2TB Drive Options

[jimakos234]

Hello. I am in need of buying a new HDD drive for storage, and this very moment there is a sale on the seagate barracuda 2tb on 78 euros in my area.

The wd green 2tb costs about 90 euros, and the toshiba-hitachi around 84 euros.

 

What choice would be the wisest, since i have heard things about a higher failrate on the seagate side than the wd?

 

I currently have:

 

120gb samsung 850 evo

1tb wd caviar blue 3.5 inch 7200rpm 64mb cache

1tb wd caviar blue 2.5 inch 5400rpm 8mb cache (ripped out of my laptop to add a kingston savage ssd 250gb)

500gb wd caviar blue 3.5 inch 7200rpm 64mb cache

[ChasingPluto]

Honestly I've heard people saying WD fails more than Seagate and Seagate fails more than WD so I would just go with the cheapest option since WD and Seagate both seem to be solid

 

Edit: I would get a Barracuda over a Green

[manikyath]

WD greens are... terrible...

 

i'd honestly recommend toshiba over greens

 

i'm not too familiar with hitachi, but i recall hearing something about them dabbling in water with toshiba.

 

as for seagate... its a hard drive, like any other decent hard drive.

[vectorx5000]

They're all pretty much the same, no major differences.

[manikyath]

They're all pretty much the same, no major differences.

there you are very, very wrong.

 

i challenge you to use a WD green as a boot drive once...

[JoshB2084]

What about WD Black 2TB?

[jimakos234]

What about WD Black 2TB?

Out of budget (143 euros)

[JoshB2084]

Out  of budget (143 euros)

 

Darn.

[vectorx5000]

there you are very, very wrong.

 

i challenge you to use a WD green as a boot drive once...

Ok. Many of them are similar, and they all have to at least somewhat work, or they wouldn't be bought.

[Captain_WD]

~snip~

 

Hey there jimakos234,

 

It really depends on what you are going to use the drive for. Since you already have a boot SSD and three good drives that can deliver decent performance I'm thinking you'd need a drive for massive storage thus the higher performance won't be the most important thing. I'd check each drive's spec sheet and compare the transfer speeds, noise levels and warranty and see which one appeals to you best. WD Green is a good drive for secondary storage and for non-demanding applications that do not require fast access times. The drive works really quiet and saves energy by spinning down more often. There are people who use the drive even for gaming and are pretty happy from what they see so I'd go with that for the low noise and heat levels and low power consumption. Here's the drive's spec sheet for more info: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=1fcE86

 

Feel free to ask if you happen to have questions  

 

Captain_WD.

[MG2R]

WD greens are... terrible...

That's just a load of <redacted>. There's nothing wrong with green drives as a whole.

[jimakos234]

-snip-

 

Thank you for your input, but here in Greece, the 12 euros difference is about 3-6 hours more work, so i think i might go seagate this time, plus the wd blue 2tb is not available anywhere near my region

[manikyath]

i challenge you to use a WD green as a boot drive once...

That's just a load of <redacted>. There's nothing wrong with green drives as a whole.

do it.

[MG2R]

do it.

Why would I? The green drives are not meant as a boot drive. The OP doesn't need a boot drive. No-one is asking for low seek times. What is wrong with green drives if they provide the necesary performance?

[manikyath]

Why would I? The green drives are not meant as a boot drive. The OP doesn't need a boot drive. Noone is asking for low seek times. What is wrong with green drives if they provide the necesary performance?

green drives are actually pretty snappy, theres just one major flaw with them.

 

each time you request data, the drive needs to spin up, creating a 1-2 second delay. now, this isnt too bad is it? well... it wouldnt be if windows knew how to work with that delay.

 

even as a storage drive, sometimes WD greens make windows do REALLY funky things. a friend of mine had to pull his WD green out his system because somehow it made his computer take 5-10 minutes to log into windows, while the drive contained nothing but music.

[MG2R]

<snip>

I don't know how many different greens you've personally dealt with, but I do know that the three in my server have no issues with staying online and not spinning down. IIRC, they lower their spindle speed, but don't shut down completely until the OS signals them to do so. They run with very low noise and have a very low heat output, yet are perfectly capable of consistently saturating a Gbit connection (IIRC, my greens could R/W at 120 MB/s sustained). Maybe the sample you had, had a defect in it, causing it to spin down more often than it should?

 

And before anyone here throws the fanboy/biased card in here: I run whatever drive is cheapest at the moment I buy it. I also run a Barracuda and am also happy of that one. It is louder and hotter, though. On top of that, I've bought 2.5 inch drives from samsung, toshiba, and (most recently) hgst.

[MG2R]

<what drive?>

To actually answer your question: I'd go with whatever one is the cheapest. They will all be perfectly fine for storing data. Remember to run a full suite of tests on the drive before you start using it, to reduce the chance of data loss due to premature failure.

[manikyath]

---

all the greens i've dealt with are mostly older models. i heard the more recent models dont spin all the way down, but the old ones did, and its beyond horrible. not only for performance but also reliability. my 4 year old WD green has around 13K spinups on it. 

 

i cant quote on when they started to make them variable speed, rather than just spinning down, and how much that improved it, but the old ones kinda blew the deal for me.

maybe i should pick up a newer green just to do some tests on it, it might restore my faith in them, who knows i guess.

[MG2R]

<snip>

My oldest 2TB green has model number WD20EARS. I bought it in 2009. It doesn't give me any of the issues you're stating, so I really think you must've gotten a bad batch or something like that. I'll get you the SMART counters when I'm home, but I'm pretty sure the spinup count won't be so dramatic.

[MG2R]

<snip>

 

 I'll get you the SMART counters when I'm home

 

As promised:

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Green (AF)Device Model:     WDC WD20EARS-00MVWB0  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       3472  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   060   060   000    Old_age   Always       -       29599 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       540

So, excluding power on/off cycles, that's roughly one spindown/spinup cycle every ten hours the drive was powered on. Keep in mind that I've never had the drive spin down on its own. I have to order and set a certain standby time before it spins down due to inactivity.

 

This is on Linux, though. It could be that windows runs auto-spindown commands automagically.

 

EDIT: my other drives for reference

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Green (AF, SATA 6Gb/s)Device Model:     WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       844  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   079   079   000    Old_age   Always       -       15593 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       320=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===Model Family:     Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 (AF)Device Model:     ST2000DM001-1CH164  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       725  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   089   089   000    Old_age   Always       -       10284 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   020    Old_age   Always       -       272=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===Model Family:     Western Digital Caviar Green (AF, SATA 6Gb/s)Device Model:     WDC WD20EARX-00PASB0  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1211  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   078   078   000    Old_age   Always       -       16483 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       421

As you can see: the oldest drive (WD20EARS) has a considerably higher spin cycle per power on hour count than the rest of the drives. This is to be expected: I used to order auto spin down on my drives when the server detected that no clients were present. I stopped doing that, though, because the server has fallen out of use-ish. It's often shut down now, and actually has had lots and lots of downtime. I mostly use it for archival reasons and to dink around with and try new software on.

Edited October 14, 2015 by MG2R