Opinions on 1 and 2 TB HDDs?

[TheInternal]

Greetings,

I'm looking to get a new HDD for an older computer (SATA I, I believe) and intend to transfer the HD to a new system a few months later.

From what I've read, there's pretty much no chance in hell of any SATA HDD saturating even a SATA I connection. However, I'm not certain if the 6.0GB/s SATA III drives are backwards compatible (I need to Google that...)

Due to budgetary constraints, I'm thinking I should avoid an SSD for now. I'm currently considering Western Digital and Seagate brands in 1 to 2 TB models (though I'd consider a 3 TB if the price was right).

However, I've had major issues finding current reviews on the more recent HDDs. Are there any clear "winners" for performance in the HDD market at the moment in the 1-3 TB model range? I know storage review suggested a Hitachi, but I have a panic response to anything labeled "deskstar" after the whole IBM debacle years ago.

I'm trying to not go much over $200 U.S., closer to $100 would be nice. I'm looking for performance, good reliability, at least 1 TB capacity, and a good warranty. Suggestions/thoughts appreciated

 

[Zap]

Hitachi HDDs are not made by IBM. If you have a panic attack when using any brand of HDD that has ever had problems, you should check yourself into an asylum sooner rather than later.

Fastest sustained transfer rate performance goes to the latest 7200RPM drives with 1TB/platter. That would be the Hitachi 7K1000.D, and maybe the latest Seagate. Fastest for running applications would probably be the WD Velociraptor 450GB or 600GB, or the WD Caviar Black. Note that many people consider the Caviar Black to be quite noisy.

Good warranty? I think Velociraptors and Caviar Blacks have 5 year warranty. All other WD drives have 2 years. Seagates are 2 years. Hitachi and Samsung are 3 years. These are all for bare OEM drives. Retail box warranties may differ.

SATA 6Gb/s is backwards compatible. Only issue you may run into is on drives larger than 2TB, which may require BIOS support.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just get a good Hitachi or Western Digital 2TB drive and call it a day. You could even go for a 5900RPM Seagate if you were desperate.

Has Samsung released any HDDs that are larger than 1TB?

 

[hclarkjr]

i have a WD 2TB black and love it. not noisy at all IMHO. price might be an issue due to the flooding in Taiwan which inflated the prices for the foreseeable future.

 

[VirtualLarry]

i have a WD 2TB black and love it. not noisy at all IMHO. price might be an issue due to the flooding in Taiwan which inflated the prices for the foreseeable future.

Uhh, "Thailand". Not "Taiwan".

If it was Taiwan, motherboard prices would have gone way up.

 

[beginner99]

I say it depends what you will use the drive for. For pure storage of media files, get one of the green drives. They are cheaper but obviously also slower. However that doesn't matter much for media files.

If you put the OS and applications on it, then i guess the hitachi or wd caviar black are fine.

In my work pc I have a caviar blue as OS drive and a caviar black for storage (seems a bit stupid but then I run VMs on the black drive. )

At least for Windows XP the caviar blue isn't to bad if you are on a very tight budget. The black sure is rather loud but it is in a crappy HP case...so that must not mean much.

Actually because of the high HDD prices, ssd are pretty attractive at least here:

WD caviar black 2 TB is 219 (not dollars)

WD Green 2 TB is 119
Crucial M4 64 GB is 111

so that is only 11 more for a SSD + slow hdd combination. For this price, I would choose this combination any day!!!

So i highly recommend you look at such a combination too

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Yep, a 64GB SSD with a 2TB drive would be a great combo.

I would not buy a 5400RPM drive to run your OS off of. If you buy a single HDD make sure to get a 7200RPM drive.

 

[palladium]

I say it depends what you will use the drive for. For pure storage of media files, get one of the green drives. They are cheaper but obviously also slower. However that doesn't matter much for media files.

If you put the OS and applications on it, then i guess the hitachi or wd caviar black are fine.

In my work pc I have a caviar blue as OS drive and a caviar black for storage (seems a bit stupid but then I run VMs on the black drive. )

At least for Windows XP the caviar blue isn't to bad if you are on a very tight budget. The black sure is rather loud but it is in a crappy HP case...so that must not mean much.

Actually because of the high HDD prices, ssd are pretty attractive at least here:

WD caviar black 2 TB is 219 (not dollars)

WD Green 2 TB is 119
Crucial M4 64 GB is 111

so that is only 11 more for a SSD + slow hdd combination. For this price, I would choose this combination any day!!!

So i highly recommend you look at such a combination too

I think the OP is taking into account warranty/reliability too. As Zap mentioned, the Black has 5 year warranty while the Green is 2 years. I'm not sure how much this matters to the OP, but if the OP isn't fussed about 2 v 5 year warranty (I am), I think this is a very solid recommendation.

 

[KingFatty]

As far as the issue of whether a spinning hard disk drive can take advantage of faster SATA III 6.0 interface, aren't there situations where a SATA III hard drive will perform better than a SATA I/II hard drive?

I'm thinking about an example where the hard drive has a big RAM cache built-in, and the drive is serving repeated requests for the same data that is cached in that RAM - wouldn't the hard drive be able to serve that data at a really fast rate because the data is coming off the drive's cache and not from the spinning platter? So it would take advantage of the faster SATA III speeds?

 

[taltamir]

I'm not certain if the 6.0GB/s SATA III drives are backwards compatible (I need to Google that...)

Since noone answered that... It is compatible.

 

[ICXRa]

Zap did.

SATA 6Gb/s is backwards compatible.

 

[TheInternal]

Thanks for all the suggestions (and confirmation on backwards compatibility). I've continued to hear Hitachi has reliablility issues compared to some other brands, hence some of my reluctance. I've no idea about Samsung's reliability issue.

When I worked in a professional shop, they swore mostly on Seagate, and I've mostly used (and had good luck with) Western Digital. Acoustics DO matter to me, so thanks for mentioning the possible concerns with the WD Blacks.

It's looking like what I'm going to end up doing now is get a lower end HD as a temporary solution in the old computer, then (hopefully) turn it into a storage drive with an SSD boot drive when they buy the new one.

and yes... warranty is important to me. If a company won't stand behind it's product for but two years, it makes me a bit skeptical as to the quality.

 

[Bad ConNecTioN]

Everyone has their favorite HD manufacturer. I wouldn't use a Seagate drive if it was given to me for free....seriously. I've had more drive failures with Seagates than any other drive...I simply don't trust them. I've had failures with Western Digitals too, but the very easy warranty process gives me some peace of mind.

I currently have seven 2tb Hitachi drives in use, and they have given me no issues. I also have 3 Samsung F4 2tb drives in use, and they too have given me 0 issues aside from the Firmware update I did as preventative maintenance (when I bought them over a year ago the firmware at the time was said to cause serious issues in raid arrays, Samsung released an update to resolve the issue).
I also have an assortment of 640gb and 1tb Hitachi and WD drives in use....all working wonderfully after years of service (they've now been retired to external backup duty).


The bottom line is this...the failure rates for consumer level drives are pretty similar across the board. So buy whatever you can get for the best price with the best warranty, and remember to backup your data often and in multiple locations. Warranty periods have recently been slashed as a result of the above mentioned floods....some people are saying this is because the quality of these "first run" drives on the market after the floods might not be up to snuff. Others have said it was a move to reduce costs, as warranty replacements are a huge money dump for manufacturers.
Either way, drives are still cheap for the storage they provide...so if one does fail 3yrs from now, its really not that big a deal to replace it as at that time the cost for an equivalent size would have seriously gone down.
In fact...buy a hard drive expecting it to fail...because eventually, it will. Whether its 1 week from purchase or 6yrs, hard drives are ticking timebombs waiting to die, taking all your data with them. So plan accordingly, and suddenly drive failures aren't that much of a concern.

As other have mentioned, going with a dual drive system using 1 ssd boot drive and a larger storage drive would offer the best performance. Switching to an SSD was one of the best things I ever did for my system. For the storage drive, stick with something low RPM....produces less heat and noise, and with platter densities being what they are, you'll still get great performance.
My Samsung F4's are 5400rpm drives, but the large platters mean I get read/write speeds over 200MB/s...granted, this is in a raid 5 array, but even a single drive should be around 130MB/s, which for storage drive is more then enough.

 

[zCypher]

I've had good experience with the Western Digital Black drives as well. I have 3 of them in operation, a 500GB/32MB, 1TB/32MB, and a 1TB/64MB all obviously 7200rpm. Also have a 3TB external drive (USB), but that is really in a different category altogether.

None of the drives have had any issues, however the 500GB is virtually silent compared to my 1TB drives.

 

[taltamir]

Zap did.

I fail at reading comprehension...

 

[FAUguy]

I had been using some Western Digital Black and RE4 drives that range from 4-7 years old, but was almost out of space. My only complaint was the 1TB RE4 drive always made a high-pitch oscillating sound that got annoying.

When I went to replace them a few months ago after I built a new PC. I got two of the Seagate Barracuda 3TB drives at $178 from Amazon. But they died after a couple days of use and started making loud clicking sounds. Review of the Barracuda 3TB and 2TB (with the 1TB platters) show that other people have had the same problem.

The next drive I got was the Western Digital Black 2TB (7200RPM). I used it for 3 weeks, and it worked fine, but produced the same high pitch "always on" sound that the WD RE4 drive does. This was not acceptable to me, as my PC is in the bedroom and want it to be as quiet as possible.

The final set of drives I got was the Hitachi Deskstar 2TB (7200RPM). It was the same price as the WD ($200), but the warranty is less. I've been using them for 5-6 weeks now, and haven't had any issues and they are very quiet.

So between them, I'd recommend the Hitachi Deskstar if you want quiet and WB Black if you don't mind the extra noise and want the longer warranty.

 

[BFG10K]

I stick to Western Digital Black drives; overall I think they’re the best 7200RPM drives you can currently buy.

The Hitachi drive I have is pretty good too, but the slow random access time makes it a bit sluggish compared to WD.

I was doing some file copying yesterday and for some smallish files it was dropping to 20 MB/sec for writing, while the WD wrote same files at over 50 MB/sec. This is with the WD drive being disadvantaged by having the OS on it, too.

This is my first Hitachi drive so I can’t comment on longevity yet, but I’ve never had a single WD drive fail on me. All past drives have gracefully retired and been sold.