Seagate or WD Green for storage and gaming

[Carson Dyle]

Agreed, even as a storage drive, once the heads park, good luck getting anywhere for another 10 seconds.

If you're waiting 10 seconds for a drive, you're waiting for it to spin up, not just unpark the heads.

 

[Data-Medics]

Honestly as a data recovery professional here's my opinion of different brands:

1. Seagate - Used to be good but sucks these days. Only offer 1 yr warranty because even they doubt it will last longer. Impossible to recover data from many newer models.

2. WD - Good performance, Budget friendly, green and blue are not the most reliable, but easy enough to recover data from when they do fail. Pretty average overall.

3. HGST/Toshiba - More expensive but 10x more reliable for newer models. Easy for data recovery if they fail due to better design. Slightly more expensive and lower performance than WD but safer if your data is important.

4. Samsung - The spinpoint drives used to be pretty good, but now that they are made by Seagate, I'd stay away.

 

[Data-Medics]

- Just testing if my signature is working....

 

[Data-Medics]

Yay! it is.

 

[Carson Dyle]

3. HGST/Toshiba - More expensive but 10x more reliable for newer models. Easy for data recovery if they fail due to better design.

IMO, this should NEVER even remotely be a consideration or criteria for choosing a hard drive. You should never leave yourself in a situation where a failed drive has to be recovered by anything beyond restoring from a backup or rebuilding an array. If you do, you've failed far worse than having chosen the "wrong" drive for the task.

 

[Zodiark1593]

If you're waiting 10 seconds for a drive, you're waiting for it to spin up, not just unpark the heads.

This is actually probably why WD Greens have such a long delay after a period of inactivity compared to other drives (I assumed all drives spin down when the heads parked though). I can hear it spin up from my eHDD enclosure when I access something after it's been sitting.

As for Data Medic's post, I believe he does data recovery (a field I want to get into), so I'd wager it's just some sarcasm, or at least, I hope it's sarcasm.

 

[Carson Dyle]

This is actually probably why WD Greens have such a long delay after a period of inactivity compared to other drives (I assumed all drives spin down when the heads parked though). I can hear it spin up from my eHDD enclosure when I access something after it's been sitting.

The heads are going to be parked when a drive spins down, but not necessarily the inverse. So, is the problem that the drives are spinning down when not expected to? The whole WD head parking thing has gotten to be a giant red herring with a lot of people. Reminds me of the days when people jumped over each other giving advise to defrag a hard drive anytime someone experienced the slightest performance problem.

As for Data Medic's post, I believe he does data recovery (a field I want to get into), so I'd wager it's just some sarcasm, or at least, I hope it's sarcasm.

In that line of work, he probably does think this way, which could perhaps be forgiven. But for the home user or (God forbid) enterprise user, giving any consideration to how difficult/easy it may be for a data recovery firm to salvage some unknown percentage of data from a failed drive is preposterous.

 

[antef]

This is actually probably why WD Greens have such a long delay after a period of inactivity compared to other drives (I assumed all drives spin down when the heads parked though). I can hear it spin up from my eHDD enclosure when I access something after it's been sitting.

As for Data Medic's post, I believe he does data recovery (a field I want to get into), so I'd wager it's just some sarcasm, or at least, I hope it's sarcasm.

I currently have a Seagate external drive and it does the same thing when I try to access it after it's been sleeping for awhile. You can hear it spin up and it takes a few seconds. So I think that has more to do with Windows/external drive sleeping than anything to do with WD head parking.

The heads are going to be parked when a drive spins down, but not necessarily the inverse. So, is the problem that the drives are spinning down when not expected to? The whole WD head parking thing has gotten to be a giant red herring with a lot of people. Reminds me of the days when people jumped over each other giving advise to defrag a hard drive anytime someone experienced the slightest performance problem.

By red herring are you saying it's not really the concern people make it out to be? It seems so far we've established that WD Green's transfer rates are not that bad compared to 7200 RPM drives of just a couple years ago, and while the heads may park frequently, I'm not entirely certain that the Seagate 7200 RPM doesn't do this as well, just maybe at longer intervals. This makes me not understand how the WD Green could be as much slower than other drives as some are saying.

At the same time, Cerb, you may be right that the reliability difference here is not statistically large enough to affect a purchase decision. Nonetheless in addition to Newegg's poor reviews of the Seagate you also have the Backblaze study which showed the Seagate conclusively worse, but may be flawed in its own ways.

 

[Cerb]

But for the home user or (God forbid) enterprise user, giving any consideration to how difficult/easy it may be for a data recovery firm to salvage some unknown percentage of data from a failed drive is preposterous.

Agreed. I bought a Seagate last year, and it started making bearing noises a little while back (still passes diags). But, it was on a deep sale (as cheap as they ever got this year), and total loss of the drive would mean losing some days worth of saved games, a dozen or so recent CD rips, and a little pr0n.

I very much prefer WD over Seagate myself, but thinking about HDD reliability more than a little bit indicates to me that the problem is being looked at wrongly.

 

[antef]

From what Zodiark1593 is saying, it seems the drive spinning down is the larger cause of access delay, not the head parking. Can you totally prevent a WD Green from spinning down using normal Windows power management, or will it do that by default similar to my external Seagate?

I've been factoring reliability into it, but with the uncertainty of it all, it can't be the sole factor. It seems WD Red is another option, if you want WD but faster than Green and cheaper than Black. I guess it's 5400 RPM and doesn't park its heads as often.

 

[Data-Medics]

For some reason I'm having an issue responding with a quote... strange.

 

[Data-Medics]

IMO, this should NEVER even remotely be a consideration or criteria for choosing a hard drive. You should never leave yourself in a situation where a failed drive has to be recovered by anything beyond restoring from a backup or rebuilding an array. If you do, you've failed far worse than having chosen the "wrong" drive for the task.

While in theory that should be true, reality is another story. No one, and I mean no one, plans to need data recovery. But statistically most people will at some point need data recovery.

Even if it's only for a few hours work that would have been backed up that night, if it's a few hours of work that can't be re-created you'll need data recovery.

Then you'll be happy you bought the HGST that'll cost you $450 for 100% recovery instead of a Seagate that'll cost you even more money and likely still only get back 10% of your data. It's a factor worth considering, trust me. All my customers wish they had considered it before they ended up here.
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