Seagate 4TB Vs WD 3TB Red (can't decide)

Narfski

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Dec 2, 2012
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Hey all,

Figured I would ask for some suggestions / advice here as to what to do for my next round of purchasing drives for my new NAS system that I will be building.

I'm trying to decide between getting 6 x Seagate 4TB (ST4000DM000) or 6 x WD 3TB Red (WD30EFRX) drives to be placed in RAIDZ2. These drives will mostly be for storage of movie backups, music (mp3/lossless), and some other random storage needs. Not planning on doing any VM's off of it.

Would like to have some thoughts overall. Mostly asking since my experiences with the Seagate 3TB (ST3000DM001) have been horrible, with the noise coming from them (head parking issues that people are talking about) and trying to get all of the firmwares in order / matching. I only have 4 x 3TB (ST3000DM001) Seagate's right now but have been all making the same noises but seems to be working fine.

Anyways, I'm not really sure what to do with picking between those two mentioned above. I assume the noise and "head parking" issue or whatever people were calling it has been fixed and are not happening with the 4TB drives?

Overall I would think the WD Red's would have faster transfer rates and improve my large file transfers, just don't know by how much, so to say.

Thanks for all of the advice in advance,
Narfski
 
I have problems trusting any large drive....but if you are going that route...stick with seagate drives. I have seen far less failure rates than from WD.
 
See I would say the opposite, my experience in the past with Seagate has been terrible, failures all over the place, since the .11 fiasco with Seagate a few years ago, I'll never touch another one of their drives. I currently have a NAS with 12x3TB WD REDS, zero problems, most of these drives has been running for months in two other NAS's. My vote would be 3TB WD RED.
 
Just go for the space with the 4TB drives. Both use 1TB platters, both are 5400RPM and both have 64MB cache. Speed is probably going to be pretty similar between the two if not faster on the 4TB drives.

Everyone has horror stories about every HD manufacturer and as far as the drives mentioned I haven't heard of any trending hardware or software issues. My preference would be to go for more space.
 
I would go with Seagate Desktop HDD.15 4TB for storage. But in your case, you should buy 'Red' for your NAS.
 
I'm currently transferring over all my files from my old NAS into my new HP N40L with four ST4000DM000.
No errors so far, but I think one of them is making some kind of noise when starting up, however I haven't yet bothered to check exactly which one...

There is a NAS version of the drives coming out soon (ST2000VN000, ST3000VN000 and ST4000VN000), they are starting to show up on swedish retailers product pages.
The main difference I can see is that Power-On Hours is specced to 8760 versus 2400 on the ST4000DM000.
The spec sheet also has these features:
• Dual-Plane Balance - Yes
• Vibration Tolerance for Small NAS - Yes
• NASWorks Error Recovery Control - Yes
 
I'd take 4TB over 3TB. Everyone's anecdotal evidence is worthless. Unless you have data for 1000s of drives you're not going to be able to say which is more reliable. Its getting a bit old now but Google released a paper awhile ago and found no difference between manufacturers. Anyways I'd go for larger drives unless you're absolutely sure you'll never need more space, at least until you're willing to replace all the drives. 8 drives in a normal system is pretty easy to do, doing 10 or 12 starts to be a huge pain in the ass (aka costly).
 
I went with 8x Seasgate 4tb ST4000DM000, for $150 was prette decent sale. But ill keep my eye on those ST4000VN000
 
I went with 10 ST4000DM000s (0 bad sectors after a badblocks run) to replace my WD EADS 2tbs. I've had 10 bad drives from a total of 28, including the rma replacements. I was planning to wait for 4tb reds but I'm up to 4 out of warranty green failures now and needed new drives. Also the one red 3tb I bought didn't last a week.

The 2400 hour warranty is terrible (if enforced), so I picked up some squaretrade policies with the 30% off coupon they email every week. Just in case.
 
I went with 10 ST4000DM000s (0 bad sectors after a badblocks run) to replace my WD EADS 2tbs. I've had 10 bad drives from a total of 28, including the rma replacements. I was planning to wait for 4tb reds but I'm up to 4 out of warranty green failures now and needed new drives. Also the one red 3tb I bought didn't last a week.

The 2400 hour warranty is terrible (if enforced), so I picked up some squaretrade policies with the 30% off coupon they email every week. Just in case.

Wow, that's a surprising number of failures with the greens. I've been replacing most of mine for upgrades and have only had 1 start developing a few errors out of 11 or so...
 
I might suspect you have bad power or something, thats a ridiculously high failure rate for one person, I have 16 WD Greens (8x1.5 and 8x2TB) all EADS drives and they are well out of warranty, other then one failure in over three years, no issues. I also have about 20 3TB WD RED drives, the oldest is about 9 months, no issues so far. I think its more then bad luck in your case though.
 
I have good luck with Seagate product lines. I have 17 of the 1.5TB 7200rpm drives, and most had the bad firmware that had to be upgraded, and one had smart predicted to fail, and was replaced by Seagate. I also have 19 of the 3 TB 7200 rpm models, and no issues to date. The 3TB are about half the older model and the other half the current model. Some of these drives are 5 years old, and all have been spinning continuously since install. I know the 1.5TB do the head parking clicks a quite a bit, but it doesn't bother me. I believe the main thing to keeping these guys running, is keeping them cool. Heat is your enemy, and so many people seem to go for low acoustics, and essentially fry the drive. I can't comment on Green or Red lines, as I have never owned or used one of these. Maybe I have been luck with the single failure. Also the single failure I had, happened a year or two after purchase and run time. No DOA's either.
 
Well, from a purely anecdotal standpoint, I like Western Digital over Seagate. I"m currently using WD Red 3Tb's in my array, and they've been great. And they're silent as the grave... assuming you're not used to unusually loud graves. The Seagate 4Tb's do have a slightly better price-to-capacity ratio, though. Red's are supposedly designed for an NAS environment, which can't hurt.
 
The only thing is, when a manufacturer known for their problems in the past (Seagate), comes out and says that they say their drive is classed for 100 days per year use, that people will become worried.

Would be great to fast forward 3 years to see how the 2400 hour drives are holding up.

I have had 4 Maxtor and 7 WD and a single Samsung, none of them have missed a beat apart from my 2 Raptors, after 7 years each. So can't complain with any of the manufacturers I have bought products from.
 
Is Seagate really known for problems? Don't all drives fail? Do you have a link to Seagate's claim that their drives are "classed" for 100 days per year use? (Can you explain what "classed" means in this context?)
 
Of course all drives have problems, however Seagate had a particular issue with their .11 version drives a few years ago, many many people suffered drive failures with those drives and it left a bad taste in the mouths of many. For some its more of a personal, if you have a bunch of WD drives fail, you might hate them and swear by Seagate, or conversely, like me, you have a bad experience with Seagate and go with WD. I am sure Seagate has improved and their drives are better, but for me it also comes down to warranty and unfortunately Segate is weaker then WD in this regard. If I am looking at a 3TB Segate drive with a 2yr warranty versus a WD Red which is perhaps $20-25 more but comes with a 3yr warranty, I am going to go with the WD Red, an extra year of warranty to me is huge. I know Seagate is supposed to be coming out with a line of drives to compete directly with the WD Red's lets hope their warranty matches it too.
 
All vendors have had problems with one model or another over the years. I fail to see how anyone could claim any particular manufacturer has risen to prominence for failing drives. Indeed, people do form personal opinions, but that's irratoinal -- and particularly dubious when used as a basis for advice to others.
 
I've noticed that reliability tracks closely to warranty length. If you want reliable drives, target >= 3 years length regardless of manufacturer.
 
Is Seagate really known for problems? Don't all drives fail? Do you have a link to Seagate's claim that their drives are "classed" for 100 days per year use? (Can you explain what "classed" means in this context?)

Yes, all drives do fail, just that Seagates seems to specify that they will fail quicker than some of the other competing manufacturers products.

"when a manufacturer known for their problems in the past (Seagate)"

I would like to hazard a guess that when you say Seagate to someone who knows who Seagate are, they think of the .11 saga. Which makes it a reasonable assumption to say that Seagate is known for their problems in the past.

No one says "Yeah, Seagate, they have been bullet proof".

Same with the Deathstars from days gone by. Hitachi seemed to of cleaned up their act, however with Seagate dropping their warranty to 1 year for OEM stuff for a while, everyone did wonder.

As for classed for 100 days use, I was refering to http://www.seagate.com/files/static...sc/barracuda-desktop-hdd-ds-1770-1-1212us.pdf which clearly shows they are not rated for 24/7 operation, power on hours 2400. Some people are buying them, with the idea of running them 24/7, I thought would be interesting to see, how it pans out in 3 years or so. You are correct, it doesn't say over 1 year, but if I was going to make an educated guess, 2400 hours over its warranty period would mean you would be able to run it for 2400 hours over 3 years?

EDIT: On their Constallation2 drive spec sheet, it says Power on hours per year, which is rated at 8760. That would imply the power on 2400 hours, would be per year too.

Wouldn't the sensible option be to go with a drive that was rated for 24/7 use, for the specific application that the OP wanted it for?

My money is going into the WD Red drives, for specific storage applications, with backups on other drives. I have yet to work out a hash checking application and some sort of proper backup method.
 
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I cannot find anywhere anyone has been denied a seagate warranty claim for exceeding the power on specification, while inside the warranty period. It seems like a 3 year warranty is really a 3 year warranty. Also I would think they would have to advertise it like cars, 3 years or 2400 power on hours warranty. May be I'm wrong, but I have searched both seagate forums and google and can't find anyone experiencing a denial.
 
No one says "Yeah, Seagate, they have been bullet proof".
Do you think anyone makes that statement about any brand of disk drive?

What is the ".11 saga"? Is it like the problems Western Digital had with their Raptor drives? "Saga" seems like rhetoric and hyperbole, and I like to stick with facts.

As for classed for 100 days use, I was refering to http://www.seagate.com/files/static...sc/barracuda-desktop-hdd-ds-1770-1-1212us.pdf which clearly shows they are not rated for 24/7 operation, power on hours 2400.
What does that parameter specifically mean? You seem to think it means running the drive more than 100 hours per year does damage to the drive -- or otherwise shortens its life, somehow. Isn't it really just a way to calculate the MTTF of the drive?

You are correct, it doesn't say over 1 year,
Huh? I never said that it didn't say over one year. Sorry for the confusion -- are you directing that comment to someone else?

I don't see anything on the WD Red spec sheet that lists the "power on hours". Where did you find that WD rated those drives for 24 x 7 use? I must be looking in the wrong place.
 
By ".11 saga" I'm going to guess he's referring to the firmware issues with the 7200.11 that Seagate had. There was a good number of drive issues that were caused by it and it's one of the more prominent issues that Seagate has had in recent history.

Interestingly enough, while there is a review on Tom's Hardware that lists the power-on hours as 8760 and the WD spec sheet blurb on the first page states it's designed for 24/7, the actual spec table within the pdf itself does not list a power-on rating:
http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771442.pdf

IIRC, the definition of power-on rating is the expected usage for which the specifications stated apply. If you use more than the power-on rating then the specifications given are not guaranteed. That being stated I have not heard of anyone getting a RMA refused for an excessive power-on stat.

I have to say I found the statement "Same with the Deathstars from days gone by. Hitachi seemed to of cleaned up their act" a bit funny. It's 12 years after the fact without any serious issues and all Hitachi gets is "well, it seems like they cleaned up their act".
 
HGST was purchased by WD. Since Liggywuh is biased towards WD, I figure "cleaned up their act" means "succumbed to the WD culture of quality". Really, all manufacturers have had problems that, like the Barracuda 11 firmware problem, have caused recall-class issues with their products. If you use those issues as a reason to not buy a particular brand of drive, then after a certain point I don't think you have any vendors left!

I don't think "power-on rating" defines the usage for the specifications; I don't see any engineering reason for that definition to apply. Do you? Why wouldn't they specify the figure you propose as "duty cycle", since it would be a ratio and not an absolute figure? If 2400 is meant to be 2400 hours per year, why isn't that specified as well?

I think "power on hours" has more to do with the failure rating for the drive -- given some ratio of acceptable failure rate, it lets us determine the statistical MTTF for the drive. But I don't have any documentation which tells me that. Drive vendors all seem very stingy about disclosing their methods for making such measurements and establishing their practices.

I'm all for using spec sheets to make decisions about purchases, but it seems pretty important to know what the specifications actually mean before using them as inputs to a decision process.
 
Hitachi were making good drives before WD bought them.

Anyway.

A quick look on Seagates site, and I found this:

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/174791en?language=en_US

Specifically:

AFR is the probable percent of failures per year, based on the manufacturer's total number of installed units of similar type. AFR is an estimate of the percentage of products that will fail in the field due to a supplier cause in one year. Seagate has transitioned from average measures to percentage measures.

The product shall achieve an Annualized Failure Rate - AFR - of 0.73% (Mean Time Between Failures - MTBF - of 1.2 Million hrs) when operated in an environment that ensures the HDA case temperatures do not exceed 40°C. Operation at case temperatures outside the specifications in Section 2.9 may increase the product Annualized Failure Rate (decrease MTBF). AFR and MTBF are population statistics that are not relevant to individual units.
AFR and MTBF specifications are based on the following assumptions for business critical storage system environments:
8,760 power-on-hours per year.
250 average motor start/stop cycles per year.
Operations at nominal voltages.
Systems will provide adequate cooling to ensure the case temperatures do not exceed 40°C. Temperatures outside the specifications in Section 2.9 will increase the product AFR and decrease MTBF.

That was from a drive that is rated to 8760 hours per year.

It seems that on the 2400 hour drives, Seagate says that they will have a 0.73% AFR, but to achieve this number, they shouldn't be powered on for more hours than that.

Sounds to me as if there will be a lot of drives dying just outside warranty period, but of course this is just my own speculation.

As mentioned, Toms said that the Red drives were rated for 8760, but I can't find a shred of evidence to back that up.
 
I have to say I found the statement "Same with the Deathstars from days gone by. Hitachi seemed to of cleaned up their act" a bit funny. It's 12 years after the fact without any serious issues and all Hitachi gets is "well, it seems like they cleaned up their act".

If you turn the clock back to before 4TB drives and the WD Red, the number of threads recommending the Hitachi drives were enormous, based on quality alone.

Now it seems everyone either goes for the cheaper Seagates, or the WD Reds, mostly because pure "hitachi" drives seem to of dried up (in Europe at least), as they are now WD.

I thought it was a fair comment to make that Hitachi went from making something that was a huge problem to being recommended as the go to drive for pretty much everyone in the know.

Seagate seems to win peoples recommendations based on price and or capacity these days, not because of peoples glowing reports of how few they have RMAd.

I can appreciate also, people do go buy 20 retail boxes at a time, and run them into the ground, and they still work 7 years after. All comes down to personal experience I guess, my WD experience has been pretty good, and I would rather have my data on drives specifically designed to be a bit more rugged when it comes to vibration tolerance etc. Not sure it will make any difference what so ever, but it is not like we are talking about a massive price difference or anything.

Maybe it even comes down to the fact that the quality of packaging seems to have more effect on a drives life than the manufacturer or model. Times have changed!
 
I'd take 4TB over 3TB. Everyone's anecdotal evidence is worthless. Unless you have data for 1000s of drives you're not going to be able to say which is more reliable. Its getting a bit old now but Google released a paper awhile ago and found no difference between manufacturers. Anyways I'd go for larger drives unless you're absolutely sure you'll never need more space, at least until you're willing to replace all the drives. 8 drives in a normal system is pretty easy to do, doing 10 or 12 starts to be a huge pain in the ass (aka costly).

You do need a larger sample size than most here are basing their experiences on, but you don't necessarily need to get up to the 1000's unless you have a really small standard deviation between the two populations.

30 or so of each should be a good starting point. May even be possible to detect a difference with 15, if the standard deviation is small enough.
 
With RAIDz2, just buy whatever you like from a feature standpoint, and if one dies, just replace it, for free if its still under warranty. :p

It seems to me, with redundancy, what matters the most is the warranty period, not the exact reliability of the drive.
 
I thought it was a fair comment to make that Hitachi went from making something that was a huge problem to being recommended as the go to drive for pretty much everyone in the know.

My comment was on the timescale :p Saying they screwed up over a decade ago and being recommended as the go to drive now isn't particularly notable imho. I also think that the Hitachi recommendations on the forum weren't made primarily because they didn't fail, but rather because they were significantly more compatible with RAID cards. If WD or Seagate had made drives that worked well with my RAID setup when Hitachi was still making drives, I probably would have gone with one of them as well back then.

Zarathustra[H];1039916156 said:
With RAIDz2, just buy whatever you like from a feature standpoint, and if one dies, just replace it, for free if its still under warranty. :p

It seems to me, with redundancy, what matters the most is the warranty period, not the exact reliability of the drive.

I agree. It's best to simply plan for drive failure rather than make it the exception.
 
I agree. It's best to simply plan for drive failure rather than make it the exception.

Yup. I'm getting ready to upgrade the drives in my NAS.

I'm going to keep the WD 3TB greens I already have, and add 4 more WD 3TB reds.

4x 3TB WD Greens + 4x 3TB WD Reds in RAIDz3.

I should have held off and bought the reds in the first place, so now I will wind up with a half and half green/red combo, but I guess I can deal with that. And when (not if) I have drive failures, hopefully the greens will go first :p
 
Zarathustra[H];1039916145 said:
You do need a larger sample size than most here are basing their experiences on, but you don't necessarily need to get up to the 1000's unless you have a really small standard deviation between the two populations.

30 or so of each should be a good starting point. May even be possible to detect a difference with 15, if the standard deviation is small enough.

Since lots of things affect drives, the standard deviation is almost never small enough. Are all 30 drives in the same manufacturing lot? Same date code? Were they shipped the same day, and subject to the same abuse in transit? Odds are the were, and that means the failures are correlated. That's going to be true whether the claimant knows it's true or not.
 
[QUOTE='Zarathustra[H]4x 3TB WD Greens + 4x 3TB WD Reds in RAIDz3.[/QUOTE] 7 drives is a much better better setup for RAIDZ3.
 
Since you are on software raid I'd go with the extra capacity of the Seagates.
 
Hitachi were making good drives before WD bought them.

they still make good drives after wd bought them... the two are operating separately.

but anyways 2 solutions to your worries about failure:
1) RAID
2) buy a better line of drives (even enterprise if $$ is not an issue)
 
I would say it all depends, I have had some issues with everyone at some time or another. The difference is how they treat you under warranty.

The one thing not mentioned so far is cooling, in my home server with several multi TB drives issues were much improved when I installed extra fans, filters (and kept them clean), noise levels and temps are low and my server add on SW (Stablebit) checks the HD status while I sleep.
 
been digging into this all day with no clear answer between the seagate 4GB NAS drives (I wish the CS Constellations came in 4 instead of 3) and the WD Red NAS drives. I have a new synology 4 bay NAS on the way and was back and forth between the 4GB NAS seagates or the WD 3 GB reds, both are 3yr warrrantys so decided to go with the extra space since I'm outta bays and give the seagates a chance in a 4 drive RAID5+1 hot spare so i should be safe even if an infant mortality. if not everyone here will know !
 
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