• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Looking to replace a dying data drive

J

jnick

2[H]4U
Joined
Sep 25, 2004
Messages
2,888
My rather old 250gb drive is slowly failing. I have backed all of the data up and am now looking to replace the drive. I currently have a WD 640 black as a data drive. I'm also a photographer by hobby and have around 140gb of pics from the last three years. I need a rather large, reliable drive around the $80 price range. I can either grab another 640gb black, but was thinking maybe I should go for more storage space such as the 750 or the obvious 1tb.

Any recommendations on drives would be appreciated!

Thanks!
 
Thanks! Would it be worth it to replace the 640 with that as well? The initial place was to us that 640 as a backup drive for the 250gb, then I'd use the extra space for more random day I needed. The information have a 750gb external drive for a backup of the 640.

Since this is obviously a lot bigger, should I get 2 and do some type of mirror? Or use the 640 as the main data drive and the 2tb as the manual backup drive?

Thanks again!
 
a mirror (RAID1) would be an excellent idea and i would highly suggest it.
a photographer myself, i have my photos (400GB worth) backed up on 3 different computers, it would be terrible to loose all of your photos.
 
I have a couple of terabytes of photos, and the most recent year or so is stored on my main photography rig. All, including the most recent year, are stored on a 12TB ZFS RAIDZ2 volume on the fileserver. I back up the most important shoots in full on DVDs and store them at a friends house, and as I photograph for the web as my primary target, the exported JPEGs are on a server in another state.

Having a mirror is helpful, but isn't a solution for a backup. Rather than a mirror, in your case, I recommend a backup volume. With a mirror, if the volume is corrupted / malware hits (do you run Windows?) / you delete things on accident, you are more likely to lose data than backing up to a volume that is not always present on the machine.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I also do archive on DVD and store it at my parents house. I also just received web hosting as a gift and will upload there as well.

As far as mirroring goes, once a RAID1 is set, then one drive strictly acts as a mirror, correct? Meaning I cannot use the second drive to store any files that AREN'T on the "main" 2TB drive? Just curious :).

Also, is the built in RAID1 from my P8P67 Pro suitable? I cannot really afford a dedicated RAID card at this point in time.

Thanks!
 
Tagging along on this thread, I am looking to replace a 4 year old Samsung 320GB drive (which still works flawlessly) with a 2TB drive, just because space is becoming restricted.

For about the same cost (~$80), I could go with a 5 year warranty 1TB drive or a 3 year warranty 2TB drive. Having had a 5 year warranty drive fail... twice (in less than 4 years), I'm not particularly inclined to pay for the 5 year warranty as it doesn't appear to buy me any longevity.

Of these 2TB choices, are there any clear favorites? The 64MB cache drives? Should I expect the Samsung to have the updated firmware by this time? This is going in an old Asus P5B-E mobo.

cLOLt.png
 
Having had a 5 year warranty drive fail... twice (in less than 4 years), I'm not particularly inclined to pay for the 5 year warranty as it doesn't appear to buy me any longevity.
Click to expand...

No SATA drive will buy you longevity. A drive is expected to have a 2% to 8% failure rate each year for its first 5 years and higher after that. Look at the graph on page 4:

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

At work where I have 100 to 300 disks spinning 24/7 we are seeing the upper end of this rate for the last 2 to 2.5 years. We have had to RMA drives from every single manufacturer this year and most of our RMAs are drives that are 3 years old or younger.
 
Interesting link, although I note that report is 4+ years old. I doubt things have changed much. In my home environment, I leave the PC on 24/7 too. And while I have my data backed up (I need to improve my process), it is still a lengthy process to recovery from an OS HD crash.

Looks like I should just hold my nose, close my eyes, and dive in. There's no clear standout. They all seem equally bad.. or equally good, depending on your perspective.
 
I doubt things have changed much.
Click to expand...

I can tell you that if anything reliability has gone down. If you care about your data back it up. Also monitor the smart data for your drives. In all but 1 drive (out of over 10) that has died this year at work I have been able to predict failures before they happen so that I was able to recover nearly all (>99.9%) of the data before the drive died without having to restore backups. I double backup at work (at minimum). I was lucky on the drive that was not very recoverable. When looking at the data I found out I did not need it since I already had a copy of raw data in more than 1 location.
 
Those last two failures (WD Raptors) died with no SMART warnings at all. I am somewhat surprised to hear that reliability is heading down. Generally in the tech world, you expect cheaper and better as time marches on.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for all of the helpful information. However, from all that I can tell, it would appear the WD20EARS is quite a bit faster performing drive than the Samsung. Any reason not to go with that? Especially since it has a 64MB cache?
 
Does a 64MB vs 32 MB cache make much of a difference in a general purpose system?

There's a wide range of 1+TB drives available with 64MB caches.
 
I've had a 320GB Sammy running in my system for 4+ years (HD320kj, iirc). It is the coolest running drive I have had (of 3).

In spite of the fact that Seagate now owns the Samsung HD line, I'm leaning to the HD204UI Samsung because of my positive Samsung experience and from what I've read online about the performance of this drive. I especially like how cool my 320GB Sammy runs (28*C)... about 7* or 8* C cooler than my old 74 Gig Raptor or 300 Gig Seagate.
 
I have the WDC 2TB green (both 3 and 4 platter models), I have several samsung 2TB F4s HD204UI, and the hitachi 2TB 5k3000. Both WDC greens are significantly slower than the other two drives. The oldest green I believe is around 40MB/s slower across the whole disk with the 3 platter green being around 20MB/s slower across the disk. I believe the new hitichi 5K3000 is a little faster than the Samsung F4. As for temperature I have not measured that on any of my disks so I do not know. It would not be fair if I just checked the smart since the disks are not used equally and they also are not cooled equally (some are together in 5in3s some are separate with no cooling at all).
 
Argh. After further review on StorageReviews site, I may change over to the Barracuda 2TB Green drive. Its performance appears to smoke the Samsung F4. OTOH, looking at the latest info on returns, the F3 is best in the 2TB class while the Barracuda LP lags. Neither the F4 nor the Barracuda Green show up in that list.

Samsung F4 2TB vs Barracuda 2TB Green.... same price. Not sure on warranty since NewEgg claims 2 years on the Barracuda while SR says it is 3 years.

For temps, I just use what SpeedFan 4.43 reports.

Thanks for your reports on your drives in service. Good data points.

Edit: I decided on the Samsung F4.
 
Last edited:
Argh. After further review on StorageReviews site, I may change over to the Barracuda 2TB Green drive. Its performance appears to smoke the Samsung F4.
Click to expand...

On that page they are comparing the Barracuda to the Green F3 not F4 for some reason I can not understand since the F4 was available last November. Although the F4 had a firmware bug that was fixed in mid December. The F4 does low 140 MB/s on the outer tracks.
 
Yeah, the Barracuda review does reference the F3EG drive. However, the F4 review includes the newer Barracuda 2TB Green (3 platter) drive.

Performance aside, I felt better about the expected reliability of the F4 drive. [Shrug.] It's really a toss up, I expect. I think the 2 year Barracuda warranty may be a misprint on NewEgg's site.
 
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0340562

[ame="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Spinpoint-Cache-Desktop-HD103SJ/dp/B001U3S5S0"]Amazon.com: Samsung 1 TB Spinpoint 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.5 inch Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive HD103SJ: Electronics@@AMEPARAM@@http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41ZPq%2BIaQ2L.@@AMEPARAM@@41ZPq%2BIaQ2L[/ame]

SuperBiiz.com often has this drive on sale for $50 - $55 with an ecoupon, but I haven't seen anything at the moment. The 1TB Samsung F3 is the best drive I know of in the 1TB and below class. Faster than a 1TB Caviar Black in some tests and even more reliable. Just a wonderful drive. It's also an excellent option to stripe two together and beat the sequential transfer rate of 2TB Caviar Black by a significant margin. Samsung is also a good option if you decide to upgrade all the way to 2TB, but then your drive will be slow. But you didn't mention speed. Only reliability. So I would stick with Samsung. Even though their drive division was just bought out by Seagate. Hopefully Seagate will honor their warranties. I think they did when they bought Maxtor, but I'm not certain.
 
I could have saved $20 and bought the 1TB drive, but I elected to spend $20 more and get the F4 2TB drive. We'll see how it compares performance wise to my existing HD321KJ 320GB drive. Both Sammy's are for data storage anyway. I'm using an SSD for OS and programs.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top