Originally posted by: jjmIII
Originally posted by: 13Gigatons
Also this uses 4 platter design instead of three platters.
Sadly, these are 5 platter.
5 platters likely means more heat because of the additional mass the motor needs to spin. It also _may_ lead to slightly lower MTBF because of the additional RW heads (more potential failure points, assuming a constant MTBF per head). Both of these are assuming apples vs apples - other aspects of the designs could (and likely would) change the relative standings. What is your major concern about these drives, and especially their having 5 platters?
Note that at $80 each, I can build a 5 drive RAID 5 storage farm for a little more than 3 drives of the WD Caviar (and for the cost of 4 of the WD's, add an additional drive to sit on the shelf as a cold-swap spare). I would run a separate drive as the system drive, so I'd expect that the storage array would run fairly idle most of the time, averaging maybe 50W or less for the 5 drives (plus another 10 or so for the system drive). Since this will be in a dedicated server box, there won't be a (significant) graphics card, so overall I'd expect the whole mess to run relatively cool...
Admittedly, the Hitachi's only have a 3 year warranty, but I don't know how serious that is - over 15 or 20 years and a couple of dozen drives in home systems, and 30 years and a lot more drives professionally (almost all running 24x7), I've only experienced 2 hard sealed drive failures (one a Deathstar, the other an apparently physically abused SCSI drive). There were more that gave failure warnings (usually well past their design lifetimes) easily in time to save the data and swap the drive out (and quite a few failures in open drives like 2310's, 3330's, etc., but that's not unexpected - especially since the tech that replaced failed heads on these drives usually smoked while he was working on them, which gives an idea of how long ago that was )...