HGST 4TB Deskstar 0S03359 experiences?

B

bleomycin

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 14, 2010
Messages
242
I'm curious if anyone has any experience with these drives? I've had great luck with hitachi in the past and these seem to be the cheapest 4TB drives around right now. I'm planning to use them in a raidz2 array for storing media, so they don't need to be particularly fast, just enough to saturate gigabit.
 
I've heard mostly good things about the Hitachis, so I recently bought 6. Didn't have any bad sectors on the 6 after a full format, so I put them into production. I haven't used them very long so my only personal experience so far is that they run hotter than a number of the other WD and Seagate green drives I have. Now, that could just be a difference in the way each company reports temps, since I mostly read that the Hitachis run very cool. My Hitachis are reporting high 30s to low 40s while idle, up to mid 40s under load.
 
I have good experience with these HGST drives but they are quite slow. In my opinion a better option is the new Seagate NAS drives. The price difference for a 4TB Seagate is $200 vs. $150 for the HGST but the speed improvement (sequential read/write is very close to 7K4000 HGST drives) and lower power consumption make it worth the price.

I own both drives and both have a good track record however the availability of HGST replacement drives concerns me should one fail in the future. I just bought another HGST to use for standalone backup but I would not build a new array using the HGST drives as supply is going to dry up soon.
 
I have some in my current home media server now. It runs cool, quiet but slow as WD green ones.
Not any issues after a half year of running 24/7.
 
Deskstars will be replaced by Toshibas in the very near future, am I right? Here in Finland there's _zero_ HGST 3,5" drives available now.
 
The hitachi storage division still operates as a division of WDC and still produces drives. These are drives that are HGST. Toshiba did get the designs of the hitachi drives and are producing new Toshiba models based on the designs but have no control what HGST produces.
 
Oh, I thought it was something like WDC bought HGST and sold their 3,5" stuff to Toshiba, what ever. Already ordered ST4000VN000.
 
I'm curious to know the date of manufacture. this drive was on sale for $150 last year, and now appears to be discontinued. I don't know of ANY other 5400rpm 4tb drive
 
bAMtan2 said:
I'm curious to know the date of manufacture. this drive was on sale for $150 last year, and now appears to be discontinued. I don't know of ANY other 5400rpm 4tb drive
Click to expand...

I believe all six of mine were manufactured in January 2013.

Edit: I purchased them in August 2013.
 
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
The Coolspins are 5700rpm, so they're not 5400rpm either.

It's possible they are not producing them anymore, I've seen the Jan 2013 manufacturing time frame before but nothing more recent. However, I see the prices of them continuing to drop and that leads me to believe they still are. These drives seem to be in high demand and if there was a limited quantity I would expect prices to have increased instead of decreased. People have been claiming they are extinct for nigh on 8 months now and they still seem to be available.
 
I get the same (although not 100% sure this is accurate - I mean how does the software know the speed hard drive database? or is this read from the drive?)

Code: 
jmd0 current # hdparm -I /dev/sdh

/dev/sdh:

ATA device, with non-removable media
        Model Number:       Hitachi HDS5C4040ALE630
        Serial Number:      PL2311LAG2UNAJ
        Firmware Revision:  MPAOA3B0
        Transport:          Serial, ATA8-AST, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6, SATA Rev 3.0; Revision: ATA8-AST T13 Project D1697 Revision 0b
Standards:
        Used: unknown (minor revision code 0x0029)
        Supported: 8 7 6 5
        Likely used: 8
Configuration:
        Logical         max     current
        cylinders       16383   16383
        heads           16      16
        sectors/track   63      63
        --
        CHS current addressable sectors:   16514064
        LBA    user addressable sectors:  268435455
        LBA48  user addressable sectors: 7814037168
        Logical  Sector size:                   512 bytes
        Physical Sector size:                  4096 bytes
        Logical Sector-0 offset:                  0 bytes
        device size with M = 1024*1024:     3815447 MBytes
        device size with M = 1000*1000:     4000787 MBytes (4000 GB)
        cache/buffer size  = 25060 KBytes (type=DualPortCache)
        Form Factor: 3.5 inch
        Nominal Media Rotation Rate: 5700
 
drescherjm said:
I get the same (although not 100% sure this is accurate - I mean how does the software know the speed hard drive database? or is this read from the drive?)
Click to expand...

Yeah I don't know either, but if it's able to be read, I'd assume it's correct. It also gets the correct number for my Seagates @ 5900rpm. My WDs don't show any rotational speed.
 
drescherjm said:
I get the same (although not 100% sure this is accurate - I mean how does the software know the speed hard drive database? or is this read from the drive?)
Click to expand...

That is coming from the database. From what I remember reading some time back, someone did an acoustic test with the pitch and amplitude of the sound coming from the drive and came up with 5940RPM for one of the Coolspin 1TB or 2TB drives, though I don't remember which particular Hitachi it was.
 
drescherjm said:
I get the same (although not 100% sure this is accurate - I mean how does the software know the speed hard drive database? or is this read from the drive?)
Click to expand...
mwroobel said:
That is coming from the database.
Click to expand...
No. It is from word 217 in the data block returned by the ATA command "Identify Device".

In the case where a drive chooses not to include that in the data block, or if you want to confirm/verify the number, it can be determined programatically using low-level read timings.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top