2TB - 3TB decisions

I am running out of room in my main computer, so I am looking at 2 particular HDs... I cannot find a lot of benchmarks for them.

I am looking at the 2TB WD Blacks and the 3TB Seagate SV35's...

Which one provides a good balance of performance, reliability, etc?

I'd like to know what hard drives are stable these days as well. My Samsung F4 is about full.

All of the hard drives look like shit today. Any drives in particular that are stable with good performance? I have heard the WD Reds are decent. But other than that, I am having a hard time picking out another drive.

Reds offer good performance for their price, I've always leaned towards WD over other brands. Blacks are going to have greater performance but you will be paying for that. If it is just a data drive, there is no need for a black drive

Aren't they phasing out blacks for the Red line?

Master_Pain said:

Aren't they phasing out blacks for the Red line?

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Not that I'm aware of, it would be a stupid mistake if they did. The Blacks are considered the premium drives and offer better performance than Red, Blue, or Green.

Liger88 said:

Not that I'm aware of, it would be a stupid mistake if they did. The Blacks are considered the premium drives and offer better performance than Red, Blue, or Green.

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Exactly, blacks are the performance line but for a data/storage drive, the performance is hardly needed.

How are the Reds stability wise? Will they last a long ass time or they like the greens, a crap shoot?

Master_Pain said:

I'd like to know what hard drives are stable these days as well. My Samsung F4 is about full.

All of the hard drives look like shit today. Any drives in particular that are stable with good performance? I have heard the WD Reds are decent. But other than that, I am having a hard time picking out another drive.

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People seem to say that Hitachi drives are reliable. Although with WD/Toshiba taking ownership of Hitachi Global Storage (Hitachi's hard drive division), Toshiba might be the drives to go for these days. There's a thread over here about the annoucement of 12 new Toshiba drives: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1710269

The Backblaze people stated on their blog that the Hitachi drives they used had the lowest failure rates/problems of the manufacturers they'd used - note that Backblaze generally use consumer drives!

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.

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

With regards to drives 'popping out of RAID arrays' (as Blackblaze noted): WD/Seagate probably don't certifiy their consumer hard drives to be used in RAID configurations. I've heard that WD prevent the user activating/reducing the TLER setting on their cheaper drives (such as WD Greens) so that the drive will drop out of a RAID array if a read error is encountered. Normally you'd have to spring for the expensive WD Black drives but with the release of the WD Red drives it might not be a big deal anymore. Apparently Hitachi never bothered to segregate their drives like this.