Reliable 2TB storage drive?

[nervx]

Samsung 830 is going to be my OS drive but im looking for something to hold all my music, video and other files. The drive will be accessed on a regular basis and needs to be reliable, quiet and preferably at least as fast as my current WD6400AAKS drives. I was looking at WD green but complaints and head parking issues have me worried. The new red drives seemed like a potential improvement in reliability but reading they are only really for raid kind of kills that plan too. Seagate drives i've had in the past all went poo so im not sure if i want to trust them again.

Recommendations?

 

[masteryoda34]

If you want reliability in your hard disk storage then you need RAID. The reality is that any hard drive can die without warning.

I'd suggest 2 WD Red 2TB drives in a RAID 1 setup based on what you said.

 

[Compman55]

Yes two drive in raid 1 is needed. I am running the seagate 5900 rpm 64mb cache in my server as we speak. Since april, they have only had about 9 power cycles. Still going strong.

They will last if left o 24/7. Overall frequent power cycles is what ruins them. Newegg packing them crappy, people RMA'ing drives that don;t need to be and then giving poor reviews, and lastly people who have a great experiance often don;t give a review. But when they have poor experiance they can;t wait to slam the product.

My theory is if the piece of computer hardware makes it 30 days, it will be fine. Unless treated wrong or if it has a substainable flaw verified by multiple sources. Exmaple 8MB death on intel SSD';s

 

[nervx]

raid is not an option at this point.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

We simply don't have the right data to recommend what's best. Every suggestion you get is just going to be anecdotal and not particularly valuable. The most reliable drive is any drive you back up regularly. That is, you could buy two used 1TB drives for $60 each and those would be more reliable than one new 1TB drive you buy for $100. What's your budget and how much do you have to spend? Western Digital Blacks and RE4s carry five year warranties - for what that's worth.

 

[destey]

I stopped using RAID 1 when my HPT370 controller wiped both my data disk and the mirror (lost all my college projects). Then I read data corruption was fairly common with that controller. I'm weary of any RAID now. Now I just plug in the 2nd drive and copy the contents when I feel like updating. Less hours on the backup and don't run the risk of RAID erasing everything.

 

[corkyg]

My sense is that as drives go above 500GB, their "reliability" seems to go down. I have no data to support this, but that is my sense based on experience and anecdotal data in this forum.

 

[Xonim]

Keep in mind with things like WD Greens that the reviews are going to be largely negative because #1 they're cheap drives and #2 because they're cheap drives, they sell a lot of them and #3, you're more likely to hear from people with problems than people without.

Between all my boxes, I'm running 4x Samsung 2TB F4 (though 1 is post-Seagate acquisition), 1x 2TB WD Black, and 1x 1.5TB WD Green. I also have smaller drives of a 500GB Seagate, 640GB WD Blue, 1.5TB WD external, and 500GB Seagate external. In my experience, as long as the shipping/packing was okay, and as long as you aren't using the drives as a puck in office hockey, you'll probably be alright. Failures do happen though, so you should keep a backup.

 

[Compman55]

Also over the years my personal luck has been better when the drives are on 24/7 vs being power cycled.

RAID 1 (IS) an option for you and any windows xp or newer has software RAID1 available even if your board does not support it. It is also a robust solution.

Otherwise it really is hit / miss reliability.

 

[lehtv]

I'd recommend Samsung F4EG, nice reliable green drives. Not that I can back that up with hard data, but my experience with it has been flawless

 

[ronbo613]

I've had pretty good luck with 1TB drives from WD; Blacks, RE4 and Greens(mostly Blacks and RE4) and Seagate 7200.12 Barracudas. At this point in time, I would choose WD over Seagate.
The only 2TB drives I have are Samsung HD204UI, which have been great drives(aside from the firmware flashing deal), however, I would not buy a 2TB drive from Samsung today because they are actually Seagates.
I have almost 20TB of data, mostly digital photos/scans and video files and would love to see some reliable 2-3TB drives, but for now, I am sticking to 1TB drives. RAID would be a good idea, or an extensive collection of external enclosures for backup.

 

[GrumpyMan]

WD Blacks or RE4 for me.

 

[nervx]

What settings do you need to change on a green drive so that the head parking would work like in a blue or black drive?

Can the settings of a red or re4 drive be permanently changed so they act like a normal blue/black drive?

 

[Concillian]

My sense is that as drives go above 500GB, their "reliability" seems to go down. I have no data to support this, but that is my sense based on experience and anecdotal data in this forum.

It used to be 500GB because that's what 1 platter drives were. Now there are 1TB drives with 1 platter. When possible I stick to 1 platter drives.

However, as I say time and again, no matter how reliable the history of a product line or how reliable you think something will be, if there's anything important on it, keep multiple backups. Nothing important of my data is saved in less than 3 places.

All product lines have a failure rate. Some more than others, but every product line has drives that fail. The only way to truly protect yourself is to keep multiple copies of any important data.

 

[Concillian]

Keep in mind with things like WD Greens that the reviews are going to be largely negative because #1 they're cheap drives and #2 because they're cheap drives, they sell a lot of them and #3, you're more likely to hear from people with problems than people without.

There's also #4:
The people who shop strictly on price are generally not as knowledgeable as those who also factor performance and/or reliability into their decision.

This means there are a larger proportion of people who are "computer idiots" reviewing greens than "computer idiots" blacks.

 

[imagoon]

What settings do you need to change on a green drive so that the head parking would work like in a blue or black drive?

Can the settings of a red or re4 drive be permanently changed so they act like a normal blue/black drive?

1) disable head parking
2) this question makes no sense... RED can have tler set to 180 seconds like a black so can RE4. However red can't be firmware updated to run the spindles at 7200. RE4 is an enterprise drive.

 

[shurato]

I have 2 2TB WD Green drives for storage. I also have 2 external Hard drives and use Synchroncity http://synchronicity.sourceforge.net/ to backup nightly. I don't think I'm going to lose sleep if I lose some data before the nightly backup happens. I'll just re-download it. Anything critical to you should probably have a 2nd backup methodology whether it be the cloud or yet another drive. My setup is simple and it works.

 

[thelastjuju]

Keep in mind with things like WD Greens that the reviews are going to be largely negative because #1 they're cheap drives and #2 because they're cheap drives, they sell a lot of them and #3, you're more likely to hear from people with problems than people without.
.

WD Black drives like the 1001FALS and the 1002FAEX also have THOUSANDS of reviews, and they aren't disproportionately and alarmingly negative.. neither were the very popular WD Black and Blue 640's before they went off the market.

So... you can safely interpret the LACK of alarmingly poor ratings as a GOOD thing :thumbsup:

The WD 3tb Green for instance, has nearly the same % of 5-star reviews as 1-star reviews.

-
Ever since the Samsung F4 2tb went to Seagate's manufacturing plant, I no longer feel safe going with any drive over 1tb.

Lastly, you might think you are saving money by getting a cheap little green drive, but when you factor in how it will probably only last you 1-2, maybe 3 years if you're lucky.. you aren't saving much since you'll have to buy another drive to replace it so soon. I'm very confident in my WD Blacks which should hold my storage for well over a decade.