question Should I get a WD gold or a Seagate Barracuda Pro (both at the same price and 12tb))

[themostwanted]

Hi all!

I have an option to either get a WD gold HDD or a Seagate Barracuda Pro HDD for almost the same price, I dont care much about speed as I intend to use it to mainly for multimedia. My main goal is to get somthing reliable that would last for years

I know that the enterprize level drives (WD Gold) are slightly different than pro consumer drives (such as some are more optimized for sequential reads ). Could you please tell me if its a good idea to use a data center grade drive in pc (take for example that a pc get truned on and off maybe more than once a day) Im asking this after seeing this form about using NAS drives in PCs https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1241379

 

When I was researching the Barracuda I saw on some forms that its not very reliable as many people seem to have there drives die on them early. Not sure if that is fixed by now

 

official links to both drives:

https://shop.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-gold-sata-hdd#WD121KRYZ

https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/hdd/barracuda/

 

sorry for bad english

[Streetguru]

4 minutes ago, themostwanted said:

Hi all!

 

You are better off with 3 4TB drives, or 2 6TB drives for general reliability, since don't drives with higher densities tend to fail more often? 

You also really don't need a NAS drive for a PC, but WD Reds are cheap anyways.

[dizmo]

7 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

You are better off with 3 4TB drives, or 2 6TB drives for general reliability, since don't drives with higher densities tend to fail more often? 

You also really don't need a NAS drive for a PC, but WD Reds are cheap anyways.

Not necessarily. Depends entirely on the drive. There's lots of higher capacity drives that don't fail nearly as often as the smaller ones.

I'd say it's more risky to get 3 drives and running them in RAID, as then you have an additional point of failure.

Failure numbers are minuscule anyways. If you're to believe BackBlaze, their tests had 25,000 12TB drives and 187 failed.

Same number of 4TB Seagate drives, and 281 failed.

[dizmo]

As for your question @themostwanted, they're virtually identical. Pick the company you like more and feel will give you better support, and go with them.

Welcome to the forum.

[Bacon soup]

I own the predecessor to the gold edition, WD RE, from a time before SSDs. These drives never die in a home PC, and the performance is excellent. At the capacity you are seeking; I think you have to buy enterprise level drives.

[Streetguru]

20 minutes ago, dizmo said:

As for your question @themostwanted, they're virtually identical. Pick the company you like more and feel will give you better support, and go with them.

Welcome to the forum.

 

4 minutes ago, Bacon soup said:

I own the predecessor to the gold edition, WD RE, from a time before SSDs. These drives never die in a home PC, and the performance is excellent. At the capacity you are seeking; I think you have to buy enterprise level drives.

For the same price wouldn't it be better to have 2 6TB prosumer drives with an SSD cache?
 

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/GCNv6h/western-digital-red-6-tb-35-5400rpm-internal-hard-drive-wd60efax

[dizmo]

1 minute ago, Streetguru said:

 

For the same price wouldn't it be better to have 2 6TB prosumer drives with an SSD cache?
 

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/GCNv6h/western-digital-red-6-tb-35-5400rpm-internal-hard-drive-wd60efax

I wouldn't. Unnecessary added complexity.

IIRC someone once told me seek times are much faster on higher capacity drives because the data is packed into a tighter area thus the head has to move a shorter distance. Not sure how true that is but it makes sense in theory.

[Bacon soup]

4 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

For the same price wouldn't it be better to have 2 6TB prosumer drives with an SSD cache?

sure why not. Whatever they get; still need a backup for all that data so they may as well get whatever is cheapest. IMO hoarding multimedia is not worth the cost when the entire nation of Romania does it for free  

[Streetguru]

8 minutes ago, dizmo said:

I wouldn't. Unnecessary added complexity.

IIRC someone once told me seek times are much faster on higher capacity drives because the data is packed into a tighter area thus the head has to move a shorter distance. Not sure how true that is but it makes sense in theory.

It's not like it's a point of failure, since if the SSD dies all you lose is the temporary cached data, lots of software can make it automatic like StoreMI, or the built in windows tools.

[dizmo]

Just now, Streetguru said:

It's not like it's a point of failure, since if the SSD dies all you lose is the temporary cached data, lots of software can make it automatic like StoreMI, or the built in windows tools.

I didn't say it was a point of failure. I said it was unnecessarily complex.

[Streetguru]

1 minute ago, dizmo said:

I didn't say it was a point of failure. I said it was unnecessarily complex.

It's like 5 minutes of software set up though

[dizmo]

3 minutes ago, Streetguru said:

It's like 5 minutes of software set up though

He's not putting games on it. He's putting media on it. It's unnecessary.

[Streetguru]

2 minutes ago, dizmo said:

He's not putting games on it. He's putting media on it. It's unnecessary.

If you're $300 deep what's another $50 for a 500GB SSD cache?

[dizmo]

1 minute ago, Streetguru said:

If you're $300 deep what's another $50 for a 500GB SSD cache?

What's the point of putting a 500GB cache on it when it, really, won't even work?

It's media. I imagine they're things he'll load random items every so often. Not something constant. So since the cache would constantly be changing, since nothing's being accessed repeatedly, it doesn't really work the way it's designed to.

[Bacon soup]

Just now, Streetguru said:

If you're $300 deep what's another $50 for a 500GB SSD cache?

i dont think SSD cache is needed for videos or music. You can get away with SD card level speed for multimedia.