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What Drive Should I Get? A Guide to the Mechanical HD Market

Blade of Grass
By Blade of Grass
in Storage Devices
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Posted

Do you think you could do a section on the pro/cons of buying hard drives and ssds used of ebay.etc?

Pro: Pricing

Con: Lack of warranty/possible liability from seller. 

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  • 1 month later...
Posted

SSHD'S are pretty nice i think and underrated. Just got my first one with OS installed on it everything is very fast so close to an ssd but it a 2tb drive and costs 3x less and near same speed at least in common use of loading games. os and stuff. If you bench mark of course ssd wins but for daily use no difference from my 1-2 year old ssd. 

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  • 7 months later...
Posted

is it possible to add some rudimentary pricing to the post?

 

Aselwyn1

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Posted
  • Author
24 minutes ago, aselwyn1 said:

is it possible to add some rudimentary pricing to the post?

 

I don't think it's quite worth it to be honest. Price changes depending on what country, store and time of year you're shopping, and it would be difficult to get enough data to make it worthwhile. For example, do I only show it in USD? What about Euro? CAD? AUSD? 

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  • 2 months later...
Posted

@Blade of Grass  I think that you should update the original post to mention that WD's green line was merged into then blue line. This means that there is a blue 7200 RPM class and a blue 5400 RPM class.

 

Also,(I am not sure about this and this is probably wrong) WD seems to have terminated the original Blue series i.e the 7200 RPM blue line completely.

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Posted
19 hours ago, nvpendsey said:

@Blade of Grass  I think that you should update the original post to mention that WD's green line was merged into then blue line. This means that there is a blue 7200 RPM class and a blue 5400 RPM class.

 

Also,(I am not sure about this and this is probably wrong) WD seems to have terminated the original Blue series i.e the 7200 RPM blue line completely.

Correct I believe they killed off the 7200rpm blues though you can probably still find some around. They were replaced with green with ssd caches which I have dubbed the WD brown as to which Paul and Kyle have agree on Awesome Hardware :P

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Posted

Are WD Re drives compatible with Sata 3gbps connectors? The site states they're SAS but I don't know what that means. 

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Posted
9 minutes ago, Energycore said:

Are WD Re drives compatible with Sata 3gbps connectors? The site states they're SAS but I don't know what that means. 

There's two versions of WD Re drives, the SAS version and the Sata version. The Sata version would be, but the SAS version is only available to SAS ports (SAS RAID card or HBA card). SAS is different from Sata.

 

@Blade of Grass Just wanted to comment that the WD Re drives are being phased out by the WD Gold drives (Why they didn't just keep the Re name I'll never know...)

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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted
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On 07/04/2016 at 1:06 PM, nvpendsey said:

@Blade of Grass  I think that you should update the original post to mention that WD's green line was merged into then blue line. This means that there is a blue 7200 RPM class and a blue 5400 RPM class.

 

Also,(I am not sure about this and this is probably wrong) WD seems to have terminated the original Blue series i.e the 7200 RPM blue line completely.

 

On 08/04/2016 at 8:48 AM, TheProfosist said:

Correct I believe they killed off the 7200rpm blues though you can probably still find some around. They were replaced with green with ssd caches which I have dubbed the WD brown as to which Paul and Kyle have agree on Awesome Hardware :P

 

On 09/05/2016 at 1:20 PM, scottyseng said:

There's two versions of WD Re drives, the SAS version and the Sata version. The Sata version would be, but the SAS version is only available to SAS ports (SAS RAID card or HBA card). SAS is different from Sata.

 

@Blade of Grass Just wanted to comment that the WD Re drives are being phased out by the WD Gold drives (Why they didn't just keep the Re name I'll never know...)

Thanks guys for letting me know. I've put this guide on the back burner for a bit as life's been crazy busy the past few months, but it will very likely be updated some time this summer, hopefully near the start :)

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Posted

Just a note, we don't currently produce any SAS drives, but they can still be found around the retailers. :)

If you need any specific info regarding any of the Consumer, Prosumer or Enterprise drives I'd be more than happy to provide it!

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
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  • 5 months later...
Posted
On 27.5.2016 at 1:58 PM, Captain_WD said:

If you need any specific info regarding any of the Consumer, Prosumer or Enterprise drives I'd be more than happy to provide it!

Objectively speaking, what is better: a Seagate drive or a Western Digital drive?

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Posted
1 hour ago, Litargirio said:

Objectively speaking, what is better: a Seagate drive or a Western Digital drive?

I wonder if thread necro-ing counts if it's a guide/pinned post? :D (looking at above, no)

 

WD obviously...although I've never had a Seagate fail :P (and you asked that question to a WD representative...hmmmm)

Looking at my signature are we now? Well too bad there's nothing here...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What? As I said, there seriously is nothing here :) 

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Posted
25 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

I wonder if thread necro-ing counts if it's a guide/pinned post? :D (looking at above, no)

Well, the whole thing about necroing is that you bump a post that was buried somewhere to the very top of the list, pointlessly. But posting on an old sticky doesn't really count as necroing, since it's always at the top anyway.

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Posted
On 4.11.2016 г. at 10:38 PM, Litargirio said:

~snip~

As an official Western Digital representative I can't really recommend or comment on other companies' products or reliability so I can't really answer that question. WD makes great and reliable storage devices, though for the best way to protect your data, regardless of your storage's brand and model I'd recommend keeping backups on multiple storage drives that are not attached to the same system. You can check out the 3-2-1 rule. :)

  • Have at least three copies of your data.
  • Store the copies on two different media.
  • Keep one backup copy offsite.

 

Cheers! 

 

Captain_WD. 

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
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Posted
On 07/11/2016 at 11:06 AM, Captain_WD said:

As an official Western Digital representative I can't really recommend or comment on other companies' products or reliability so I can't really answer that question. 

I was hoping you'd just say "WD is better" or something of the sort.

 

Oh well.

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On 13.11.2016 г. at 1:51 AM, Litargirio said:

~snip~

As I pointed out, unfortunately I can't make comparisons between different companies and their products. 

I've always said that getting as many opinions from different users and review websites as you can is a great way of figuring out what is going on with a brand or a specific product. :) Gathering such data from popular forums and blogs should be a good enough way of figuring out such things. :)

 

Captain_WD. 

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
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  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Interesting guide, but you didn't explain what you meant by seagate barracuda drives being only "rated for 8x5".

 

I'm just scratching my head as to what that means.

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1 hour ago, Pyrii said:

~snip~

That should mean 8 hours, 5 days a week... basically a regular office/home usage-type :)

If this helped you, like and choose it as best answer - you might help someone else with the same issue. ^_^
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Posted

So I just bought a thirth Seagate NAS 2TB drive. (I haven't opened it yet and can still return it)

But they just released the new IronWolf 2TB (same price)

 

Do you guys think I should return it and buy the new one? Are there any benefits in buying the new one? I'm a noob in hdd's :P

 

I'm using it in an unRAID system there are already 2 Seagate NAS 2 TB drives in it.

 

(Tell me if I need to make a new topic.)

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Posted (edited)

@Captain_WD You mentioned that WD is not currently producing SAS drives, which would include the Xe drive line. I've been wanting to get a couple of Xe series drives for Raid 0 high speed storage with a separate Raid 1 backup, but I'm not sure which Xe drive model is the most recent version.

 

Should I look to get the Xe WD3001HKHG? Should I instead look for a more recent product from perhaps a different manufacturer?

Edited by Sumiko
Fixed a typo
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  • 1 month later...
Posted

I'd go with WD RE. The most reliable drives of them all.

WD Black, is pretty good too. You probably might want to replace it after 4-5 years.

WD Red is really great for NAS.

 

My personal experience with seagate wasn't very good.

I don't trust it since 7200.12, buying Seagate drive is like a lottery, it can work for years, or couple months..may be even couple weeks, then something fails (heads or motor or firmware or whatever. ether way you won't be able to access your precious data when it's gonna happen)

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Posted

I'm planning to add new storage to my home desktop. I was planning to add a WD Black 2 TB, but someone suggested using 2 WD Blue in RAID configuration would be more reliable.

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Posted

Any thoughts about this drive? https://www.computeruniverse.net/products/90476249/toshiba-dt01aca-series.asp

 

I would be using it for the games and mass storage. Windows is on SSD.

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Posted

A lot of WD external drives use WD green, However a few years ago my friend's WD green failed and mine despite being a few years old (would be about 11 years old now) is still running strong, at that time the maximum capacity was larger than 1TB but mine was just 1TB and i modified the firmware of the drive to not idle or park because i hated the wait to transfer files as it was so slow. My friend's failed WD green was exactly the same but failed at a younger age.

 

Ever since both WD and seagate locked the ability to tweak their drive's firmwares WD greens should be avoided at all cost not only because of reliability if you dont use it much but also because of the very poor performance.

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Posted
On 10/27/2014 at 7:59 PM, Blade of Grass said:

The WD Green series are high capacity, low cost drives designed for home use. They aren't the fastest, but they are cheap and use low amounts of power. They are generally not recommended for use in a RAID array however, as they lack TLER and have an aggressive spin-down cycle which can result in issues with them being dropped out of an array

Oh God I'm so stubborn, raid array failed like 4 times total and still every single time redid a raid 0 array. Should probably get WD reds. Worst thing is that I knew that this would happen if I got WD greens since I was planning on having a raid array but still got WD greens because they be damn cheap.

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