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Cheap hard drives worth it?

G

Gilbert_pwns

Gawd
Joined
Nov 13, 2010
Messages
764
Been out of the loop in terms of hard drive tech. Stopped buying anything storage related around the time Tb hard drives were getting popular.

I have started making videos and streaming, which in turn have filled up my measly 500gb hard drives that I've had for 7 years or so. Started looking up stuff online and it seems like retail value for 1tb drives are around 60-70 USD. Started digging around more and found some for 30-40. I've bought OEM components before but I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do in this case. I also want to get a heads up on any precautions I should take before I get a 1tb+ drive as I remember hearing that certain chipsets didn't recognize especially large hard drives.

my specs are in the sig.
 
They're that cheap because they are old, slow, and 1TB SSDs are selling for $300 now.

The disk capacity that can cause trouble is 2.2TB, which is the limit of 32-bit MBR disk partitioning. The solution to that is to use GPT partitioning instead.
 
If you are looking for a bargain and if your system can handle >2TB drives then this Toshiba 5TB drive at Amazon is a killer deal @ $139.99. 7200RPM, 128MB Cache, 3 year warranty. Just picked one up and it is blazing fast for a spinner. Seems to be quiet and cool. This drive was retail packaged (ie: in a static bag in a foam insert in a printed box with a warranty statement) but absolutely no accessories - not even screws. So far I'm satisfied but it's only been running a few hours. :D
 
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The 1st Toshiba 5TB drive I got died within a few hours :( -- RMA went well, and:

The 2nd drive is working fine, and it is indeed very fast compared to the HGST 4TB NAS drives. It is my loudest drive - high-pitched when active. But it's tolerable.
 
The 1st Toshiba 5TB drive I got died within a few hours -- RMA went well, and:
Click to expand...

Remember that no matter what drive you purchase there is a > 1% chance you will receive a DOA drive.
 
@ Gilbert_pwns
For now I'd say that Toshiba is your best bet in terms of performance/price/reliability.
//Danne
 
Is the Hitachi 5 tb 7200 rpm really faster than hgst 4 tb nas 7200 rpm?
More than the platter density accounts for? Both are Hitachi drives.

Archmage said:
The 1st Toshiba 5TB drive I got died within a few hours :( -- RMA went well, and:

The 2nd drive is working fine, and it is indeed very fast compared to the HGST 4TB NAS drives. It is my loudest drive - high-pitched when active. But it's tolerable.
Click to expand...
 
evilsofa said:
They're that cheap because they are old, slow, and 1TB SSDs are selling for $300 now.

The disk capacity that can cause trouble is 2.2TB, which is the limit of 32-bit MBR disk partitioning. The solution to that is to use GPT partitioning instead.
Click to expand...

The systems that can handle larger drives than 2.2TB are ones with UEFI enabled, correct? I too, am a bit of a noob when it comes to figuring this out.

Also, if it is the case with UEFI, and I have been using a 3TB drive as a backup on an older system (only shows 2TB available for use), could I move it to my HTPC which has UEFI, reformat the drive, and have all 3TB available?
 
The systems that can handle larger drives than 2.2TB are ones with UEFI enabled, correct?
Click to expand...

It's not that clear cut. I have 4TB drives (hooked up to the motherboard ports) in my 7+ year old core2quad / ASUS P5Q Pro system that I use for my linux based HTPC. No problems at all with 4TB drives and they show up as full 4TB. UEFI would only be needed to boot from the 4TB+ drive.
 
txsizzler said:
The systems that can handle larger drives than 2.2TB are ones with UEFI enabled, correct? I too, am a bit of a noob when it comes to figuring this out.
Click to expand...
Non-UEFI systems can work fine with them, just not boot from them.
Make sure you use an up to date version of Intel RST. Had a little trouble with getting >2.2TB drives to work on some older X58 rigs.
Consult here for the best version of RST to use :
http://www.win-raid.com/t25f23-Which-are-the-quot-best-quot-Intel-AHCI-RAID-drivers.html
 
For recording and streaming video a 1TB drive will still be plenty (get 7200RPM). However the place it will "lag" is if you try jumping around the video timeline a lot. Depending on your editing style this may be noticeable. But if you are doing simple recording or playback it will be fine. But you will still be surprised how fast 1TB can fill up when your working on stuff.
 
ondjultomte said:
Is the Hitachi 5 tb 7200 rpm really faster than hgst 4 tb nas 7200 rpm?
More than the platter density accounts for? Both are Hitachi drives.
Click to expand...

Well no, one is Toshiba and the other is hitachi. They only use the old hitachi tech for lower capacity drives. Although ALL hd companies cross license technology as they all use IBM developed tech. Hitachi is supposedly more reliable than the rest and toshiba had problems with their 2 and 3TB drives before. We dont really know how reliable the new Toshiba higher capacity drives are but failure rates are low for now. Far lower than their lower capacity drives. But then again seagate higher capacity drives are also far more reliable than their older drives.

yes the speeds dont support the 1TB platter design, I think they are 1.2TB platters as my seagate is 15% slower than the Toshiba even though both say they are 1TB platters.. So maybe it is not just 1.2tb but somewhere there.. But not only that but latency is 50% faster than the seagates and comes with 4x cache memory.
 
txsizzler said:
The systems that can handle larger drives than 2.2TB are ones with UEFI enabled, correct? I too, am a bit of a noob when it comes to figuring this out.

Also, if it is the case with UEFI, and I have been using a 3TB drive as a backup on an older system (only shows 2TB available for use), could I move it to my HTPC which has UEFI, reformat the drive, and have all 3TB available?
Click to expand...

My 3TB seagate external came formated as MBR. It uses 4K advanced format sectors and can go upto 16TB using MBR. But attaching it to the computer sata ports says the partition is not recognized and has to be reformated. The computer can also format it as MBR but I have not tested it, copyign 3TB of data takes a few days. The 4K sectors arento compatable with many utilities but for the rest it works normally as long as you align them the partition to 4K sectors, by default it did not come formatted like that so speeds were rather slow, under 50MB/sec.. Correcting it with NTFS format and alignment, speeds went up to 120MB/sec.. they seem a little slower than the 2TB 512byte sector drives but not by much. Took ages to correct the alignment problem. In the end I set it for like 2MB boundry and wasted like a meg of space..
 
I have a few 4TB externals that are advanced format drives however the external unit converts them to 4K native. They report 4K logical 4K physical sectors unlike advanced format drives that report 512 byte logical / 4K physical. And yes as a result of the larger 4K sectors you can use MBR even with systems that did not support GPT. Although do not think you can bust the drive out of the enclosure and it will work internally when removed from the enclosure the drive will be advanced format and if you had data on it the data will not be readable because of the sector size change.
 
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