HGST 4tb NAS drives - are they good?

I think I'm going to pull the trigger on some. I plan on rebuilding by NAS with 10 of them for use with zfs. The HGST drives in general have a good track record so we'll see what happens.
 
I just purchased quite a few of the 6TB models as well - they should be decent drives with low failure rates.
 
I looked at the HGST NAS 7200RPM but ultimately went with the 6TB WD Reds. I've had great luck with WD drives in my previous NAS builds and actually preferred the lower speed drives for my needs.

In reality, I'm not sure it matters too much between the brands (overall) - for me, I just buy on price, performance, and warranty and assume all drives are pretty much equal in terms of failure. The Backblaze article was revealing - but that's from just one use case in a very unique situation. I used it to influence my purchase but not too deeply - as my environment serves 1-3 users and not thousands. :)
 
I usually buy based on price as well. I've had some WE Red's before, they worked well but the price on the HGST is about 30$ cheaper per drive right now so that's what I'm going to end up with. Those are the 2 that it came down to for me anyway. I don't need the faster speed but with the price I'll take it.

Same warranty and MTBF(not that that MTBF actually means anything) between the two so just came down to price right now.

Thanks for the replies
 
Last edited:
I've deployed over 100 of these drives so far. None have failed but they've only been in use for a year or so. About half of them are in servers / NAS boxes in a datacenter. The other half are in general purpose servers in client offices. I'm using them in hardware RAID 10 arrays with LSI SAS caching controllers. Have been very happy with them.
 
I have 4 of them in my storage server and 4 of the 3TB models in my NAS, they work great.
 
I have a pair of 4TB and 3TB running raid 1 for 5700K+ hours without any issues.

Not the fastest but not the slowest either.

I notice the 4TB keep going on sale at egg for around the $155 mark which is what I paid on sale.

Actually thought they would drop more in price with the 5TB out now.
 
5700K hours, yeah. Been running 24/7 for about 8 months or so.

My 3TB are through marvell raid1 and I can't use crystal to see their time but
I had them for a few months before buying the 4TB.

They are probably closer to 8K hours
 
ep0x73 said:
I have a pair of 4TB and 3TB running raid 1 for 5700K+ hours without any issues.

Not the fastest but not the slowest either.

I notice the 4TB keep going on sale at egg for around the $155 mark which is what I paid on sale.

Actually thought they would drop more in price with the 5TB out now.
Click to expand...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8743/hgst-deskstar-nas-4-tb-review

Other than enterprise drives, they're the fastest Nas drives. 7200rpms when most nas drives are 5400-5900rpms.
 
That is true, they are fast but not as fast as the latest barracuda drives for instance.
Certainly not the slowest either.
The 5/6 are a newer revision and they are right up there with the best.

They are mass bulk drives so speed really is not a main priority and I really can't complain
if it takes a another minute to transfer folders/files etc.

My 4TB match and even beat by 10mb read from the Anand review.
 
Last edited:
Anyone know if you can disable spindown on these drives? I've tried "hdparm -B 255" (and 254), but neither have disabled spin down; the number keeps slowly rising. hdparm works fine on Seagate drives, and wdidle exists for WD drives... HGST seems to lack support for disabling spindown? Do I really have to write a script to poll the drives every once and a while? :(
 
I have over 2tbs of porn over 3 drives my last seagate 3 tb external died prob due to being external and running daily. should i go with a wd black or 3tbx2 reds in a nas box to backup my porn plus games and stuff.
 
turbolude said:
I have over 2tbs of porn over 3 drives my last seagate 3 tb external died prob due to being external and running daily. should i go with a wd black or 3tbx2 reds in a nas box to backup my porn plus games and stuff.
Click to expand...

the cloud. but if its got to be in a nas, reds.
 
ep0x73 said:
5700K hours, yeah. Been running 24/7 for about 8 months or so.

My 3TB are through marvell raid1 and I can't use crystal to see their time but
I had them for a few months before buying the 4TB.

They are probably closer to 8K hours
Click to expand...

5700K is 650 years, have they really been running that long?
 
Hitachi drives are awesome. I have many 2TB Deskstars that have been been in service for 5 - 7 years. They have survived living in many different systems over the years, starting out life begin an Areca 1170 controller with idle spin down enabled. Then through various software raid solutions until their (hopefully) final resting place in FreeNAS.

Here a SMART report from last night, filtered on the Deskstars in my main FreeNAS server:

hitachistats.PNG


So out of all those drives spinning for years, only 2 of them have had to reallocate a single block...
 
Awesome. I'm glad that they are getting so much praise. My drives just showed up yesterday so I'll be starting to get things up and running throughout the weekend while I'm not enjoying the weather. Should make a nice raidz2 array with 10 of them. I'm not sure if i'm going to go with freeNAS, ZFSGuru or ZFS on Linux with a ubuntu/debian flavor and napp-it web gui. I'll be trying each of them a bit to see which i like better.
 
Ivan_Only said:
5700K is 650 years, have they really been running that long?
Click to expand...

There are roughly 8,700 hours in a year so if you run 24/7.

5,700 is roughly 9 months or so.

I still have a Seagate 320 running for about 8 years and it has 70K hours on it.

I see what you did, yeah I missed the comma ;)
 
ep0x73 said:
There are roughly 8,700 hours in a year so if you run 24/7.

5,700 is roughly 9 months or so.

I still have a Seagate 320 running for about 8 years and it has 70K hours on it.

I see what you did, yeah I missed the comma ;)
Click to expand...
You sure you didn't miss the "k"?
 
Nah, five thousand and 700 hours as of now without any issues.

I also have around 6 WD's with anywhere from 30-50K still flawless.

If you don't beat on them by moving files all the time they can last for quite a long while.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top