Which of ST2000NM0053, ST2000DM001 and RE4 2TB etc?

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Schaki

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I'm looking for a decent 2TB drive with good reliability and transfer-rate. http://reybasti.hubpages.com/hub/Top-5-Best-2TB-Hard-Drive-For-2013
I've narrowed down to these three drives. The ST2000DM001 have better performance in terms of transfer-rate but comes with a mediocre one year warranty compared to five year for the RE4 2TB.
Then I happened to notice this ST2000NM0053 which have a 128mb cache. But I've not managed to find reviews of this drive or even how many platters it uses so it is hard to get a good clue how it in fact would perform compared to the Barracuda which uses 1TB platters.
Having read that older 2TB Barracudas uses Platters with less than 1TB which crippled the performance and I would like try to find out at least how many platters the ST2000NM0053 have. Have had a look at Seaget's specs but unless I've missed it it is not mentioned there either.
http://seagate.com/gb/en/internal-h...nterprise-capacity-3-5-hdd/?sku=ST2000NM0033#

Same for the Hitachi Ultrastar 7k4000 2TB. Have not managed to dig out the number of platters there either. http://www.hgst.com/internal-drives/enterprise/ultrastar/ultrastar-7k4000
 
I went with the RE4 2TB for my array.

Hard to pass up the 5yr warranty + RAID support + enterprise class drive.

You can find them <150 pretty regularly now too, and they seem to be dropping. I would have loved 3 or 4TB but the price was just a bit much :D
 
The harddrive cache is not really significant. If the data is in the disk cache, it is most probably also in the much larger host cache.

Did you take a look at WD Caviar Blacks? They also come with 5 years and are less expensive than the RE4s.
 
Buy the cheapest drives you can so you can buy more of them, and use the extra drives to hold duplicate copies of your files. An enterprise drive for home storage is a waste of money- they're not inherently more reliable, there is no data and no large scale studies that have ever concluded that.

The ST2000DM001 (and ST3000DM001, and ST4000DM000) all support raid as well. So taking ToddD2's example, he might've been better off buying 2 x ST2000DM001 drives for the same money as a RE4 2TB, enabling a separate physical copy of the files to be kept. Much more reliable than buying into the illusion that your data is somehow "safer" on an enterprise drive and hoping for the best. Because the fact is they crash just like consumer models.
 
Because a 2YR warrnaty drive is = to a 5yr?

Your logic is flawed. I don't care if the drive DIES it's in RAID1 and then I get a new drive.


After 2 years your stuck buying a new $99 drive while my $140 drive has a 5yr warranty.

Keep thinking what you're thinking, I`ll take the edge of the Enterprise quality drive + the 3 year additional warranty ;)

But sure, spend more for a hot swap spare TODAY that in 2 years is out of warranty too... The logic just doesn't work even if you have a complete spare drive.


All my consumer drives day within <5yrs my server/enterprise drives have lasted me 5+ years... obviously YMMV but I`ll stick with what works for me.
 
omniscence said:
The harddrive cache is not really significant. If the data is in the disk cache, it is most probably also in the much larger host cache.

Did you take a look at WD Caviar Blacks? They also come with 5 years and are less expensive than the RE4s.
Click to expand...

Yes I had a look at the Black 2TB as well. While it is about equal to the RE4 2TB in terms of read-performance, it writes slower. The price difference here in Sweden is not big enough to make me go for the Black instead. The ST2000DM001 however cost less than the two WD. But as long as the price is reasonable I'm not going to go for the cheapest unless it turns out to be the best of them.
Damn Seagate's junglelike site. Can't find out the number of platters or the length of warranty for the Constellation drive there though warranty should be 5 year unless they are out of their mind as it is a Enterprise model. Can't find that info for the ST2000DM001 either but could at least find it elsewhere.
I might register an account in seagate's forum to get to know the number of platters, If I really have to.
While I googled to try and find the warranty of the ST2000DM001 I stumbled upon a grouptest of decent 2TB drives. The Hitachi Ultrastar which could have been of interest was included there. The Constellation with 128mb cache which I'm looking was not to be found in that test.
Edit: Forgot to include link to the grouptest http://hardwareluxx.com/index.php/r...ndup-12-hdds-with-2-tb-capacity.html?start=17
 
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ToddW2 said:
Because a 2YR warrnaty drive is = to a 5yr?

Your logic is flawed. I don't care if the drive DIES it's in RAID1 and then I get a new drive.

After 2 years your stuck buying a new $99 drive while my $140 drive has a 5yr warranty.

Keep thinking what you're thinking, I`ll take the edge of the Enterprise quality drive + the 3 year additional warranty ;)

But sure, spend more for a hot swap spare TODAY that in 2 years is out of warranty too... The logic just doesn't work even if you have a complete spare drive.

All my consumer drives day within <5yrs my server/enterprise drives have lasted me 5+ years... obviously YMMV but I`ll stick with what works for me.
Click to expand...

Relax, it was just another way of looking at it for people unclear about the pros and cons of spending double the money on an enterprise drive. I wasn't trying to change your mind. And I wasn't talking about warranty, but as long as you bring it up, warranty is meaningless if your enterprise drive crashes except for getting a replacement.

The point was if someone's just looking for the least painful way of storing movies at home - which seems to be a lot of the people on a forum like this - then enterprise drives are a waste of money, unless youve got money to burn. And if all someone has only a fixed amount of money for a handful of drives, then to my mind, 2 x drives with 2 yr warranty is superior to 1 x drive with 5 yr warranty in terms of safety of your data, assuming the second of the 2yr warranty drives is keeping a cold copy of the data. And I have just as much anecdotal evidence that the 2yr warranty drives will tend to outlive their warranties anyway.
 
syncopied said:
directly from their website
Click to expand...
It was the Seagate drives I had problem to find despite quite some efforts. Especially with the Constellation drive. With the Hitachi I didn't try that hard even though I did try because I found these drives somewhat less interesting from beginning.
Thanks for the information about the platters for the Hitachi anyway. And I finally also got to know that the Constellation 2TB uses 3 platters, as I feared might be the case, compared to the ST2000DM001 which uses 2 1TB platters.
http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Savvio...-many-platters-in-ES-ST2000NM0053/td-p/198194
 
Those Constellation ES.3 2TB drives are fast for a 7200 RPM drive. I am seeing ~190MB/s (reads and writes) in the outer tracks on the 5 I purchased this week.

if someone's just looking for the least painful way of storing movies at home - which seems to be a lot of the people on a forum like this - then enterprise drives are a waste of money, unless youve got money to burn.
Click to expand...

I agree with this. At work I have moved to low end enterprise drives for my storage arrays (raid6 + at minimum 1 tape backup depending on how valuable the data is). The main reason for this is to reduce the # of RMAs I do and reduce the chance of having to recover from backups. At home I have no raid to store my htpc data (and I have done this for almost a decade without data lost - careful monitoring + luck comes to play). Anyways I recently purchased 3 x 4TB drives (all $150 or less) for backups of the videos.
 
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drescherjm said:
Those Constellation ES.3 2TB drives are fast for a 7200 RPM drive. I am seeing ~190MB/s (reads and writes) in the outer tracks on the 5 I purchased this week.
Click to expand...

Interesting. Is it those ST2000NM0053 / ST2000NM0033 with 182mb cache which you are using? The only difference between them which I managed to find was that the former supports Encryption.
What test program are you using?
 
They are ST2000NM0033 with 128MB cache

Code: 
fileserver1 ~ # smartctl --all /dev/sdn
smartctl 6.0 2012-10-10 r3643 [x86_64-linux-3.7.7-gentoo-fileserver1-raid1] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-12, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     ST2000NM0033-9ZM175
Serial Number:    Z1X05ABQ
LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0508bbe71
Firmware Version: 0001
User Capacity:    2,000,398,934,016 bytes [2.00 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Rotation Rate:    7200 rpm
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
SATA Version is:  SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
Local Time is:    Fri Jul 26 07:59:37 2013 EDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x82) Offline data collection activity
                                        was completed without error.
                                        Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status:      (   0) The previous self-test routine completed
                                        without error or no self-test has ever
                                        been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection:                (   97) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:                    (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
                                        Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
                                        Suspend Offline collection upon new
                                        command.
                                        Offline surface scan supported.
                                        Self-test supported.
                                        Conveyance Self-test supported.
                                        Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
                                        power-saving mode.
                                        Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:        (0x01) Error logging supported.
                                        General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time:        (   1) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time:        ( 244) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time:        (   2) minutes.
SCT capabilities:              (0x50bd) SCT Status supported.
                                        SCT Error Recovery Control supported.
                                        SCT Feature Control supported.
                                        SCT Data Table supported.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   083   068   044    Pre-fail  Always       -       207090186
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   097   097   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       5
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   069   061   030    Pre-fail  Always       -       7651470
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       19
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       5
184 End-to-End_Error        0x0032   100   100   099    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   069   069   045    Old_age   Always       -       31 (Min/Max 20/31)
191 G-Sense_Error_Rate      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       4
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       5
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   031   040   000    Old_age   Always       -       31 (0 20 0 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   067   041   000    Old_age   Always       -       207090186
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged.  [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]

What test program are you using?
Click to expand...

I was using iotop to display the current IO throughput to the devices when running a badblocks 4 pass read / write test.

The following is an iotop output for 3 ES.3 drives doing a badblocks test. The first is writing near the end of the disk (@ 99% ) while the other 2 are 5 to 10% into the disk reading and compare step.

Code: 
Total DISK READ :     367.18 M/s | Total DISK WRITE :      88.54 M/s
Actual DISK READ:     367.42 M/s | Actual DISK WRITE:      88.48 M/s
  TID  PRIO  USER     DISK READ  DISK WRITE  SWAPIN     IO>    COMMAND
 3989 be/4 root        0.00 B/s   88.54 M/s  0.00 % 98.51 % badblocks -wsv /dev/sdo
 3610 be/4 root      182.60 M/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 % 91.45 % badblocks -wsv /dev/sdn
 4817 be/4 root      184.59 M/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 % 91.22 % badblocks -wsv /dev/sdp
 
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If I remember correctly the ST2000DM001 exist in both 2 and 3 platter variants. While initially they made only the faster and cooler 2 platter variant, newer drives can also come with 3 platters. It is the same as with the WD Reds.
 
Half way through the disks the 2TB ES.3s are still reading at 140MB/s+

Code: 
fileserver1 ~ # badblocks -wsv /dev/sdo
Checking for bad blocks in read-write mode
From block 0 to 1953514583
Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0x55: done
Reading and comparing: done
Testing with pattern 0xff: done
Reading and comparing:  52.13% done, 20:48:34 elapsed. (0/0/0 errors)

Code: 
Total DISK READ :     436.29 M/s | Total DISK WRITE :     255.16 K/s
Actual DISK READ:     436.47 M/s | Actual DISK WRITE:     157.09 K/s
  TID  PRIO  USER     DISK READ  DISK WRITE  SWAPIN     IO>    COMMAND
 3610 be/4 root      140.13 M/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 % 93.75 % badblocks -wsv /dev/sdn
 4817 be/4 root      144.24 M/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 % 93.43 % badblocks -wsv /dev/sdp
 3989 be/4 root      151.92 M/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 % 93.06 % badblocks -wsv /dev/sdo
 
at least for the hgst drives, don't worry about the platter numbers

it was only for the seagate drives that some were having issues with certain drives, with problems being identified by the number of platters in the drive. i haven't had a seagate drive in a while due to their barracuda line being a mess at several points in time

if you are worried about reliability then no matter what you never want a single drive backup solution. because with a sample size of 1, anything can happen
 
Might want to check out the WD SE series. It's slots between the Seagate options you listed and the WD RE, and it has a much lower cost than the RE.
 
In the end I went for the Constellation ST2000NM0053. Uses it as the main drive and no problem so far. As I expected the 3 platter design is not quite as fast in read/write compared to the ST2000DM001, but the reliability which should be better and 5 year warranty is worth it to me.
Have not benchmarked the drive fully yet but are probably going to do so.
What surprised me somewhat is that this drive is somewhat more loud in operation than my old Velociraptor WD3000GLFS, probably the first one after the previous non Veloci-raptors from WD. The spinnoise is marginally more loud despite that the Velociraptor is 10k rpm, though in 2.5" form factor compared to 7200 rpm for the Constellation.
The noise from the seekhead is a noticeably more loudly rattling sound.

Is there any known utility to tweak the firmware settings? Like that Hitachi Drive Feature Tool?
Found that SeaTools but it is not quite clear if it is just for diagnostic purpose or if it can be used to change settings for the drive and I would have to install MS .Net 4 for that shit :/
http://www.seagate.com/support/exte...es/freeagent-pro-classic/seatools-win-master/
The only slight problem I have is that the drive sometimes go into sleepmode or
powersaving while I play a FPS game and the rounds lasts for something like 30min. During these 25-30min there is no HD activity and the drive must have a proper wakeup again which takes about 4-5 seconds if not slightly more and that delays the start of loading of next map.
I know there is Power Options in Windows to change settings like this but would rather prefer to do it for the drive itself.

Other than that, so far so good.
 
I have a question, which one of these drives would be good for Fraps recording at 1080p60, that has as much space as possible (like 3TB)? Without smashing the bank?
 
If the Seagate Barracuda 3TB ST3000DM001 is fast enough to do 1080p with Fraps, which it seems from what I've read in the links here, I might just have to get two for my build. I'm going to use an SSD for the OS, one of the 3TB for games and such, and the 3rd for recording/compressing videos. Probably even get a third one after a few months if they work out really well for internal backup.
 
BYOGamingPC said:
I must say that I've got a couple Seagate Barracuda 3TB ST3000DM001 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...SIN=B005T3GRLY&linkCode=as2&tag=hardforcom-20 in a RAID 1 setup and they perform quite well. I've not had them a super long time so I can't say as to their longevity but I've been quite satisfied with them. I even bought them as refurbs and haven't had a hiccup yet. *crosses fingers*
Click to expand...

I have 8 of these and they are working good for me as well. 2 in a raid 1 and 6 in a raid 6.
Whenever I build my next storage box I plan to do the re4 instead for the longer warranty and enterprise features.
 
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I've had a Seagate Barracuda 3TB ST3000DM001 (owned less than 8 months old) and a 2TB Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 (2.5yrs old) fail within 2 months of each other. Both were manufactured in China, 2012 & 2011 respectively. The replacement drives from Seagate were refurbished ones from Thailand and made in 2012.

Needless to say, I'm going to be keeping a very close eye on my system. Reading negative reviews from those who have had these drives for a decent amount of time, my confidence in these specific models is shaky. My suspicions aren't helped by the fact that these specific models are now heavily discounted......
 
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Not long ago I noticed that Seagate has uploaded firmware updates for the St2000nm0053 and the St2000nm033. Updating my 0053 was pretty much straight forward and the drive works well as before. Was not stated what changes had been made however.
 
feffrey said:
I have 8 of these and they are working good for me as well. 2 in a raid 1 and 6 in a raid 6.
Whenever I build my next storage box I plan to do the re4 instead for the longer warranty and enterprise features.
Click to expand...

Make sure you have a spare drive that is identical to this. Other wise you might end up with a similar problem as this... Guess newier drives are not always better than older versions of it.

One Seagate HDD of our PX6-300d is faulty. I contacted Lenovo support and it took them ages to send us a replacement HDD. So I bought a similar, almost identical HDD - a Seagate Barracuda and I replaced the faulty HDD with the new hardware. Guess what happened? The performance of the PX6-300d went down to 10-20 % and our backup took ages to complete. After removing the new HDD the NAS started to work again as usual. So I do not recommend to use harddrives with different firmware in any RAID array with this device.

NAS original OEM disks specifications:
MANUFACTURER Seagate
MODEL Barracuda ST2000DM001
PN: 9YN164-500
FW: CC4B
DOM: 10/2012

Replacement disk specifications:
MANUFACTURER Seagate
MODEL Barracuda ST2000DM001
PN: 1E6164-570
FW: SC48
DOM: 09/2013
Click to expand...

I have the ST3000DM001 with the same firmwre and it is much slower than the older drives. Also no NCQ..
 
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