Need new drive ... scared ...

[Blieb]

I have been using Seagates with no *knock on wood* problems for 10 years. I am brand loyal ... however, the recent 20-30% failure rate on the new big drives scares the crap out of me.

I was wanting to score a 1tb+ drive ... but now I'm looking at the 7200.12 500gb ... 1 platter, better reviews (so far).

Looking to store files and video on it ... realizing that video will eat up a drive fast ... what do you think?

How many of you have the 1.5tb seagates?

Thanks!

 

[Blieb]

Man there's a shell shocker deal today, 1tb WD Caviar Green for $89 ...

 

[Blain]

You and Seagate have had a good run...
It's time for you to jump ship.

 

[taltamir]

WD Fan Boy

What the hell? really, WD just makes the better buy right now. As blain said seagate had a good run and its time for you seagate fanboys to jump ship.
Choosing the better deal = not a fanboy
Clinging to a sinking vessel = fanboy.

The woes of seagate can be best summed up with the following:
Interviewer: What is seagate's intention with regards to the SSD market.
Seagate CEO: We beleive that SSD technology, as a whole, infringes on some of our patents in regards to storage technology, and are considering the best way to leverage them.

 

[taltamir]

PS. blain, I noticed the EMP link in your sig...
The US currently has multiple layers of protection against that.
1. Short range anti missile missiles
2. Mid range anti missile missiles
3. Long range anti missile missiles
4. Ground based anti missile laser defenses (turns out it is more practical that shipping them to space, you can shoot a laser from the ground too)
5. Plane mounted anti missile laser defenses... (it takes a 747 to carry just one.. its currently HUGE and unwieldy and takes several seconds to blow up a missile, but it works and they are deployed, so, no laser fighters yet).

turns out that what scares us also scared the people in charge and they did something about it

 

[taltamir]

anyways, seagate fanboys need to get over themselves...
WD advantages:
1. Cooler running
2. Quieter
3. Lower power consumption
4. Greater reliability
5. Better tested firmware
6. Cheaper, a lot cheaper.

Seagate has:
1. A name... specifically the name of the company that made the best drives between the 1990s and early 2000s, but has since fallen from grace...

 

[Blieb]

Quit whorin' up my thread ...

Thanks for input ... I didn't mean fan boy to be derrogatory ... I just meant ... fan of WD ... I would have put fan boy next to the other choices, but wanted to mix it up ...

I ordered the WD Green 1tb ... as a storage drive, should be good.

Maybe when the 3 platter 1.5tb+ come out and are reliable for a while I'll upgrade.

 

[nerp]

The 7200.12s look good. I'm tempted to get one. I have many WD drives and all, but I'm looking for a single platter, quiet drive with some speed for an office environment. Now, tell me why I should avoid the 7200.12? The bad firmware problems are supposedly not an issue anymore, it performs well, and if it's not DOA, wtf is the damn difference between this and a WD? Not much, I'd say. So aside from being a WD fanboy or a Seagate fanboy, what is the compelling reason NOT go get this drive?

And I personally don't care about the company's quoted comments in news articles. I'm objectively looking at a piece of hardware. It could have General Motors on the drive, for all I care. I want to know about the actual hardware itself.

It's like. . . I buy AMD or Intel based on price and performance. Not on what Dirk Meyer told a website once, or what their current share price might be or whether the company has casual fridays.

 

[taltamir]

Thanks for input ... I didn't mean fan boy to be derrogatory ... I just meant ... fan of WD ... I would have put fan boy next to the other choices, but wanted to mix it up ...

thats the point, I am not a fan of WD.. i just think that right now they make the best choice... last gen it was samsung, many years ago it was seagate.

 

[taltamir]

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=575

3 x 500GB platter 1.5GB

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=576

4x 500GB platter 2GB

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: taltamir
PS. blain, I noticed the EMP link in your sig...
The US currently has multiple layers of protection against that.
1. Short range anti missile missiles
2. Mid range anti missile missiles
3. Long range anti missile missiles
4. Ground based anti missile laser defenses (turns out it is more practical that shipping them to space, you can shoot a laser from the ground too)
5. Plane mounted anti missile laser defenses... (it takes a 747 to carry just one.. its currently HUGE and unwieldy and takes several seconds to blow up a missile, but it works and they are deployed, so, no laser fighters yet).

I noticed every measure you pointed to was a defense against an air based attack... :roll:
Are ground based attacks out of the question?

Can I store my system disconnected back-up HD in a faraday cage and be safe?

 

[Blieb]

Originally posted by: taltamir
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=575

3 x 500GB platter 1.5GB

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=576

4x 500GB platter 2GB

Cool! Thanks for links ... the 1.5 is ~$170 on froogle ... http://www.google.com/products?q=WD15EADS&scoring=p


I didn't see this for some reason before:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822136344

 

[Elixer]

IMO, you almost always have to get another 1TB HD to backup the 1TB unit you are going to get.

All drives *will* fail, and we just don't have enough information on the true failure rate (I am not sure we will ever know) on ANY TB+ HDs.
There are just too many factors invloved, like how they ship the drive to you, that can play a role in all this.

For right now, it seems that WDs HDs are king. Seagate has had issues with firmware that should have been fixed before shipping them, and now, they got a tarnished reputation for that. Samsung & Hitachi are quite a bit smaller, but every manufacturer has had issues at some point or another.

Bottom line is, you must backup, no matter what brand you pick.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: taltamir
PS. blain, I noticed the EMP link in your sig...
The US currently has multiple layers of protection against that.
1. Short range anti missile missiles
2. Mid range anti missile missiles
3. Long range anti missile missiles
4. Ground based anti missile laser defenses (turns out it is more practical that shipping them to space, you can shoot a laser from the ground too)
5. Plane mounted anti missile laser defenses... (it takes a 747 to carry just one.. its currently HUGE and unwieldy and takes several seconds to blow up a missile, but it works and they are deployed, so, no laser fighters yet).

I noticed every measure you pointed to was a defense against an air based attack... :roll:
Are ground based attacks out of the question?

Can I store my system disconnected back-up HD in a faraday cage and be safe?

An EMP attack is basically detonating a nuke in the upper atmosphere...
When a nuke explodes it sends out a huge amount of energy as electro-magnetic radition...
Some of which is visible light, some of which is radio waves, some of which is all the other waves...

The EMP part is concerned with radio waves, when a radio wave hits metal it creates an electric charge (that is how radio antenna works), that means every bit of metal in your electronics near a nuke suddenly has a voltage, a high voltage, going through it, blowing capacitors and burning pathways and ruining the electronics.

In ground level detonation closeby stuff will be destroyed by the blast, slightly further out there will be a small ring of things that are not blowen up that will suffer EMP damage to electronics, the rest will fly out into space... that is because the earth is round and radio waves don't travel well through the ground.

But if you detonate a SINGLE large nuke (enough to wipe out a major city) in the upper atmosphere you can have the emp destroy every UNSHIELDED electrnoic in the entire north american continent... that is, US, mexico, and canada. Or a similarly sized area of land. The blast will be high enough to not blow things up, but the EMP will reach. it will also have a much larger fallout area, and fallout is more deadly then the explosion.

It is a fascinating subject and I have much more to say, but we shouldn't hijack the thread, if you are interested please make a new thread about the issue in the offtopic place and link...

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: Elixer
IMO, you almost always have to get another 1TB HD to backup the 1TB unit you are going to get.

All drives *will* fail, and we just don't have enough information on the true failure rate (I am not sure we will ever know) on ANY TB+ HDs.
There are just too many factors invloved, like how they ship the drive to you, that can play a role in all this.

For right now, it seems that WDs HDs are king. Seagate has had issues with firmware that should have been fixed before shipping them, and now, they got a tarnished reputation for that. Samsung & Hitachi are quite a bit smaller, but every manufacturer has had issues at some point or another.

Bottom line is, you must backup, no matter what brand you pick.

pretty much, don't say "i bought a reliable drive" as a form of data protection, back it up!

 

[RebateMonger]

The only thing I'm using new Seagates for right now is for backups. I just picked up a 1.5 TB Seagate 7100.11 for $85, but it's in an eSATA dock accepting backups.

Until this year, my personal pile of failed drives was exclusively Maxtor. But now, Seagates are starting to stack up. Mostly 7200.7s, which are getting fairly old now, and have been running in my servers 24/7 since 2004.

I saw my first failed WD drives last week. I swear I've NEVER seen a failed WD drive, and I've used quite a few of them. But a client had two of them (60 GB) in two P4 desktop PCs.

 

[taltamir]

At work I have seen a good bunch of failed drives of all kinds, and I mean ALL kinds, name a company and I have seen a failed drive of it...

This reminds me, i looted a collection of mouse balls
those things are awesome

 

[Blieb]

Hysterical ... I'm working on a machine remotely and it goes down ...

One of our guys took it offline to install 2 1.5tb seagate drives ... maybe if they do good here I'll get some for the house

 

[thegimp03]

I'm scared to pick up a Seagate drive right now as well. Have always gone with WD or Seagate, so I'm thinking of picking up one of those WD Black Caviar drives. Little bit more expensive than Seagate, but the better reviews speak for themselves.

 

[faxon]

if you guys want one of the 1.5tb drives pick one up from frys. frys returned all the drives that had bad firmware for ones that were fixed when they heard about the issues so those should probably be fine, at least on the firmware front.

 

[n7]

Being brand loyal with HDDs isn't terribly wise.
They all fail.

WD does the best RMA process though with their advanced RMAs.
Seagate makes you pay to do that :roll:


Also, please do not discuss EMPs in this thread or sub-forum.
Any further posts on that will be removed from this thread.

n7
Memory/Storage Mod

 

[Blieb]

Originally posted by: faxon
if you guys want one of the 1.5tb drives pick one up from frys. frys returned all the drives that had bad firmware for ones that were fixed when they heard about the issues so those should probably be fine, at least on the firmware front.

Interesting! Thanks!

 

[thegimp03]

Good tip faxon...might consider doing that.

 

[Thetech]

Originally posted by: taltamir
At work I have seen a good bunch of failed drives of all kinds, and I mean ALL kinds, name a company and I have seen a failed drive of it...

This reminds me, i looted a collection of mouse balls
those things are awesome

OUCH! I feel sorry for those poor mice!

 

[Blieb]

Update:

The WD Caviar Green 1tb drive ate shit after 6 hours (4 of which were spent formatting) this weekend.

It made a screetch sound and caput. Thankfully I was just copying stuff trying to break it in.