Buying a new hdd

[nurturedhate]

Need to upgrade my old seagate 500gb drive. Haven't had a reason to buy a non ssd in a long while. What is a good hdd in the 1-4tb range?

Been looking at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005T3GRLY/?tag=pcpapi-20

 

[Charlie98]

I have 3 Barracudas... 1x 1TB, 2x 2TBs and they work very well. I just can't embrace the Green drives just yet... I'll stick with 7200RPM'ers.

If I was to buy a HDD today, the Barracuda would be my first choice, but I would probably look at what was on sale that day... WD, Toshiba, Seagate... meh, all the consumer level HDDs are worthy.

 

[gpse]

Western Digital Caviar Black
I just picked up two 1 TB models for raid, they are single platter and very fast!
1003 fzxe

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I investigated that particular Seagate a few months back and came away confused about the warranty.

As I recall, the data sheet for that drive at Seagate web site does not state a warranty length. You are asked to enter a serial number in order to find out warranty details.

I wonder why they wouldn't include an ordinary English sentence to describe the warranty? I don't see it mentioned at your Amazon link either.

And--as I recall, the downloadable documents at Seagate for the 3 and 4 TB drives don't even refer to RPM. Hmmmm.....what's that mean?

And--you might find some confusion online between Seagate "Barracuda" models and Seagate "Desktop" models.

On the other hand, the data sheet for the RETAIL version states 2 year warranty.

I'd probably try to buy the retail version because of the stated warranty and because it might I say might be better protected from shipping incidents. Or maybe consider the WD Red 3 GB. But I see lots of complaining about it too.

Really, I'm not happy with the choices out there as I see too many complaints on all brands and models--seemingly more than I saw 3 or 4 years ago. Some are alleging quality has decline across all brands as compared to the pre-flood era.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Western Digital Caviar Black
I just picked up two 1 TB models for raid, they are single platter and very fast!
1003 fzxe

If I buy another HDD, I'm likely to swing with WD just out of habit. I'd used Seagates and Hitachis (before and after the IBM spinoff), and I recently had picked up one or two 1TB Samsung drives. For the latter, I forgot the model name, but I can't find them available anymore. I keep thinking they were SATA-III, but they may have been SATA-II.

It's easy to settle into a preference after dated reviews had touted the manufacturer or earlier models. But the WD Blacks are still supposed to be pretty good . . .

 

[smitbret]

Depends on what your needs are. From a pure performance standpoint the Seagates are unbeatable by a platter drive. I put a 3TB Toshiba 5940rpm drive in my NAS last night and benchmarked it next to the Seagates in the server. The Toshiba did pretty well, reporting an average of of about 138MB/s. Just for fun I ran the benchmark on one of the Seagates and the graph was flat for the first 1200GB because it maxed out my SATA interface, bouncing between 160MB/s and averaged, with the flat line for the first 1GB, 148MB/s.

If I remember my benchmarks from a year ago when I stuck them on an SATA6 connector, they would give me bursts near 210MB/s and averages around 170MB/s but it may have been +/- 5 or so.

I just bought the Toshiba cuz it was $99 for a 3TB and it was right in front of me. We're it not for that, and my curiosity about how the Toshibas are working, I would have gone with the Seagates. They're quieter than the WD Greens I have and only run about 1 degree warmer. While I have had good luck with the Greens, I just can't find any reason to go with them over the Seagates.

If you want a good performance drive that has an excellent track record for reliability then the WD Blacks are just a notch lower than the Seagates but will probably be more reliable in the long run and come with a 5 year warranty.

If you can find a Hitachi for a reasonable price, storage company Backblaze says they have been the most consistent and reliable performers since 2009 and the 1.5TB Seagates are dogs.

 

[denis280]

WD Black.the best with the 5 year warranty.

 

[antef]

I'm also shopping 2 TB drives right now and nearly everything has a lot of bad reviews, WD or Seagate. Not sure which way to go.

 

[Charlie98]

I'm also shopping 2 TB drives right now and nearly everything has a lot of bad reviews, WD or Seagate. Not sure which way to go.

Depends on which drive you are looking at...

As far as bad reviews... the ALL have some amount of bad reviews. Just pick a drive that fits your needs and budget and run with it. If warranty is important to you, you can get it (WD Black, for example) but you are going to pay for that.