Enterprise hard drive for desktop use?

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[U]ber|Noob

Limp Gawd
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Apr 4, 2013
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Are there any drawbacks to using an enterprise hard drive designed for 24 hours operation in a desktop that goes on and off?
 
The only drawback I know of is noise. Other than that I've run many enterprise drives in my systems over the years.
 
Do you mean 15,000 RPM drives? Like Charoid said, noise is the only concern. Beyond that they work like normal hard drives.
 
Ok thanks, noise might be a concern.

I just saw one for a good price.

But I read in an article that they are designed to be used with raid arrays (which I have never used and don't know how to) and if they are used with a normal sata port they don't have as good error control, can anyone explain a bit more about this?
 
Other than generally being beefier/stronger internals, assuming the interface is the same (e.g. SATA), the additional differences are just firmware changes. They have features like TLER/ERC/CCTL which report errors quicker when encountered on the drives, rather than waiting upwards of 60s (this wait can cause a drive to fail out of a RAID array in a server which can corrupt data, crash arrays et), however if you are not using RAID then these features will most likely be useless.

The last statement about error control doesn't change whether you are using consumer or enterprise drives. RAID is what gives you error control, regardless of the type of drive you use. So using an enterprise drive as a stand alone disk doesn't change much other than maybe being a little faster, stronger/longer lasting internals, and noisier/more power hungry. It's up to you if that's a worthwhile tradeoff.
 
Define enterprise drive.

There are lots of different types and they vary a fair amount. Some are pretty much just desktop drives with a firmware change, Others are faster (10k, 15k) some are slower (Seagate Archive drives).

Edit
They are almost always more expensive but often include a better warranty.
 
maybe he is referring to drives like ultrastar vs deskstar. There is some sales going on ultrastars I saw.

literally read this last night

http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/77F8DE9679CE7E3C8625765C005CC589/$file/Compare_UltrastarDeskstar_TB_final.pdf
 
If you want a quiet 15k RPM drive I can recommend the Cheetah 15k.7 drives, I have one and it's at least way more silent than a WD Raptor 10k RPM drive.
That said it's a SAS drive so you need a SAS controller for it...
 
I saw one of these for not that much.

Toshiba Mg03Aca300

I probably won't get an enterprise drive like this though because I don't really need the speed, I'd probably rather low noise and low power, but I would like good build quality.
I just noticed the idle power was not much different than a desktop drive.

The only hard drive I ever had that broke was a desktop barracuda a long time ago, are they considered reliable these days?
Well also a 2.5" portable hard drive that was designed to stand upright broke, I guess it fell over too many times.
 
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makes no sense

enterprise = durability and performance

for desktop you'd better get some cheap ssd being still ages faster in terms of seeks compared to any spinner + slower but higher capacity sata for file dumps (videos, music, photos etc) & backups

[U]ber|Noob;1041561687 said:
Are there any drawbacks to using an enterprise hard drive designed for 24 hours operation in a desktop that goes on and off?
Click to expand...
 
It will be for a secondary hard drive for saving and loading files, I have the os and software installed on an ssd already.
 
[U]ber|Noob;1041567640 said:
The only hard drive I ever had that broke was a desktop barracuda a long time ago, are they considered reliable these days?
Well also a 2.5" portable hard drive that was designed to stand upright broke, I guess it fell over too many times.
Click to expand...
Designed to stand upgright does not mean that it was also designed to fall over multiple times.

As a single drive, certain Seagate drives aren't that reliable compared to their WD and Hitachi counterparts. But their lower overall costs which adds up the more you buy means that you could potentially achieve similar rates of reliability to more reliable drives. Or at the very least more storage I.e 4 x Seagates could cost as much as 3 x WD drives which means you could do RAID 6 with the Seagates and only RAID 5 with the WD drives.
[U]ber|Noob;1041567805 said:
It will be for a secondary hard drive for saving and loading files, I have the os and software installed on an ssd already.
Click to expand...

Still though, for simple desktop usage, an enterprise drive is a bit overkill in terms of costs. I'm fairly sure you're not going to lose thousands (if not millions) of dollars of productivity if a hard drive dies. That's the main reason why businesses should be using enterprise drives.

If you're looking for backup, you're better off just buying one internal drive and one external drive for backup. That would be far more safer for your data then getting a single enterprise drive. Even if you already have a NAS, file server, external drive, and/or cloud backup, the extra costs for an enterprise drive could still be used towards expanding one of those aforementioned backup options.
 
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