Most Reliable 3-4TB HDD?

B

BfA

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 21, 2007
Messages
184
I'm looking for a drive that will be used for mainly backups and storing of files (1080p 10gb+) that I'll stream to my TV. (There's other procedures in place for backup as well so this isn't the only solution) I also would like to encrypt the full disk using BitLocker so I was wondering if that would affect a drive at all.

My orders of priority are:

1) Reliability
2) Able to do full disk encryption
3) Noise
4) Power
5) Speed
6) Heat

Any suggestions?

I can currently get a Seagate ST4000VN000 4TB 64MB for $175 (CAN) but not sure if that's a good option or not.
 
Last edited:
Personally I've been buying these lately for home and work.
www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FJRS5BA
I've had 24x Hitachi 3Tbs 0F12450 in one server for 3 years now and they have been great.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
I've been buying 3TB Toshiba drives & 4TB WD Red but as drescherjm stated any stats almost anyone here could give you would be inconsequential (although I read that there has been several follow-ups to that Backblaze study so I wouldn't use that as a guide without following all the threads through)

I bought 4 Hitachi USB housed drives recently and 2 of them failed after a few months. But of the 60 odd 2TB Hitachi drives I have got only 1 has failed.

If you believe then WD and Hitachi do NAS specific drives that are rated as more reliable. They cost more. I'm not convinced - but I have 16 4TB WD Reds, none have failed so far!
 
drescherjm said:
Its hard for anyone to answer #1 because they most likely do not have thousands of drives. Having a few drives is statistically meaningless. The best I can do is point you to the only study that has 1000s of drives.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
Click to expand...


...and even then that story has been debunked to death and the writers thoroughly flogged like they should be. It was a nice attempt, but foolish to put any faith in that report.

I don't think there is a "most reliable" anything with hard drives anymore. It seems the 1TB versions were the last batch to really go through major problems. Ever since Seagates 1.5TB, every drive bigger, from all venders, seem to have reports across the Internet about issues.

The density of storage is so high now with moving parts that it's just going to get more complex and thus less reliable. There is a reason why they started removing almost all warranties from 5 years to 3 to 2 and in some cases 1.

I'd say the best you can do if you're really that paranoid is buy your storage in doubles like I do. If you can, even go for different venders so that way you don't risk buying 2 hard drives in a possible "bad" batch.
 
Liger88 said:
...and even then that story has been debunked to death and the writers thoroughly flogged like they should be.
Click to expand...

Wrong again. You keep saying that, but the fact is that the study is fine. The people complaining the loudest just do not understand statistics.
 
Not many drives offer SE, the Seagate ES.3 enterprise does offer such a drive at a premium cost.

Seagate desktop drives seem to have a higher failure rate then other drives.

Seagate® Constellation® ES.3 SATA 6Gb/s 4-TB Hard Drive with Secure Encryption
ST4000NM0053

Currently going for $343 at AZ......not exactly reasonable.
 
JoeComp said:
Wrong again. You keep saying that, but the fact is that the study is fine. The people complaining the loudest just do not understand statistics.
Click to expand...


People understand the statistics just fine and they are hideous. The way they are presented are just poor to say the least. I'm not going to re-hash an old subject that was already dissected half a year ago. We wont even get into the conditions the drives were "tested" in.

Again OP don't buy into that horrific "study" if you want to call it that.
 
I got rid of my Seagate 2 & 3Tb drives and replaced them with these drives yesterday.

Both my original Seagates were RMA'd with replacement drives. On top of that, one of the replacements was DOA.

However, I did notice that both original drives were made in China where as the replacements were from Thailand and they seem fine. I had the original drives for about 1.5 years.

Needless to say, from my experience, recent Seagate drives are prone to early failure. I'm now paranoid about the RMA drives, hence the HGST drive purchase.
 
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Liger88 said:
People understand the statistics just fine...
Click to expand...

You obviously do not understand, since you claim the study was "debunked", when in fact, it was not.

Only someone who does not understand statistics, like, for example, a former restaurant worker with no technical credentials, would claim there was anything fundamentally wrong with the statistics that were compiled and analyzed by a senior engineer with impeccable credentials and a distinguished career history.
 
Whach said:
I got rid of my Seagate 2 & 3Tb drives and replaced them with these drives yesterday.

Both my original Seagates were RMA'd with replacement drives. On top of that, one of the replacements was DOA.

However, I did notice that both original drives were made in China where as the replacements were from Thailand and they seem fine. I had the original drives for about 1.5 years.

Needless to say, from my experience, recent Seagate drives are prone to early failure. I'm now paranoid about the RMA drives, hence the HGST drive purchase.
Click to expand...

I have both a pair of ES.3 drives and HGST NAS and so far they are all flawless.
Barracuda's were once the top of the crop but not anymore since their production moved to China.

The HGST NAS are a super good deal in price/GB.
 
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
ep0x73 said:
Barracuda's were once the top of the crop but not anymore since their production moved to China.

The HGST NAS are a super good deal in price/GB.
Click to expand...

Yup. They were the Barracuda's that gave up on me.
 
We have a running pool of ~100 drives at work. Hitachi's have been fantastic. Seagates good and western digitals bad (2TB green power RE4 drives). The western digitals may have been a bad batch as WD stopped sending us back 2TBs in the RMA, but that's my experience.
 
Those RE-GP drives were a bad call, trying to blend enterprise with green did not appear to work out that well.
 
Most reliable you ask?

Anything with 'enterprise' or 'datacenter' written on it (includes SATA drives).
 
Cerulean said:
Most reliable you ask?

Anything with 'enterprise' or 'datacenter' written on it (includes SATA drives).
Click to expand...
This or Retail drives.

OEM drives specially now at all levels have very little QC going on. That's supposed to be absorbed by the System Builders themselves, where they get re-credited for failed drives. On top of that OEM drives bought individually tend to shipped with horrible packaging and shelved in horrible ways before reaching you.

If you want a reliability over price. Don't buy OEM general consumer drives. Get either Retail consumer drives, or Enterprise drives.
 
Thanks for the great information everyone. So I've done some additional research and am now trying to decide between the following. After reading all of your opinions and doing some research on my own, I'm kind of leaning towards the 4TB HGST. Is there a difference between HGST 0F14688 and HDD-T4000-HUS724040ALE640, is the error rate for both 1 in 10^15?

The questions I'm wondering if how much reliability goes up with two consumer drives in software RAID 1 versus a single enterprise drive?

~$320 CAD - 4TB HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 0F14688

~$270 CAD - 4TB Western Digitial WD4003FZEX Black 4TB

~$270 CAD - 3TB Western Digital RE 3TB WD3000FYYZ


Other options in software RAID1 w/ Win 8.1:

~$318 CAD - 2 x Seagate Barracuda 4TB SATA3 64MB ST4000DM000

~$280 CAD - 2 x Western Digital Red 3TB SATA3 64MB Cache WD30EFRX
 
Last edited:
Those HGST NAS drives look very interesting, thanks for mentioning those guys. I'm wondering what the difference between one of those and the enterprise drives would be reliability wise as the NAS drives are about 60% of the enterprise ones.

(Edit: Looks like the NAS only have 1 million MTBF and three year warranty versus enterprise 2 million MTBF and five year warranty.)
 
Last edited:
Don't take my word for it, but a friend tells me those 4TB HGST are very reliable and he uses 6 of those in his file server using ZFS. His last drives came from Western Digital and Seagate, and he's had more issues and data loss with the Seagate in his experience. The WD less so than the Seagate.

Again, don't take my word for it, it's personal experience from a friend. I currently run three Toshiba 3TB hard drives in my computer and they've been rock-solid for a year. If I were you, I'd go with the HGST.
 
octoberasian said:
I currently run three Toshiba 3TB hard drives in my computer and they've been rock-solid for a year. If I were you, I'd go with the HGST.
Click to expand...

Those sound interesting. I've heard the Toshiba drives are reliable, plus they're 3 x 1GB platters. I could do:

~214 - 2 x Toshiba 3TB HDKPC08 in software raid one

I wonder what the difference between that and the 4TB HGST is reliability wise. Is the error rate for both 1 in 10^15 or is that only for the enterprise drive? Does that spec matter as much as people say it does?
 
I have had 2 Hitachi Ultrastar HDDs in the past year and one of them died on me. The other one makes a weird rattling noise when NOT under load. It's actually getting quite annoying.

I've replaced the other one with a Seagate Barracuda 4TB and it's been rock solid for 6 months. I'm going to replace my other Hitachi drive with another Seagate Barracuda and maybe sell the Hitachi for half price.

I just can't stand Hitachi. I've heard good things here and there but I think Seagate/WD are still the best for hard drives.

If you have the money get the WD Black 4TB HDD. If not, get Seagate Barracuda 4TB HDDs.

Avoid Hitachi.
 
Arizonian7 said:
I have had 2 Hitachi Ultrastar HDDs in the past year and one of them died on me. The other one makes a weird rattling noise when NOT under load. It's actually getting quite annoying.

I've replaced the other one with a Seagate Barracuda 4TB and it's been rock solid for 6 months. I'm going to replace my other Hitachi drive with another Seagate Barracuda and maybe sell the Hitachi for half price.

I just can't stand Hitachi. I've heard good things here and there but I think Seagate/WD are still the best for hard drives.

If you have the money get the WD Black 4TB HDD. If not, get Seagate Barracuda 4TB HDDs.

Avoid Hitachi.
Click to expand...

The problem with this is you have had 2 drives and not 1000. 2 drives could easily just be bad luck and could have nothing at all to do with quality. 2 to 10% are supposed to die each year no matter what manufacturer you purchase from.
 
1 million MTBF is plenty and kind of a joke as you will never ever reach that.
Running 24/7 for 10 straight years is only going to net you around 87K hours and the drive most likely will fail before then.

What is nice about the HGST NAS is the retail box/packaging vs a bare drive in bubble wrap.

NE shows about a 25% 1 star rating for all Toshiba drives and a high failure rate, probably why they are one of the cheapest drives you can buy.

Warranty is nice but I'd rather not go through the hassle of needing to send in drives that fail and Toshiba as of now has a pretty shoddy track record.
 
ep0x73 said:
1 million MTBF is plenty and kind of a joke as you will never ever reach that.
Running 24/7 for 10 straight years is only going to net you around 87K hours and the drive most likely will fail before then.

What is nice about the HGST NAS is the retail box/packaging vs a bare drive in bubble wrap.

NE shows about a 25% 1 star rating for all Toshiba drives and a high failure rate, probably why they are one of the cheapest drives you can buy.

Warranty is nice but I'd rather not go through the hassle of needing to send in drives that fail and Toshiba as of now has a pretty shoddy track record.
Click to expand...
If I could afford the 4TB HGST NAS drives or even the WD Blacks, I'd go for it over the Toshiba, but so far-- knock on wood-- they are working just fine.

As with everything being posted here so far, the saying still holds: "Your mileage will vary."

There are a lot of factors to consider that may lead to drive failure, and that would be too numerous to list. If it was me, and I have the money and I wanted a 4TB hard drive, off the bat it'd be the HGST or WD Black given that the Toshiba drives stop at 3TB. (This is not considering the 6TB enterprise Toshiba hard drives, mind you.) If I was on a budget, I'd go with the Toshiba 3TB hard drives.

The wildcard, to me, is always Seagate given the opinions about the drives so far that I have read.
 
All drives fail no matter what, some sooner than others, but its the nature of the mechanical hdds.

We all search for the one that wont fail... but we all know deep inside its just a bomb that will explode some day.

Some people swear by Hitachi/HGST other by Samsung, others by WD, hell i even vouch for Maxtor back in the day.

Buy whatever fits your budget, no matter the brand, and backup thats the only thing that will save your valueble info, no matter the brand or the class, all drive can fail and will fail in time.
 
I am definitely pro HGST/hitachi. Out of 200 deskstars I bought for the hardware lab I manage (replacing failing seagates) one was DOA and none of the others have failed (some deployed over a year). I have 30x3TB hitachi coolspin disks that are 900+ days powered on time and no failures or re-allocated sectors. I just bought 24x4TB coolspin from bhpotovideo (they are selling 4TB right now for $149) and they have been working great as well.
 
My 2 cent : I only own WD
-> Green : 8x 1 TB in 2x vDev RaidZ1 of 4 disks (ashift = 8)
-> Green : 5x 2 TB in 1x vDev RaidZ1 of 5 disks (ashift = 12)
-> Green : 6x 3 TB in 1x vDev RaidZ2 of 6 disks (ashift =12)
... all tweaked with wdidle.exe /s 300
Never had any problem for 24/7 since sept. 20th 2012 !

I own 8x 1 TB WD Black, no problem.

Now I fill my Nas with Western Digital SE, still with ZFS.

Cheers.
 
There is one technical specification that has not been mentioned in this thread: average bit error rate.

From the cheapest most consumer-grade drive to high performance consumer-grade drives to NAS-grade drives to enterprise-grade drives (SATA/FC/SCSI) there is a big difference in reliability against bit loss and read and write error rates. In addition, enterprise-grade drives feature multi-dimension head axis and compensate for vibrations and movements, and feature hardware-based ECC.

Intel has a wonderful paper on this (consumer-grade versus enterprise-grade hard drives):
http://download.intel.com/support/m...e_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf
 
Cerulean said:
There is one technical specification that has not been mentioned in this thread: average bit error rate.

From the cheapest most consumer-grade drive to high performance consumer-grade drives to NAS-grade drives to enterprise-grade drives (SATA/FC/SCSI) there is a big difference in reliability against bit loss and read and write error rates. In addition, enterprise-grade drives feature multi-dimension head axis and compensate for vibrations and movements, and feature hardware-based ECC.

Intel has a wonderful paper on this (consumer-grade versus enterprise-grade hard drives):
http://download.intel.com/support/m...e_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf
Click to expand...

Why there are some good points I don't put too much belief in what manufactures post for specs especially when it comes to the URE rate (unrecoverable read error) or the MTBF.

Like most non-enterprise disks my hitachi coolspin disks are rated for 1x10^14 of bytes read between non-recoverable errors.

My array of 30 of these disks I have been reading 1 petabyte (1x10^15) of bytes as well as writing about the same amount each month since march so I have easily read 5x10^15 bytes off this array so far. In an array you even have higher chances of hitting read errors because you have soo many disks...

Well in all those bytes read and written I got 1 (yup, you got it 1) reading error.

So 30x1 disks which I have read 50x the number of bytes of a single disks URE I have gotten all of 1 reading error.

Now if this was a big batch of seagate disks then a bunch of reading errors (and disk failures) wouldn't surprise me.

The guy who was did the pi record before me (both of his records) he had tons of disk failures.... He was using seagate disks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top