Reliable 3TB HDD?

A

///AMG

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I ask this because before Seagate used to be reliable. But in the last year they have proved me dead wrong. I have had 3 totally different Seagate hard drives go out on me the last year, one was an 1TB external HDD which I only plugged in 3 times, another was a 1.5TB seagate that went on me after 2 years, and a Samsung Spinpoint that is actually a Samsung Barracuda green 2TB that I bought in April last year that just died last week. It only had a 1 year warranty as well. Right now I am pissed off as fuck.

So I am looking to get a 3TB HDD from a OEM that has reasonably good reliability thats not Seagate and that has at least a 3 year warranty? Any suggestions?
 
WD RE4 5 Year Warranty
WD Black 5 Year Warranty
WD RED 3 Year Warranty
 
WD got any better the past decade? I went seagate because WD died like flies on me.
 
I've had to RMA all types of drives my blacks seem to work the longest so far though.

I don't have dozens of them though... so YMMV
 
Eh screw it. I bought a WD 3TB Red and a Toshiba 3TB HDD just to make sure this time. The only storage devices working on my comp now are the SSDs I use for applications lol.
 
Yeah, I`m with you my desktop has 2x256gb SSD 840P and 1x256gb M4 and 1x64gb M4... I really hate to wait for drives to spin-up now ;)

In my NAS I have WD green which are PAINFULLY SLOW, and my next backup system will have a mix of Seagate 1TB i've had for about 2yrs and haven't used, and WD Black, and probably some 15k rpm SAS drives. I am not looking forward to migrating my existing data from the GREENs to the blacks.

For long-term storage I personally go for the 5YR warranty, but I don't think the BLACK are RAID friendly, and the WE4 are astronomically expensive... so that leaves the "RED" with 3YR the best bang for buck, and they were made for storage/NAS usage anyway, so I think you did great with that buy :)

My next backup system is going to have a couple different drives, and arrays based on what I plan to use the data for on the drives, and how often I'd plan to access them.

Be sure to let us know which drive dies first ;) they all die!
 
Lol I let you guys know then. Though if both die in a year, I will just spend a shit load on cheap 512 GB ssds and be done with it next time.
 
///AMG said:
Eh screw it. I bought a WD 3TB Red and a Toshiba 3TB HDD just to make sure this time. The only storage devices working on my comp now are the SSDs I use for applications lol.
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Between the Toshiba and WD Red, I bet on the Toshiba to last longer and/or be trouble-free.
 
I bought 8 Seagate Barracuda 2TB LP drives. 6 of them have either died or is dying (failing SMART tests and increasing read errors/sector reallocations). To their defence they are not made to withstand the vibrations in RAID setups or 24/7 usage. You can in other words blame this on "usage error"

I replaced them with 8 WD RE4 2TB drives and moved the Seagates to my backup server (still RMAing drives, having needed the full redundancy of RAID6 TWICE). After more than 2 years 24/7 I do not have a single read error/sector reallocations or failure on any of them.

Conclusion:
RE drives are worth it if you value reliability unless you need a lot of drives or have very little money.
They will also absolutely destroy the crappy "green" drives like Reds or Barracudas in performance in real life use, even in RAIDs accessed via slow gigabit networks.
 
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Since I have seen enterprize SAS drives fail ... I do not believe any connclusion can be made with such a small sample size. I mean if you had a 10 thousand drives and only 100 of them died in the first year I would then I would call that scientific. Although I am guilty of this when I talk about my 200 or so drives I have at work..
 
///AMG said:
Lol I let you guys know then. Though if both die in a year, I will just spend a shit load on cheap 512 GB ssds and be done with it next time.
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Let us know what, exactly? How will your sample of one be meaningful to anyone?
drescherjm said:
Since I have seen enterprize SAS drives fail ... I do not believe any connclusion can be made with such a small sample size. I mean if you had a 10 thousand drives and only 100 of them died in the first year I would then I would call that scientific. Although I am guilty of this when I talk about my 200 or so drives I have at work..
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It wouldn't be scientific, though it might be statistically significant. To be scientific, it would have to involve a comparison that led to a differentiating conclusion supporting a theory about the differences.
 
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mikeblas said:
Let us know what, exactly? How will your sample of one be meaningful to anyone?
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Well one person wanted to know, if you dont want to know then ok.

ToddW2 said:
If you only need 512gb i'd have jut gone that route now :)
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I didnt say I need one. I said I would buy a lot of them so ssd(s). I would probably have to buy a raid controller if I went that route though as I would probably end up buying at least 10 512GB ssds. But I dont really have a huge want to go spend that money right now even though I do have it.
 
I agree that no scientific conclusions can be made out of my small sample (which is actually much higher as I am responsible for many servers at work, many of them which have WD RE4 drives). It is only my personal conclusion based on experiences with consumer grade drives vs enterprise drives. All drives do die in the end, but in my experience the average time to failure is very different between the two categories in RAID-setups
 
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Interestingly enough, they just came and the WD came up DOA while the toshiba is fine. Off to go Copy over data from my dying 2TB Seagate and get myself an RMA from Amazon.
 
I've done quite a bit of hard drive building recently. Out of 40 Seagate Barracuda 2TB drives I've had to RMA at least 5 within the first 6 months.
Switched to WD reds and I've had 3 DOAs out of 12 drives so far. All 3TBs

To the folks using the Barracudas in RAID 5/6 , be aware that they may not be dying, they may be dropping due to timeout because of lack of ERC. Not much of an issue in RAID 1/0/10 though it seems.
 
Innocence said:
I've done quite a bit of hard drive building recently. Out of 40 Seagate Barracuda 2TB drives I've had to RMA at least 5 within the first 6 months.
Switched to WD reds and I've had 3 DOAs out of 12 drives so far. All 3TBs

To the folks using the Barracudas in RAID 5/6 , be aware that they may not be dying, they may be dropping due to timeout because of lack of ERC. Not much of an issue in RAID 1/0/10 though it seems.
Click to expand...

Interesting. I am not using raid for my HDDs at the moment. I am just going to do a regular backup then I guess using the WD as the main storage drive and the Toshiba as my backup for that drive. Seems like raid really doesnt do well with these drives.
 
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