Looking to buy better Hard Drives , need suggestions

hi members , i am looking to buy more Hard Drives for my PC and my CFW'ed PS3's. As some of you may have seen i have had 2 Seagate 3TB fail on me in a quick amount of time. I can't remember who it was but they said i should buy better HDDs.


so yeah what do you guys suggest ? , also it is a pain in the ass going to the PC shop i was wondering if getting them shipped will be ok. I am worried they will arrive with errors or some other nasties


https://www.centrecom.com.au/

http://www.scorptec.com.au/

 

Never buy Seagate
Buy Western Digital

There's also one other brand that has a super low failure rate but can't remember then name since they're so unused.

Alternatively invest in an SSD (also not from Seagate)

 

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175089-who-makes-the-most-reliable-hard-drives
JUL - SEP 2016

 

Why do you say that?

Should be more like, find out what is failing on them and avoid drives that use the same quality or kind of component.
Take toshiba 2.5" drives for example, they use a different type of bearing in the motor that ceases up (fluid bearing iirc)..

I've got two Seagate barracuda 3TB drives in my file server, running 24/7 (obviously they are sun down most of the time) never had any issues with them, I keep them slightly on the warm side (it's a 'silent' low power machine, fanless cpu) about +5c ambient..

What application are you using them in??

 

Yeah, bad hard drive models vary. It's just a case of avoiding the current bad one.

IBM (now sold to HGST) would have been the one to avoid years ago, but now is lowest rate.

You get the idea.

 

I've had loads of IDE 10gb Seagate drives from OG Xboxes, and the failure rate is very low, 1 out 20 maybe?
Most of these drives are well over 10 years old and work pefectly. A case of "They don't make them like they used to." I suppose?

 

anyone who says to avoid a certain manufacturer is talking out their arse, if a company making hard drives were making constant faulty ones then they would go out of business pretty damn fast.
you will always get bad hard drives in a batch, due to how they are made and how they function they will always be prone to failure.

i personally run the following:

NAS 3:
4x 6TB Western Digital Red Drives

NAS 2:
4x 6TB Western Digital Red Drives

Nas 1:
4x 2TB Western Digital Red Drives

Why did i choose these particular drives? they are designed to be run in a NAS box that is running 24/7 (NAS 2 + 3 have been running for about 2 years, NAS 1 for about 4)
I would recommend anyone who wants to store files to get a cheap HP Microserver (around £100 after cashback deals from HP and can hold 4x 3.5" and 1x 2.5" drives ), pop the NAS style HDD's into it
Load Xpenology and it will run like a dream.

 

how can you get it so cheap?

 

I'm quite partial to Western Digital drives, never liked Seagate (I've seemed to have more issues with them whether it be drive failures or slower speeds). Although I believe I had read before that it's specifically the 3TB Seagate drives which have the most issues.

Hitachi, as mentioned above and shown, has been recorded to have the lowest failure rate.

 

Just accept that HDDs can and will fail and act accordingly. Do backups - If your important data isn't backed up, it can't be all that important to you. These days I keep most of my "dead storage" on a RAID6 (well, technically RAIDZ2) storage server with a healthy mix of old and new drives from various brands, to spread the risk. Fwiw, all my life I only ever had two cases of data loss due to failing hardware (1x WD, 1x Seagate), and that was before I had planned any redundancy into my systems.

As for HDDs for consoles, where you obviously won't be able to RAID all teh thingz - don't overanalyze! Just buy from a reputable source, squirrel away the small amount of data that is your savegames occasionaly (everything else can be redownloaded so not worth backing up), make use of the warranty if it fails.

 

As Bad_Ad84 said, it's a per-model problem, not a per-brand one. It's of course a very good idea to look into what are the current bad models right now before shopping an HDD. To wait a few months after a model is released is also a good idea.

That said, even if you buy the best ever 4 HDDs to put in your glorious NAS, it's totally worth it to buy a cheap high capacity external drive to back it up. As long as it's treated well, even if the quality is subpar, it should survive quite a lot of years doing incremental backups every other month or so. Keep it at a different location than your main drive. Then sleep quietly knowing your data are (mostly) safe.

Remember, raid isn't a backup; nor is a copy of the data stored next to the original.


PS: I got 4 Seagate ST2000DM001-1CH164 spinning 24/7 for over a year and they work like a charm. Regardless, I got a spare drive ready to repair the array if there's a problem and I do regular backups on a dedicated external drive stored elsewhere. Plus the very important stuff is also backed up on bd-r stored elsewhere too.

 

There are only three manufacturers left, with Toshiba being the smallest among the three. Probably all of them (or the companies that they absorbed) made at least one disk that had loads of failure stories, so pick your poison if you want to take sides.

Personally, I never found a real preference for any brand because they all gave me their own share of failures (usually after 3 years of daily use). This round, I went with Toshiba because they were cheap. But I have used Western Digital and Seagate disks before.

 

Short answer - make backups and don't buy drives from series that are known to have high failure rate.
Reliable drive is... two drives. One with data, other with backup of it.

P.S. STxxxxDMxxx - ouch... got two, still alive but one has 120 reallocated sectors, second - 1112 and nobody kicked those drives = good cooling, good power supply, but still they almost failed. So if you see one - RUN! If you got one - make backup. Another funny Seagate invention - 7200.11 (yeah, those...) in external USB/eSATA/FW case w/o active cooling and even without enough ventilation holes. It will heat to 50+C when it's more than 25C in the room just when you try to copy 50-100Gb there. And even worse - in case of power loss it will spin up but won't sleep, it will spin continously until you reconnect USB cable or unplug the power brick. Great idea - desktop 7200rpm drive in a small container with an idiotic controller which thinks that it's a NAS which must run 24/7.

 

To be fair with Seagate, I've read a lot before buying the STxxxxDMxxx and the post-2013 2TB ones are supposed to have the design flaw fixed.

Nonetheless, I am aware of the risks and I bought a spare drive in case one dies and I make backups of it. I had a hard-to-pass-on deal on a NAS with 4 of those for 500$CAN.

The 7200.11 is a disaster.

 

It's just better to make backup on different brand drives in case of some design flaws (like those Fujitsu MPx acid flux fiasco).

For good drives - Samsung SpinPoint T133 300Gb IDE


ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 100 100 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 100 100 015 Pre-fail Always - 7872
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 097 097 000 Old_age Always - 3663
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 253 253 010 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 253 253 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0025 253 253 015 Pre-fail Offline - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 69990
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0033 253 253 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012 253 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1919
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 074 059 000 Old_age Always - 26
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 160 115 000 Old_age Always - 26
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1067981
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 253 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 253 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x000a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
201 Soft_Read_Error_Rate 0x000a 253 100 000 Old_age Always - 0

20 of them running 24/7 for almost 8 years. That's the quality. Even if early Samsung drives were awful.

 

I recently had a call out to an IBM ps2, which hasn't been turned off since it was installed (nearly 30 years ago!).

Issue was the bearings had finally seized in the hdd.

 

As far as backup goes I want to go to tape, HDD seems to be a waste for cold storage

 

The drives are really friggin expensive though. And you can pretty much forget about grabbing that one file real quick if the need ever arises, so I'd prefer to only use them for off-site backups that I hope I'm never going to need back.