives and they are used as the “working” drive
One is over six years old and still works fine
In ten years, I've lost 4

I use banks of 4 Hitachi or Maxtor (IDE or sata) 7,200 rpm drives on controller cards, ranging from 1tb banks to 8tb banks, with caches ranging from 16 to 32, for storage only
Lost one 1tb in three years ... 859gb worth of files, gone ... that hurt

One thing to remember with large capacity drives, and six drives in your systems, defragging takes forever and so does full system scans

 

[nasir70]

If you are just using them for storage, the Caviar green series is fine. They are slower, so I would not use them as a system drive. You can certainly get the blue or black drives as well. The most reliable of the consumer drives would be the black series with a 5 year warranty. The most reliable would be enterprise level drives, but they are expensive.

You also have a drive shortage still due to the flooding they had in Taiwan where all the hard drive factories were. It seems so far, Western Digital is faring better than most in supply. They also happen to be the best drives.

The best prices and supply I have seen lately is Amazon.com.

Please let me know what is the difference if i am using hard disk as storage drive and if i am using hard disk as system drive.Can i use my single hard disk as system drive and as storage drive?

 

[nasir70]

I strongly recommend an SSd for your boot drive, however I have used WD exclusively for over 15 years and only recently had my first data loss. That is what prompted me to buy my first SSD and I love it. The WD greens are fine for data storage.

Please let me know what is SDD?As you are saying SDD is good for boot drive and WD green is good for data storage so it means there will be two drives one will be used as boot drive and other will be be used as storage drive.Please explain.

 

[FireCat]

[Please let me know what is SDD?As you are saying SDD is good for boot drive and WD green is good for data storage so it means there will be two drives one will be used as boot drive and other will be be used as storage drive.Please explain.]


SSD = Solid State Drive, and they're small capacity Sata III drives, and they're offered by several distributors and manufacturers. Go to Newegg, Directron or other large retailers and read about them. Haven’t got one yet, by I’m very curious about them.

As for your question regarding multiple drives, I believe anybody who has been around computers for awhile will tell you the #1 rule is back-up. Rule #2 is always use a second drive as your “working” drive, in other words, only load the basic programs to the OS drive, like MS Office, antivirus, Java, Directx, etc. and load the minor programs you can to the “working” drive. Use the “working” drive to generate, edit and prepare files for storage then cut and paste to the storage drives and let the OS drive do its thing. Rule #3 is always use storage hdds for copy / paste / read / write, only, and NEVER use the OS drive.

Been messing around with banks of laptop drives for storage because they take up less space. Recently bought a bunch of Masscool’s duplex hot swap 3½” front bay enclosures that use laptop drives. With 5¼” housings they can be stacked in multiple bay cases and are easily accessible from the front. Tried it with four of them and it seems to work ok and storage capacity per drive is 1tb with 16mb caches. The tower was networked to the other systems as a faux server, and access to the drives as hot-swap, has been limited. Simply put, once the case was set up, there was no need to swap out the drives unless they crashed, so there sits a stack of 8, 1tb laptop drives in a giant eight bay black box ... Go figure.