Now $145: Retail 3TB Hitachi shipped Amazon

[davidtb]

What an upgrade strategy.
bought it, it failed in 2 years, IBM replaced with a bigger one, twice.

 

[hansmuff]

If they had drives fail 8 times in a row, something else is going on.

FWIW I had a problem with my two 3TB Hitachi drives... until I changed SATA ports.

That's if you believe the reviewer, and if you trust they know what they're doing. For the majority of "user reviews", most don't pass the sniff test.

 

[polypterus]

Deal is apparently dead. In the meantime, another review has appeared complaining of a dead drive. I know that most computer problems are traceable to between the keyboard and chair (esp. on Amazon), but this seems a bit odd.

 

[thesmokingman]

Deal is apparently dead. In the meantime, another review has appeared complaining of a dead drive. I know that most computer problems are traceable to between the keyboard and chair (esp. on Amazon), but this seems a bit odd.

I just got mine, comes in retail box... shrugs.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I had a 30GB 75GXP drive that lasted quite awhile. I started getting some bad sectors, when I let the drive heat up to like 55C in a removable mobile-rack enclosure.

So I wiped the drive and sold it on.

I still think that the problems with those drives were the firmware, and not the "pixy dust" myself. I only got bad sectors AFTER I installed their firmware update.

 

[potzocalli]

If I followed not even my advice but my experience I would not buy from Hitachi, Seagate, WD or Samsung, hell not even Maxtor. The only drive I have that still runs after all these years is a Quantum Bigfoot in all of its 6GB glory.

I have had problems with all brands at one time or another. WD were incompatible with my early socket A motherboards (wouldn´t be recognized), Seagate with the 1.5 TB fails (I swore by them before that) and failed drives every now an then of every make and model.

All brands have good and bad batches and series. Just look at reviews at several sites for that specific model before purchasing. 3-5 yr warranties are now standard so just be sure to stress the HDD when you receive it to make sure everything is OK. I personally don´t do it anymore, if a drive is faulty it will be immediately noticeable.

So sit back, install and fill up that sweet 3TB drive and while you are at it buy a second one as a backup option for all of your data. Your digital memories will appreciate it!!

 

[CZroe]

If I followed not even my advice but my experience I would not buy from Hitachi, Seagate, WD or Samsung, hell not even Maxtor. The only drive I have that still runs after all these years is a Quantum Bigfoot in all of its 6GB glory.

I have had problems with all brands at one time or another. WD were incompatible with my early socket A motherboards (wouldn´t be recognized), Seagate with the 1.5 TB fails (I swore by them before that) and failed drives every now an then of every make and model.

All brands have good and bad batches and series. Just look at reviews at several sites for that specific model before purchasing. 3-5 yr warranties are now standard so just be sure to stress the HDD when you receive it to make sure everything is OK. I personally don´t do it anymore, if a drive is faulty it will be immediately noticeable.

So sit back, install and fill up that sweet 3TB drive and while you are at it buy a second one as a backup option for all of your data. Your digital memories will appreciate it!!

You likely had your WD drives set to "Master" when operating as the only drive on the cable. WD drives didn't like that. They had a "Single" setting in addition to "Master," "Slave," and "Cable Select." No other drives did.

 

[polypterus]

Alive again. :thumbsup:

 

[jjmIII]

Alive again. :thumbsup:

Keep up the good work!

 

[SpacemanSpiffVT]

seems like a good deal so i kopped
hope there arent lots of problems with these drives

 

[hansmuff]

Just to give an actually applicable and useful view of the reliability of the Hitachi 3TB drives, take a look at this article:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

TL;DR: "We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully."

 

[polypterus]

Just to give an actually applicable and useful view of the reliability of the Hitachi 3TB drives, take a look at this article:

http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

TL;DR: "We are constantly looking at new hard drives, evaluating them for reliability and power consumption. The Hitachi 3TB drive (Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630) is our current favorite for both its low power demand and astounding reliability. The Western Digital and Seagate equivalents we tested saw much higher rates of popping out of RAID arrays and drive failure. Even the Western Digital Enterprise Hard Drives had the same high failure rates. The Hitachi drives, on the other hand, perform wonderfully."

FWIW the HDS5C3030ALA630 is the 0S03228 whereas the drive Amazon is selling is the 0S03230. I have no idea what the difference is, but Newegg lists them separately (both as OEM, so the difference can't be the retail kit). Can someone who bought the drive from Amazon confirm the model number?

 

[hansmuff]

FWIW the HDS5C3030ALA630 is the 0S03228 whereas the drive Amazon is selling is the 0S03230. I have no idea what the difference is, but Newegg lists them separately (both as OEM, so the difference can't be the retail kit). Can someone who bought the drive from Amazon confirm the model number?

Thank you for pointing that out, that is indeed an important detail. My goal was to actually counter some of the common misgivings towards Hitachi given their acquisition of IBM HDD technology. It really is unjustified.

 

[Sephire]

Excellent drives. Eight 2 tb drives 6 months old. No issues yet. They are in Drobo.

 

[bankster55]

like I said in the prev page, HDS7230 is the 64MB cache

HDS7 = Hitachi deskstar 7K 64mb cache
HDS5C = 32MB cache Hitachi deskstar 5K (amazon)

http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/all-hard-drives/

 

[polypterus]

like I said in the prev page, HDS7230 is the 64MB cache

HDS7 = Hitachi deskstar 7K 64mb cache
HDS5C = 32MB cache Hitachi deskstar 5K (amazon)

http://www.hitachigst.com/internal-drives/all-hard-drives/

Yes, but there are two different 3TB 5k 32mb drives, that's what I was wondering about. These two: 0S03230 and 0S03228.

 

[mangust]

Since there is some uncertainty regarding the model number, the drive I ordered on Monday turned out to be HDS5C3030ALA630. It came in retail box and included mounting screws. The retail box is pretty sturdy -- a good thing as Amazon didn't bother to include any padding in the shipping box.
I installed mine into a NAS and ran some tests. No problems so far.

 

[polypterus]

Since there is some uncertainty regarding the model number, the drive I ordered on Monday turned out to be HDS5C3030ALA630. It came in retail box and included mounting screws. The retail box is pretty sturdy -- a good thing as Amazon didn't bother to include any padding in the shipping box.
I installed mine into a NAS and ran some tests. No problems so far.

Thanks for the info, same drive then apparently.

 

[bankster55]

Yes, but there are two different 3TB 5k 32mb drives, that's what I was wondering about. These two: 0S03230 and 0S03228.

Those are not Hitachi numbers - they are newegg numbers

 

[polypterus]

Those are not Hitachi numbers - they are newegg numbers

Strange how Amazon uses Newegg numbers then 0S03230 0S03228

 

[jjmIII]

alive..

 

[Evadman]

Already have 7, one was kicked out of my RAID array by my adaptec card with some smart errors (haven't researched what they are yet). I want to get another so bad so I can expand my array, and this price is making it easy to justify.

 

[QSnexus]

Got one myself for the slightly earlier $106.xx shipped price from this past weekend w/free Prime 2-day shipping and it is working out great, placed a gig of data on it. I was not scared about modern Hitachi hard drives as I already had good luck with the 2TB version of Hitachi that has been in my NAS for a year. At first the 3TB drive was only showing that it had about a 746GB of capacity, in Win7 Computer Management list, in the un-partitioned state, but then I read one forum post that mentioned the requirement to upgrade the currently installed Intel SATA Storage chipset driver to version 10.x from the Intel website as I was apparently running the default Intel SATA chipset driver that came with Win7 64-bit Ultimate on my now aging Intel P965 chipset based Dell 9200. After the simple driver update via the "iata_enu_10.6.0.1022.exe" installer package from Intel.com and a reboot the full amount of 3TB was detected just fine without any additional tools to run other than looking at the drive again in Computer Manager area of Win7. I then told Win7 64-bit to do a full format of the HDD just in case after reading a couple of Newegg reviews mentioning that possible need to do a full format which took about 8 hours to complete. This desktop PC now had 6.5TB of storage and was placed in the last remaining internal HDD slot, should be good for another year of movie storage!

 

[QSnexus]

Got one myself for the slightly earlier $106.xx shipped price earlier this week with free Prime 2-day shipping and it is working out great, placed a gig of data on it. I was not scared about modern Hitachi hard drives as I already had good luck with the 2TB version of Hitachi that has been in my NAS for a year. At first the 3TB drive was only showing that it had about a 746GB of capacity, in Win7 Computer Management list in the non-partitioned state but then I read one forum post that mentioned the requirement to upgrade the currently installed Intel SATA Storage chipset driver to version 10.x from the Intel website as I was apparently running the default Intel SATA chipset driver that came with Win7 64-bit Ultimate on my now aging Intel P965 chipset based Dell 9200. After the simple driver update via the "iata_enu_10.6.0.1022.exe" installer package from Intel.com and a reboot the full amount of 3TB was detected just fine without any additional tools to run other than looking at the drive again in Computer Manager area of Win7. I then told Win7 64-bit to do a full format of the HDD just in case after reading a couple of Newegg reviews mentioning that possible need to do a full format which took about 8 hours to complete. This desktop PC now had 6.5TB of storage and was placed in the last remaining internal HDD slot, should be good for another year of movie storage!

 

[jjmIII]

I'm using Win7 64....

I can see all 3tb, but format MBR or GPT ??

This will be a storage drive (not boot).