Hard drive recommendation

[jhu]

One of the drives in my 2TB ZFS mirror died. It was one of those Western Digital green drives. So I'm not getting another one of those. Any recommendations for reliable 2 TB drives? I was looking at a Seagate Barracuda for $100 on Amazon. Reviews seem mixed, but all HD reviews are mixed, so I don't really know what to do here.

 

[Coup27]

Tbh WD drives get the best feedback from people around forums these days and Seagate seem to get one of the worst. Everything can and will fail sometimes so I wouldn't make a knee jerk decision to another brand. I would still get another WD.

 

[Kusnierek]

The Samsung EcoGreen F4 2TB drive used to be one of the highest rated around, however, now it's "Samsung by Seagate" so buy at your own risk. Otherwise WD and HGST are pretty good still.

 

[SonicIce]

u need a whole 2tb?

 

[jhu]

Tbh WD drives get the best feedback from people around forums these days and Seagate seem to get one of the worst. Everything can and will fail sometimes so I wouldn't make a knee jerk decision to another brand. I would still get another WD.

The issue with WD's green drives is that the head parks after a few seconds of inactivity. After 3 months of usage, mine were at 100k head parks. It's been about 7 months now and one of them died.

 

[Elixer]

Must it be "green" drives, or can you afford the black series of drives ?

I don't think anyone really has a clear picture of reliability these days. They have swapped out lots of parts, so can't really compare post floods & mergers with the drives they made before.

 

[jhu]

Bought a pair of 2 GB Hitachi drives. Hopefully they'll last longer than 7 months.

 

[ronbo613]

The Samsung F4 2TB drives were the best bet a few months ago, now they're not Samsung anymore, which is unfortunate and now manufactured by Seagate, which puts it in the "no buy" category in my opinion.
If you can afford it, I would go with Western Digital Caviar Blacks. You can get their RE4 enterprise drives on sale once in a while, that would be my first choice from WD.

 

[Zxian]

The issue with WD's green drives is that the head parks after a few seconds of inactivity. After 3 months of usage, mine were at 100k head parks. It's been about 7 months now and one of them died.

The head parking issue was not an issue. The data indicated by SMART is not indicative of the actual wear level on the drives.

I've had GP drives in my server for over 4 years now (8x1TB for 2.5 years, 4x2TB for 1.5 years). The 1TB drives were all showing well over 2.5 million "head parks" from SMART when I retired them from my server. I've sold them to friends and I'm still using a couple - all of them are still going today.

Random failure is random.

 

[Kusnierek]

Bought a pair of 2 GB Hitachi drives. Hopefully they'll last longer than 7 months.

Oh dear, are you sure that's gonna be enough space to hold your stuff?

 

[jhu]

Oh dear, are you sure that's gonna be enough space to hold your stuff?

Never enough space for pr0n!!!

 

[Kusnierek]

Never enough space for pr0n!!!

Well, I bet 2 GB will hold a lot of compressed photos, at least.

 

[samboy]

The Samsung F4 2TB drives were the best bet a few months ago, now they're not Samsung anymore, which is unfortunate and now manufactured by Seagate, which puts it in the "no buy" category in my opinion.
If you can afford it, I would go with Western Digital Caviar Blacks. You can get their RE4 enterprise drives on sale once in a while, that would be my first choice from WD.

Does anyone know for certain that these are now different other than the label and firmware identification being different?

I would expect that Seagate, having purchased Samsung, would put their own branding on the drive but keep using the same Samsung manufacturing factory; especially when there has been a shortage of HD's and insufficient manufacturing capacity.

I've received Seagate labelled F4 2TB drives and the controller boards etc on the back look identical to older Samsung drives I have. I've read a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt that these are now made by Seagate but does anyone have anything definitive that these are now being produced in a different facility etc (lower quality control etc?) that makes them worse? (other than distrust of Seagate in general?).

 

[thelastjuju]

The golden rule: the larger the capacity, the more "Green" the drive, and the shorter the warranty offered = the sooner the drive will die on you.

Honestly, right now I think the best buys are used WD Blacks. You can get a three year old WD Black on ebay that will still have a two year warranty on it remaining.. a brand new Seagate or Samsung (by seagate) will only have half that, a one year warranty.

As far as the Samsung F4.. I think we CAN be certain that its no longer the same internally, since they dropped the warranty from 3 yrs to 1 yr and many are saying that diagnosis tools show different serial numbers from the old version as well.

 

[WilliamM2]

I would expect that Seagate, having purchased Samsung, would put their own branding on the drive but keep using the same Samsung manufacturing factory; especially when there has been a shortage of HD's and insufficient manufacturing capacity.

All of the Samsung drives I purchased before the Seagate buyout are made in Korea. Now they say made in China. Not saying whether that's good or bad, but it can't be the same factory.

 

[jhu]

Hmm... turns out the bad drive is still under warranty so I RMAd it. Now what to do with all these drives?

 

[bryanW1995]

Well, I bet 2 GB will hold a lot of compressed photos, at least.

They are probably low res...

 

[beginner99]

The issue with WD's green drives is that the head parks after a few seconds of inactivity. After 3 months of usage, mine were at 100k head parks. It's been about 7 months now and one of them died.

What did you do with those drives?

I've 2 of those for 2 years and one of them has 50k headparks, the other 90k. Maybe they are not compatible with solaris/ZFS?

I vaguley remember having read that the issue is much worse in linux compared to windows. So yes for your use-case the hitachis you already bought are probably the better choice.

 

[Carson Dyle]

Does anyone know for certain that these are now different other than the label and firmware identification being different?

I would expect that Seagate, having purchased Samsung, would put their own branding on the drive but keep using the same Samsung manufacturing factory; especially when there has been a shortage of HD's and insufficient manufacturing capacity.

I've received Seagate labelled F4 2TB drives and the controller boards etc on the back look identical to older Samsung drives I have. I've read a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt that these are now made by Seagate but does anyone have anything definitive that these are now being produced in a different facility etc (lower quality control etc?) that makes them worse? (other than distrust of Seagate in general?).

I think what Seagate has done is taken the design and moved the manufacturing of the drive to their own Chinese factories.

But I would stay clear of the Samsung F4, which is now labeled "Barracuda Green" and has a model no. of ST2000DL004-HD204UI. The biggest reason isn't necessarily reliability or who is making it, but the fact that they have only a one year warranty.