Which Hard Drive would meet my needs the most?

[glitchmaster0001]

Hi! I have this old Seagate 1TB barracuda HDD that I bought used back in late 2015 and now it's starting to show signs that it is dying when I checked the SMART data off it. I am now starting to look for a replacement HDD for it. What brand would you guys recommend. I am looking to spend around $100 on a new HDD. Though I am fine with spending less than that. I am starting to not trust Seagate since this is the 3rd Seagate Barracuda HDD that has started to die on me. My family had 3 computers with Seagate Barracudda HDDs over the years and they all failed in 1 or 2 years of use. The first one was a 250GB Seagate and that died in a year of use. The second one was a 1TB Barracuda and that was in my Dad's Dell PC. It died in a year and a half of use. This current drive in my desktop is a 1TB Barracuda and the SMART data shows 4.4 years of total power on hours. Now it's showing signs that it's dying. I'm fine with any brand but I would want something to last at least 5 years before breaking down.  I am fine with either 1TB or 2TB in size. Also, what do you guys think of SSHDs as opposed to HDDs? 

[Mira Yurizaki]

If you want some semblance of reliability, drives made for NAS systems typically come with a three year warranty and more head park ratings (this is when the heads go rest on something after not being in use). Otherwise, if the drive survives the first three or so weeks of regular use, it's very likely going to last at least several years regardless.

 

SSHD's are only worthwhile for things that are loaded often off the drive. They're better suited for OS or daily application storage than say for documents, media, or games (unless you play one game all the time).

[Daan101]

WD is a well know and generally good brand.

But keep in mind that 5 years is a long time for a hard drive to last. 

[ARikozuM]

Have you looked at the WD Blue 4TB or WD Black 1TB?

 

There's also the WD Red 2TB.

[NTDaws]

Barracudas are better for storage then full time use

[mariushm]

I would suggest going for a retail HGST NAS 3 TB for $120 : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145911&ignorebbr=1

Yeah, it's over 100$ but it's worth it.

 

If you want cheaper, there's a deal for HGST 2 TB bulk enterprise drives ( HGST Ultrastar A7K2000 )  that used to come with 5 year warranty for  88$ : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1B0-006B-00040&ignorebbr=1

But I'm not sure how much warranty is Newegg offering for these. I'd also be worried about how well would Newegg package these for you.

 

The above 3 TB drive comes in a nice box with some packaging to protect it and I suspect Newegg would add more bubblewrap or some packaging material so it would handle shipping better.

 

I agree with you on Seagate, it's not my favorite these days. I'd also recommend staying away from WD Red and Purple .. if you're ok with spending 100$ for 1 TB-ish, go with WD Black, at least those have 3 year warranty or more and have better track record.

 

73$  WD Black 1 TB 5year warranty : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236625&ignorebbr=1

87$ WD Gold (datacenter) 1 TB  ?years warranty : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1Z4-0002-002U9&ignorebbr=1

124$ WD Black 2 TB : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236624&ignorebbr=1

 

 

[glitchmaster0001]

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

I would suggest going for a retail HGST NAS 3 TB for $120 : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145911&ignorebbr=1

Yeah, it's over 100$ but it's worth it.

 

If you want cheaper, there's a deal for HGST 2 TB bulk enterprise drives ( HGST Ultrastar A7K2000 )  that used to come with 5 year warranty for  88$ : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1B0-006B-00040&ignorebbr=1

But I'm not sure how much warranty is Newegg offering for these. I'd also be worried about how well would Newegg package these for you.

 

The above 3 TB drive comes in a nice box with some packaging to protect it and I suspect Newegg would add more bubblewrap or some packaging material so it would handle shipping better.

 

I agree with you on Seagate, it's not my favorite these days. I'd also recommend staying away from WD Red and Purple .. if you're ok with spending 100$ for 1 TB-ish, go with WD Black, at least those have 3 year warranty or more and have better track record.

 

73$  WD Black 1 TB 5year warranty : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236625&ignorebbr=1

87$ WD Gold (datacenter) 1 TB  ?years warranty : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1Z4-0002-002U9&ignorebbr=1

124$ WD Black 2 TB : https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236624&ignorebbr=1

 

 

What's a WD Gold drive? Is it supposed to be super reliable? I am mainly looking for a drive to run cool and be super reliable. Raw performance I don't really care about since I have a boot SSD and tho drive will mainly be used for storage of  applications, games, photos, videos, documents, and etc. the 120GB SSD in my system is going to be used for storing the OS and maybe at most 6 other small applications

[glitchmaster0001]

1 hour ago, Being Delirious said:

Barracudas are better for storage then full time use

I had 3 barracuda drives fail on me before so I don't know if I could trust Seagate that much 

[NTDaws]

2 minutes ago, glitchmaster0001 said:

I had 3 barracuda drives fail on me before so I don't know if I could trust Seagate that much 

Like I said they are better for storing files and then having a SSD as your boot drive.

 

[mariushm]

14 minutes ago, glitchmaster0001 said:

What's a WD Gold drive? Is it supposed to be super reliable? I am mainly looking for a drive to run cool and be super reliable.

It's supposed to be an "enterprise"/ "datacenter" drive which handles vibrations better, because it's meant to be inserted into dedicated servers which may have 16-24 such drives tightly packed in the front of the case. Cheaper drives (like let's say wd blue) may not have so advanced error correction or the more complex anti-vibration mechanisms inside the drive , capable enough to handle so many potential sources of vibration.

In theory, those WD Gold drives are supposed to also have long warranty.  The PDF below also say they have a higher than normal MTBF (2.5 million hours vs 1 mil typical for consumer drives) and that they also have some RAID specific features enabled (which you can ignore if you don't use raid)

 

See https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800074.pdf

 

I'd say the warranty of a hard drive is the best indicator of how much trust the manufacturer has in that model. If a WD Black has 5 years warranty, you can be sure they did the math and figured out the large majority of those drives will last more than 5 years, otherwise they'd probably go bankrupt .

 

I actually have a 1 TB WD Black drive in my system and it actually has over 57000 hours of operation (or 2375 days or about 6.5 years, as I rarely turn off my pc) and just recently it got one reallocated sector in the SMART info (but the drive works superbly).. i'll probably replace it in the following months with another 4 TB HGST NAS drive. 

 

(but anyway, my drive is just one datapoint , i'm not backblaze to have 20k drives of a specific model to tell you how many died on me)

[glitchmaster0001]

3 hours ago, mariushm said:

It's supposed to be an "enterprise"/ "datacenter" drive which handles vibrations better, because it's meant to be inserted into dedicated servers which may have 16-24 such drives tightly packed in the front of the case. Cheaper drives (like let's say wd blue) may not have so advanced error correction or the more complex anti-vibration mechanisms inside the drive , capable enough to handle so many potential sources of vibration.

In theory, those WD Gold drives are supposed to also have long warranty.  The PDF below also say they have a higher than normal MTBF (2.5 million hours vs 1 mil typical for consumer drives) and that they also have some RAID specific features enabled (which you can ignore if you don't use raid)

 

See https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-800074.pdf

 

I'd say the warranty of a hard drive is the best indicator of how much trust the manufacturer has in that model. If a WD Black has 5 years warranty, you can be sure they did the math and figured out the large majority of those drives will last more than 5 years, otherwise they'd probably go bankrupt .

 

I actually have a 1 TB WD Black drive in my system and it actually has over 57000 hours of operation (or 2375 days or about 6.5 years, as I rarely turn off my pc) and just recently it got one reallocated sector in the SMART info (but the drive works superbly).. i'll probably replace it in the following months with another 4 TB HGST NAS drive. 

 

(but anyway, my drive is just one datapoint , i'm not backblaze to have 20k drives of a specific model to tell you how many died on me)

Speaking of which, What is a reallocated sector count? In CrystalDiskInfo, my 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD say caution there. Also, should I just buy a NAS drive for my computer instead of a standard HDD? Like a WD Red? What's wrong with WD Red drives?  

[mariushm]

The hard drive arranges the data in chunks of 512 or 4096 bytes called sectors.

When the firmware on the drive detects that an un-correctable error during the read of that sector or when writing that sector (for various reasons), the hard drive will copy the contents of that sector in one of the sectors available as reserve and mark that sector as "don't use, use the sector at this address instead"

 

The error could be a fluke and may be fixed by erasing the drive completely and filling the surface with null bytes, which can force the firmware to recheck the state of that marked sector. On the other hand, it could be that some in some very small point where a few bytes were read or written, the surface of the disc developed some magnetic weakness or some other flaw which could extend in the future.

 

Based on various studies, including Google's hdd study ( see : Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population )  there is some correlation between SMART errors and eventual failure of the drive.  In the case of reallocation count errors, between 10% and 20% of the drives who show up with such an error would die within a few months.  See page 7, figure 7 and see below the text

 

Quote

3.5.2 Reallocation Counts
When the drive’s logic believes that a sector is damaged (typically as a result of recurring soft errors or a hard error) it can remap the faulty sector number to a new phys-
ical sector drawn from a pool of spares. Reallocation counts reflect the number of times this has happened, and is seen as an indication of drive surface wear. About
9% of our population has reallocation counts greater than zero. Although some of our drive models show higher absolute values than others, the trends we observe
are similar across all models.

Figure 11 shows the survival probability after the first reallocation. We truncate the graph to 8.5 months, due to a drastic decrease in the confidence levels after that
point. In general, the left graph shows, about 85% of the drives survive past 8 months after the first reallocation.
The effect is more pronounced (middle graph) for drives in the age ranges [10,20) and [20, 60] months, while newer drives in the range [0,5) months suffer more than
their next generation. This could again be due to infant mortality effects, although it appears to be less drastic in this case than for scan errors.
After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without reallocation counts, making the critical threshold for this parameter also one.

So basically, when your hard drive reports one sector with issues, it's time to think about copying the data to another hard drive and to use that hard drive just for stuff you won't regret losing if the hard drive dies suddenly (like music or movies or steam games you can download again)

 

[glitchmaster0001]

28 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Snip

It says i have 511 reallocated sectors. Is that bad? how much life do you think is left in this drive? 

[Phate.exe]

I hoard server-pull 2TB HGST Ultrastar's.

 

I've been buying them for like $30 each, they usually have about 17,000 hours (about 2 years) of on-time but otherwise totally clean SMART data.  I've had one in my server for a year now, another has been in an external enclosure for about that long, and they've been great.  The others have been on a shelf.  Some of the fastest mechanical drives I've ever used (previously I've been using Seagate Barracuda's).

 

I grabbed a couple more (bringing my stash up to 5 2TB and 1 3TB ultrastar), and this week I'm going to be throwing 4 of them into raid 5 in my server to gain some redundancy and even more speed.  One drive can already saturate a gigabit ethernet connection, which is why I'm also throwing the 10Gbit nic I bought into my server as well.

[glitchmaster0001]

Just now, Phate.exe said:

I hoard server-pull 2TB HGST Ultrastar's.

 

I've been buying them for like $30 each, they usually have about 17,000 hours (about 2 years) of on-time but otherwise totally clean SMART data.  I've had one in my server for a year now, another has been in an external enclosure for about that long, and they've been great.  The others have been on a shelf.  Some of the fastest mechanical drives I've ever used (previously I've been using Seagate Barracuda's).

 

I grabbed a couple more (bringing my stash up to 5 2TB and 1 3TB ultrastar), and this week I'm going to be throwing 4 of them into raid 5 in my server to gain some redundancy and even more speed.  One drive can already saturate a gigabit ethernet connection, which is why I'm also throwing the 10Gbit nic I bought into my server as well.

the thing is that I don't really trust server drives. I bought this drive used and when I bought it, I think it had around 3 years of use on it already. Though i know that HGST makes really good drives 

[Phate.exe]

43 minutes ago, glitchmaster0001 said:

the thing is that I don't really trust server drives. I bought this drive used and when I bought it, I think it had around 3 years of use on it already. Though i know that HGST makes really good drives 

 

Whenever I get one of these I look up the smart data, run a full test on them, and listen to how they sound.  They're supposed to have a stupidly high MTBF of like a million hours or something like that, and assuming they're used but functioning properly, perform well, and don't sound crunchy I figure I might as well just send it, especially for only $30 each.  My use case (stuffed into a mid-tower NAS/media server) is a pretty easy life for these drives.

 

With them in raid and an extra drive on standby, I'm even more comfortable running server-pulls.  I want to see what kind of read speeds I can pull out of the 4 drive array.

[seagate_surfer]

Hi glitchmaster0001,

 

Seagate forum team here.

Sorry to hear you had issues with 3 different Seagate Hard Drives. Our engineers are working diligently to provide the most impressive drives possible. In the case that anything does not meet our standards we are committed to resolving any issues that may arise. Additionally, we are making ourselves available in various communities to answer any questions and clear up any misconceptions for current and future customers.

 

It is not entirely clear in which context you used the drives mentioned, so the attached table is just supposed to be informative (brand independent) to use any hard drives in the right context to maximize lifetime and reliability.

 

Also, in regards to your SSHD question: so far we got pretty good feedback on those drives. End users seem to like the combination of SSD performance (in regards to caching and frequently used files) plus regular HDD capacity at an affordable price.

 

Hope that helps a bit in your decision making,

Enjoy your weekend!