Best 2TB disk?

[ncalipari]

I need to buy 9 2 TB hard drives for a backup NAS.

Speed is not important, more important is reliability and cost.

Which disk would you choose (ordered by price)?

- Hitachi 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 2TB 32MB,
60 euro

- Samsung HD204UI SATA 5400 32mb intern bulk HD204UI
64 euro

- Western Digital WD20EARS 2TB Intellipower 64MB Caviar Green
65 euro

- SEAGATE 2TB ST2000DL003 5900rpm 64MB Barracuda LP SATA 6
67 euro


I'm oriented toward the caviar green, but I read bad reviews in this forum, unlike the samsung which is praised.


Anyhow which one would you choose? why?

 

[Timmah!]

I have the WD Green and i had no issues with it in 9 months, but apparently it has too much of load cycles, which shortens its lifespan. I just made a thread dedicated to that.

 

[dma0991]

I am using the Samsung HD204UI 2TB and it has been trouble free so far. I wouldn't mind getting the Hitachi as well because to me Hitachi's drives are pretty good IMHO.

 

[fffblackmage]

I would probably pick the Samsung. WD20EARS would probably be my next choice.
I wonder how the Hitachi is. I haven't really heard anything about them.
And Seagate... I feel like avoiding them altogether.

 

[nanaki333]

another vote for samsung!

EDIT: i also like hitachi drives. they're usually quite a bit cheaper and i haven't had any problems with them.

 

[hans007]

i have the samsung. make sure you get the updated firmware (though if you buy one now its probably already got it), the hitachi has only 600gb platters, instead of 667 so it is not quite as fast i think.

 

[kmmatney]

I haven't had any trouble with the WD Green Caviar drives, but I only have 1 TB and 1.5 TB models.

 

[SickBeast]

I have a pair of the Seagate drives with a short stroked RAID-0 partition for my games and they are great. No problems at all with them so far. The nice thing about them is that they automatically align the partitions for you. They're also the fastest of the "green" drives, and they're dead silent, even with both of them hammering away at the same time.

 

[Phynaz]

Both the Hitachi and the Samsung run cool and quiet.

 

[VirtualLarry]

All of the drives you listed, are Advanced Format drives. Be sure to double-check that your application can use Advanced Format drives.

I personally chose the 7K2000 series 2TB drives from Hitachi, for my WHS, because WHS cannot easily use Advanced Format drives. (It can apparently use the WD Green drives, because they have a jumper setting, but the others do not.)

 

[tokie]

I just bought the WD20EARS and it is fantastic. I can't even tell that it is on when it is running. Cool, fast and quiet.

 

[Emulex]

i run RE4 2TB (2003) [qty 4] at near 100% duty cycle and have had no failures for months. and on esxi server i'm about to grow from 6 to 8. solid just slow as turd.(7200rpm half duplex)

 

[ncalipari]

i run RE4 2TB (2003) [qty 4] at near 100% duty cycle and have had no failures for months. and on esxi server i'm about to grow from 6 to 8. solid just slow as turd.(7200rpm half duplex)

Re4?


Anyhow guys how much power should I account for each one while choosing the PSU? 10W? 15W? 20W?

 

[amdhunter]

Stay away from Seagate. For some odd reason when my 2TB Seagate (st32000542as) is connected via a ESATA enclosure it complains about having bad sectors. My 2TB Samsung does not.

When the Seagate is connected directly to the motherboard it's fine. Any time I do a surface scan, it shows no bad sectors, even on ESATA. So annoying. I just have it lying around in a drawer because I don't trust it.

 

[pcunite]

I have two WD20EARS in an HTPC, quiet and pretty quick too. I turned off the head parking via the wdidle utilty.

 

[ummduh]

Im on my third wd20ears in about a year. Number one failed inside of three months, "click of death". Number two failed in less than a month, it was a refurb from wd. They sent me a new nonrefurb and so far this one is holding up.

Formatting a 2TB hard drive sucks.

I will not be buying this line again. Although I do admit it is very quiet and transfer speeds are pretty good. I use it as a data drive, no booting.

 

[mtneer]

I've owned 2 WD20EARS for about 10 months now. Primarily use them for backup as bare drives in pop-in/out docking stations. They have been cool and quiet until now. I would pick another one if I had to choose something today.

 

[Emulex]

RE4 is western digital's raid edition drive. It is cherry picked for longest lasting at the rated duty cycles and has TLER=8 raid programming so raid cards won't drop a 2TB drive lol.

For everything else i just use some JBOD drive @ 7200rpm

I have 12 Seagate 500gb NS drives (SATA) from HP that have been rocking raid-5 for the last two+ years. freakin' solid. lost 1 drive in maybe 2 years

 

[nanaki333]

12 drives in a single raid5 array with only 1 failure in 2 years? holy doodoo!!

 

[Emulex]

yes hp flashes custom firmware on them and uses 3 second idle timeout scan. we run them at 110% duty cycle on weekends and about 80% duty cycle on weekdays when they are not writing (disk2disk backup for 70+machines/vm's) then they are reading to off-site storage at 2xgigabit max speed. i have to manually manage overlap to prevent a file from getting 6 million fragments versus 6000 (several hundred gig). and yes it is affected by the nasty nasty nasty windows 32bit big file buffered read bug that even 2003 server doesn't fix. (note to self never use 32bit windows o/s with super huge files).

I suspect you get alot from the 512meg write back cache since the unit takes 1 week to do the same task as it does in less than 12 hours (writing) when the cache failed. it is THAT important to have battery back write cache that is ecc (the module commits suicide upon finding an ECC error). P400i hp storage server. it kinda looks like some a-hole stuffed a server in a MSA60 - weirdest server ever can hold a dvd-rom or two more drives in the rear of the unit but not both!

the RE4's are in a hp 600 storage server (ML350 G5) which i found some empty 3.5" sleds on ebay and stuffed them in. they work perfectly. that's a vmware/backup vmware server where veaam can snap-replicate live vm's to that machine even though its probably too weak to run them it only has 1 socket which reduces licensing costs. Plus iirc you can ditch the DVD-rom and put 8 more (up to 24?) 3.5" drives in the mofo. with dual 750 watt power supplies to back that up it is quite a nice storage server or vmware/storage server. terribly underpowered (effectively a core 2 duo 2.66/1333) but you'd be suprised at how much junk you can run on one cpu with 16gb-32gb of ram. really suprised. 10+ machines and the drives are where its bottlenecking using raid-1+0(10).

i do not recommend 12 drives in raid-5 but the server was free so i'm not messing with that setup until i can replace it with 6 (raid-10) RE4's in the future. Having your battery go out disables the write cache which crippples your raid-5/6 ability 10-fold.

Raid is waiting for an error email 24x7 - its going to happen. it's a burden but necessity. and yes i've have (2) times double-disk failure so raid-10 is preached here my friend.

 

[Idontcare]

- Hitachi 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 2TB 32MB,
60 euro

I have three of these, no problems whatsoever.

 

[Alx09]

I love my Hitachi drives as well.

 

[ncalipari]

i do not recommend 12 drives in raid-5 but the server was free so i'm not messing with that setup until i can replace it with 6 (raid-10) RE4's in the future.

Raid 5 is more reliable than Raid 10

 

[fffblackmage]

Raid 5 is more reliable than Raid 10

And the Sun orbits the Earth...

Please, you need numbers, evidence, data, something! to back up your statement. If you can provide a link or something, that would be great, because I would like to know.

 

[masteryoda34]

Samsung