Secondary drive - Seagate out of the running?

[JTsyo]

After reading about the issues Seagate drives were having, I was reconsidering their Hybrid drives for the secondary drive in my new build. Is there any info available on the reliability of the Hybrid drives? I haven't seen any other that offer such drives, I guess just a regular drive shouldn't be too much of an issue.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Most stats seem to indicate Seagate has a super high failure rate so I'd avoid them for that reason. No matter what you want backups at least but raid + backups even better. The less you have to deal with a failure, the better. I have a mix of WD, Toshiba and Hitachi in my file server and I have not dealt with a failure in years.

 

[Charlie98]

Why would you spec a hybrid drive as your secondary drive?

Seagate has a few bad models, they are not all bad. In fact, I have one of the ill-fated 3TB Barracudas... and it has been fine up to now (but I wouldn't go out and buy another, mind you, based on the absurd failure rate.) But I have 8 other Seagate drives (500GB, 1TB, 2TB) in service and they have all been 100%, and I would buy another non-3TB Seagate tomorrow if the price was right.

Seagate is the current whipping boy of internet rangers, just like the Samsung SSDs are, at the moment... everyone seems to forget the other manufacturer's bad drives (early Hitachi Deskstars, for example.) I had a brand new WD Red come out of the box with bad sectors... so it happens to everyone.

 

[JTsyo]

Why would you spec a hybrid drive as your secondary drive?

....

I figured with the low markup for the improved load time it would be worthwhile investment. I plan on putting the OS and games on the main drive and it would be pictures and home videos on the secondary drive. There isn't much else that I store on my machine.

 

[Topweasel]

Seagate isn't out of running. They had a bad couple of years with the .12 models. Specially the 3TB 7200.12. Their newer drives and larger capacity drives aren't showing the DOA and SIDS that those drives have shown, but not enough information about their average lifespan out in the wild. But I would be hesitant to buy another (saying that I got a 6TB 7200 on sale for -$100 the next cheapest 6TB 7200 drive).

As for what drive to get. Hybrid drives are not a bad option as long as the drive is actually used for something other than data storage. If this is going to be a primary non-OS drive then sure. But that means secondary games and applications where load times are not an issue or doesn't impact performance. If it is just media storage than it will do very little good. For a regular drive I would say a HGST or WD Red.

 

[Coup27]

Hybrid drives are not a bad option as long as the drive is actually used for something other than data storage. If this is going to be a primary non-OS drive then sure. But that means secondary games and applications where load times are not an issue or doesn't impact performance. If it is just media storage than it will do very little good. For a regular drive I would say a HGST or WD Red.

This. To expand on it a bit further, hybrid drives work by having a a small amount of NAND onboard (in this case 8GB) and an algorithm in the processor monitors what files you access the most frequently and caches them into the NAND for quicker access. This is why using one on an OS drive makes so much sense but using one for a "bulk storage" drive of movies, pictures, music etc doesn't as the nature of your access of these files is likely to be random so the controller will not cache them into NAND or it will but it will push them out again with a new file before you access it again. Writes will likely get cached and wrote during idle but that's about the only benefit you will see.