Are 2TB hard drives reliable?

L

llmercll

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 17, 2010
Messages
1,369
I ask because I need to make a hard drive purchase soon. I like WD Caviar blacks, but i've heard of a lot users having issues with the 2TB drives. It's a "semi" new "concept", these gigantic drives, literally doubling what is still considered a gigantic drive(1tb), and just wondering if the bugs have been worked out yet.
 
Both Samsung and WD have 3-platter 2TB drives now. Those will be your best bet in terms of reliability.
 
I've had my 2tb western digital greens for about 2 years now. I have 5 of them. None of them have given me trouble...knock on wood.
 
So the WD green-3 platter sounds like a great buy. Cant seem to find it anywhere though.

and the three platters is meant to improve performance and reliability? I'm guessing maybe because of the 4 platters some of the original 2tb hard drives had issues? =p
 
Depends what your definition of "reliable" is. Mechanical HDs are ...mechanical... so they'll fail one day. For most of them that could be a few years after they're first turned on, but there's never any guarantee.

If you're using the highest capacity model for important data without backing up then you're going to lose an awful lot when it fails... does that mean 2TB is less reliable? :)
 
I'm really interested in the 3 platter drive, but cant find a place to buy em =(
 
The Samsung F4EGs are 3 platters and seem to work in RAID just fine (well they play nice with my 51645 and F3 just fine)
 
Based on a number of anecdotal evidence on a variety of forums, I think the Hitachi and Samsung 2TB drives are more reliable than their Seagate and WD counterparts. 1TB is a different story (all seem to be okay).

Both Samsung and WD have 3-platter 2TB drives now. Those will be your best bet in terms of reliability.
Click to expand...

Having less platters is offset by the fact the density is much higher. It doesn't necessarily make it any more reliable. If Seagate's high density drives are any indication, it makes it less reliable.
 
Valnar: you're forgetting 4K sectors. The density's high BER is offset by bigger ECC pools for 4K sector disks.

But for anyone who debates reliability keep in mind no HDD in reliable 'enough' to not need backups. You need backups, so reliability isn't that important. It only determines howmany minutes you spend on replacing the hardware; but your data should never be in jeopardy.
 
I'm pretty sure I want to get a 2TB. I just can't justify anything less considering the price:GB ratio, space consideration, and power requirements. As long as the 2TB aren't considerably unreliable compared to smaller sizes (which from this thread I'm getting the idea they arent) I would much prefer one.

Now I'm looking for a website with accurate benchmarks. What's important, read and write speeds right?

http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/
http://www.storagereview.com/Testbed4Compare.sr

Are these reputed sites for the "storage enthusiast"? =p

I'm looking for a 3 platter ideally, but if the prices are much higher then I won't bother. I really like the caviar greens on newegg for $120 and $110, amazing value, but nothing about having 3 platters.

Then theres the samsung F4 priced at an amazing $95

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245
 
Last edited:
But for anyone who debates reliability keep in mind no HDD in reliable 'enough' to not need backups.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I take the stance that any drive from any manufacturer can die at any time so if I have irreplaceable data (my 5+TB of HTPC stuff can be replaced) I do backups on that (few GB) data.

As for drives dieing for the last 15 years I have averaged 1% to 7% annual failure rate on drives at work (where I usually have around 200 spinning). These failures are not all highly used or old age. Of the 9 to 10 drives that failed this year, 1 was 6 to 8 months old. 3 or 4 others were 2 years or less. And then 4 or 5 were 5 to 6 years old.
 
drescherjm said:
I bought 3 of them for under $100 each at newegg hot deals. These are faster than all of my 7200 RPM drives (including a 1TB WDC black) at STR but have slower seeks.
Click to expand...

Do you recommend them over the caviar green 2tb? has there been any stability issues or bad sectors? From what I read they run cooler, quieter, and about as fast as the 1gb WD blacks, but slower than the 2gb WD blacks. And it doesn't seem to have the 33% DOA chance like other 2tb drives

I'd really appreciate you running hdtune on one of them to compare with my WDC black.

I'm really excited about this drive, It's looking GREAT for the price. Like, unbelievably great.
 
Last edited:
I have both WD greens and Samsung f4s with 667 GB/ platters. The F4s are faster than the WDC greens by about 20 MB/s (130 MB/s+ on outer tracks versus 110MB/s+).

As for reliability I do have an unresolved problem with an F4 on 1 linux box and running badblocks but after testing it in a second machine it appears the drive is not the problem. I would like to test my WDC green 2TB drives in the same way but both of them are full.

Here are links to this problem:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1551753&highlight=Samsung
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-847350-highlight-.html


Also I would never count on any reliability statistic of only a few drives. The 1% to 7% annual failure rate numbers I talk about for work I consider barely enough statistically to make any valid conclusion.

I'd really appreciate you running hdtune on one of them to compare with my WDC black.
Click to expand...
I did that in this thread..
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1547827&highlight=Samsung
 
Last edited:
I love buying hard drives. I typically always stick with WD drives. I simply like that brand the best.

However, I also feel that any drive manufacturer is going to have failures. It just cant be avoided.

I think the best thing for anyone to do, Which I am guilty of not doing, is to look at the driver space you need, and then buy the fastest and cheapest drive that will work with the space you need.

I dont think it matters if it is Hitachi, Seagate, WD, or samsung, etc...If it works with your hardware and it the fastest and cheapest, then buy it..

I wish I would take my own advice. Laugh
 
Steer clear of Seagate Barracuda LP drives. Mine are dying left and right. I have 4 and 2 have gone to RMA and they are less than a year old.
 
Steer clear of Seagate Barracuda LP drives. Mine are dying left and right. I have 4 and 2 have gone to RMA and they are less than a year old.
Click to expand...

I would not take anything out of that statistically. I mean if you had 1000 drives and 500 of them died in the first year that would say Seagate has a problem... However 2 out of 4 does not say anything at all statistically. The UPS driver could have just dropped the box or there could be some other problem not related to manufacturing of the drive or of course the drive could be of low quality..
 
Slickdeals shows the 2TB F4EG is on sale right now at ewiz... (I can't get to the website though so not sure...)
 
Although it may be tough to experience a failure of two drives out of four, a sample size of four drives isn't enough to really conclude an entire model is unreliable.
 
longcat said:
Slickdeals shows the 2TB F4EG is on sale right now at ewiz... (I can't get to the website though so not sure...)
Click to expand...

$85 for the 2TB Samsung is a good price... Even better than the $90 for the hitatchi last week.
 
Neb said:
Although it may be tough to experience a failure of two drives out of four, a sample size of four drives isn't enough to really conclude an entire model is unreliable.
Click to expand...

I agree. Two failures out of four samples is way too small of a sampling to be meaningful. 100,000 failures out of 1,000,000 drives manufactured, on the other hand, can be considered significant enough by many manufacturers to warrant a voluntary recall.
 
Stearing clear of Seagate is a good idea. This isn't the first thread saying the same thing.
 
I generally assume every drive I buy will fail at the worst possible point in time, plan accordingly and just buy the cheapest drives/GB. Buying from different sellers when buying a large quantity of drives to hopefully get different manufacturing batches is also a good idea as well.
 
Valnar said:
Stearing clear of Seagate is a good idea. This isn't the first thread saying the same thing.
Click to expand...


I completely agree. Seagate isn't the fastest or the cheapest, and given the reliability issues, there is no reason to use them at all. Cross them off the list...
 
Although I have been on a mostly Hitachi binge in the last 8-9 months, the Seagate firmware issues on the 7200.11's have been fixed for well over a year. I'm at 3/12 WD Green 1.5TB failures in 9 months and 2/15 7200.11 1.5TB failures in 15 months (one was DOA shipping, one was firmware bug during burn-in). None of the <15mo old Seagates have died thus far. Small sample sizes but I think the point is that since the firmware has been fixed, and assuming a user fixes the firmware and doesn't have a two year old drive (still with the fw bug) that dies, it is a bit disingenuous to say that Seagate has particularly poor reliability these days.

More like, 18 months ago they had a serious firmware problem, on a super-high volume drive many of which are still in service, that they have a fix for but have not reached all of the population yet.

Then again, Seagate's price/ performance is a bit behind at the moment which is the primary reason I am not buying them. ($87 retail boxed Hitachi's are hard to pass up).

Another consideration when buying quite a few drives is the RMA process. WD and Seagate probably have the best RMA departments. I have only had one experience with Hitachi and it was OK, but it is not as user friendly as the STX/ WDC RMA process. Samsung drives I will probably be buying more of but with like 4 in service for under six months I haven't seen a failure other than a DOA that was returned to retailer so no RMA experience there.

Also, heard word that 3TB drives are expected to hit volume shipments in the Jan timeframe.
 
I just ran hdtune on my caviar black 1tb and whoah! The results are underwhelming. There are sharp drops in the graph for some reason, and the speeds aren't even that good. the F4 whoops it. I would have never thought considering it's a "green" 5400rpm drive vs a performance 7200.

http://img151.imageshack.us/img151/6091/wdcb1000.png

Could those sharp drops be because it's my system drive?
 
Could those sharp drops be because it's my system drive?
Click to expand...

Yes. Probably other system activity during the benchmark.

I would have never thought considering it's a "green" 5400rpm drive vs a performance 7200.
Click to expand...

This is caused by the F4s having 667GB platters instead of 500 or 333.
 
longcat said:
Slickdeals shows the 2TB F4EG is on sale right now at ewiz... (I can't get to the website though so not sure...)
Click to expand...

Be careful buying drives from ewiz.

OP: I am really liking Samsung lately. I have 4 x 2TB F3s and 2 x 2TB F4s, all running great so far (knock on wood).

This is recently coming out of a WD phase (all my previous drives have been WD 1TB or less, and before that, Seagate 400GB or less). I was happy with all of my WD drives (Raptors, VelociRaptors, 640GB Blacks and Blues, 750GB 7500AAKS, and 1TB Blacks and a Green). Reliability seemingly took a slight downward turn with the 1.5 and 2TB models, so this time I went with Samsung and I haven't been disappointed.
 
imyourzero said:
This is recently coming out of a WD phase (all my previous drives have been WD 1TB or less, and before that, Seagate 400GB or less). I was happy with all of my WD drives (Raptors, VelociRaptors, 640GB Blacks and Blues, 750GB 7500AAKS, and 1TB Blacks and a Green). Reliability seemingly took a slight downward turn with the 1.5 and 2TB models, so this time I went with Samsung and I haven't been disappointed.
Click to expand...

This sounds like a lot like the situation I'm facing. I've got a bit of brand loyalty to WD, but it does seem reliability has taken a downward curve for these very large drives. Even worse for Seagate judging by reviews, but I never used them anyway.

I'll probably be getting the Samsung F4 3-platter very soon. It looks to me like the "go-to" 2tb drive at the moment, within the budget anyway =p



I'm just curious, would drive speed on a 3 platter 2tb be increased by making 3 seperate partitions of 667gb?
 
I agree with pjkenned above and was about to mention the RMA process when I read his post.

I think (and this is especially true) when you buy a lot of HDDs, one of the factors that you SHOULD include in your decision making process is the RMA process of the particular manufacturer you intend on buying from. There is nothing worth than having to struggle through an RMA process when things are already at it's worst. What I mean is you don't want to have to worry about how to get a drive replaced (that is hopefully still under warranty) when you already stressed because the drive failed on you in the first place!

I can highly recommend Western Digitals RMA system. I haven't dealt with Samsung or Hitachi in recent years so I can't really comment on their RMA performance. I have however dealt with Seagate and WDC fairly recently and found the WDC RMA process the easiest to work with. Hence my decision to go with WD 2TB green drives for my media server.
 
Our shop has exclusively used WD for over 7 years, and while there have been failures here and there, we've never had something on a large enough scale to switch. The 13GB, 60GB, and 120GB models were all duds and failed everywhere. When we found those models acted like that, we just took them out of the lineup.

And their RMA process is the gold standard of easy.
 
I have had to RMA 5 or so drives this year at work. 1 from WD and 4+ from Seagate. I would say that the RMA was just as easy with all. Seagate wanted a an error code for the RMA but you could get away with an "I know the drive is bad" and I exercised that a few times. Although its not too difficult to get a failing drive to fail.. A few days of badblocks on a lot of failing drives will push them past the threshold that the manufacturer software uses for warranty purposes.
 
WD Blacks are one of the best desktop HDDs around. It doesn't matter if it is 500GB or 2TB model. All working well and fail ratio is very low. I do have few various Blacks in my system. Working like a charm, never failed.

Please keep in mind however that Blacks are not enterprise/RAID versions of HDDs, because price for these is * 2. It is a good idea to enable TLER [WDTLER tool] - 99.9% of "desktop" disks from WD are delivered with TLER turned OFF, which is not recommended for serious RAID systems (5,6,50,60).

As for which HDDs are most reliable I say WD Blacks/Raptors/Hitachi in general, Samsungs are good too (4 in RAID - no issues for past 3 years), but in general slower than WD or H (if you do require performance from RAID then go with WD or H). Valnar is spot on. Seagate is complete no go for me. Owned few of those (various models) - ALL - ended badly.

If someone asked me which one and only HDD is best choice for serious RAID at the lowest possible cost&fail ratio I would pick Hitachi 2TB HDS. From what I experienced and read it is the most stress free 2TB drive in the world - keep in mind that SAS RAID controllers are often very picky about desktop HDDs (Areca 1680s are good example here - it is better to go with 12xx line for SATA only).

Cheerio.
 
llmercll said:
Any experiences with Samsung RMA's?
Click to expand...

Not yet. Thankfully.I have owned 3 Samsung drives for less than 1 month and they seem to be working fine. Well except for the thread about badblocks but that looks like a problem specific to the machine I was testing the drive on.
 
I like WD. They have good customer service.

I just bought 2 2TB green drives. Quick format. And moved files (deleting originals) to them. Only TV programs that we could get on line. But I have confidence.

After a couple years of "testing" in my HTPC they will be used as backups of business data.
 
I'm debating the WD green and the Samsung F4. Both 3 platters, 3yr warranty, 2tb, 5400rpm. F4 is a bit faster going by user benchmarks, and reliability is hard to tell, but the Samsung is looking nice, and a good bit cheaper then the WD.

I'm leaning toward the Samsung f4. But before I pull the trigger what do you guys think? for around $100 can it get any better?
 
llmercll said:
for around $100 can it get any better?
Click to expand...

The cynic in me thinks that if you can get a 2TB drive that performs well, is reliable, and doesn't silently corrupt your data for $100 then that's nothing short of a miracle.

There are plenty of people who after a bad experience with WD/Seagate/Hitachi/Samsung will swear never to buy another drive from them. The truth is, if you really stuck to that, you would never buy another drive, certainly not for $100 anyway.

Let's see some of examples:

Seagate: ships 1.5TB drives with dodgy firmware and other problems. Covers this up for ages before admitting to it. Eventually fixes the problem and later production runs seem ok (no problems with mine, anyway). Generally hated and despised. But their SAS drives are OK.

Western Digital: Ships Velociraptor "Enterprise drives" with a firmware bug in them which makes them crash after 45 days. Fixes the bug, while at the same time claiming that there is no bug, and there is no fix. Actual company policy (as revealed by support rep accidentally forwarding me his conversation with manager) is to deny all issues. Yet I've had no major problems with their GP drives especially RE4-GP - the only ones I've used in RAID.

Hitachi: Had a 2.5" drive which was available in 24x7 and "normal" variations, mechanically identical, only difference was firmware, and price (and in my case, availability - I would have paid more for 24x7 model if I could). Result: the "normal" ones drop out of RAID arrays, but are fine in WHS.

Samsung: five failures in as many years. But OK RMA process, and the replacements have been reliable.

At the low end of the market, all of the manufacturers are guilty of the same practices - building down to a price, cutting corners on testing to be first to market, concentrating on speed and capacity instead of reliablity to look good in reviews, and having shitty RMA processes because it encourages people to just give up and throw away a bad drive rather than get it replaced.

So yes, all drive manufacturers are evil in some way or another, but if you need a hard drive, you've got to look past that and what your needs are, what the risks are, and how much you are prepared to pay. If all you are storing on that cheap 2TB is video, then a few flipped bits don't matter. 2TB drives have been out for a while, prices are coming down because of imminent 3TB, and hopefully most of the reliablity issues and firmware bugs have been ironed out by now. So grab that $100 bargain and accept the risks.

If on the other hand you care about stuff like low BER, strong error correction, 24x7 reliablity etc, then you have to consider something like a Seagate Constellation SAS drive, which has been through a 12 month qualification only to be resold at 4x MSRP by the likes of EMC for use in SAN arrays. But it will cost you a lot more than $100.
 
Low BER? I'd say try 4K sector drives first. Shouldn't need to sacrifice areal density.

Even even the most reliable HDD, is still unreliable. So what does it all matter?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top