Time to replace my mechanical HDDs with new ones?

[FAUguy]

Now that I've had my new PC up and running for about 2 months (i7-2600K, ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Pro Gen 3) I think it may be time to update my mechanical HDDs.

Right now I have 4 installed in the system, all are Western Digital.
One 1TB WD1002FBYS-01A6B0 (as my Win 7 x64 Ultimate, Vista, and XP partitions and programs).
Two 320GB WD3200KS-00PFB0 one is data and the other is an older XP and Vista partition.
One 160GB WD1600SD-01KB0 that has only data.

The 1TB drive is Western Digital's RE3 series that is 3 years old, the the two 320GB are the Caviar SE16 that are 5 years old, and the 160GB is 6 years old.

So far all drives have worked fine with no issues, and my system is usually on 24x7, which is why I went with the RE3 Enterprise Class drive the last time around. But now that I've been using my new PC build, which is much quieter (fans) than the last one, I've noticed a "high-pitch oscillating" sound that is coming from the 1TB RE3 drive. I've tested all 4 separate, and know it's the RE3 drive that is making it. It's not supper loud, but can still hear it and would like it to be quiet.

What I'd like to do first consolidate these 4 HDDs on to two 2TB HDD (not doing RAID). The question is which brand and model to go with, keeping in mind the system is on all the time and I'd like the drives to be quiet?

I know the Indonesia issue has caused prices to go up, so I can wait a while for prices to drop.

Right now on my list is:
=> Western Digital RE4 2TB drive WD2003FYYS, which is an Enterprise Class with 1.2M MTBF and an update to my RE3, but I'm concerned that it "might" make the same high-pitch sound.
=> Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB drive WD2002FAEX, but not Enterprise Class and not designed to be on 24x7.
=> Seagate Constellation ES 2TB drive ST2000NM0011 , Enterprise Class with 1.2M MTBF.
=> Seagate Barracuda 2TB drive ST2000DM001 just came out and has only two 1TB platters, but is not Enterprise Class and only has a 2-3 year warranty and not designed for 24x7. (or go with the Barracuda XT).
=> Hitachi Ultrastar 2TB drive HUA723020ALA640, which is Enterprise Class and has the best MTBF of 2M hours.

After I were to migrate my three Windows partitions and data to the new drives, and make sure they were reliable for a couple months, I would then look at doing a single SDD just for my Win 7 x64 Ultimate install.

 

[pitz]

Personally, I'd just get a SSD. 160gb models were on sale recently, and probably will go one sale in the next few months in the ~$1/gb range.

For my home, I have migrated all of my mechanical storage to a SAN. All other machines either boot from a SSD (ie: laptops), or boot remotely from the SAN through the network.

As for enterprise versus non-enterprise -- the Hitachi Ultrastar's are identical mechanically to the Deskstars, in the 7200rpm flavour. I don't see any reason why you'd pay a premium for the Ultrastar. For what they charge as a premium, you could buy a pair of the Desktars and run them in RAID-1, which is exactly what I do in my SAN.

You don't have to be a Linux guru to set your own SAN up; there are excellent solutions out there including FreeNAS, that are fairly easy for Linux neophytes to work with.

 

[Concillian]

Around 6 years of continuous use is when I've started to get a significant spike in failures. I don't use that many drives, but when I had 3 of 5 die between year 6 and 7, I just started making sure I replace drives between 5 and 6 years.

 

[jhansman]

I would then look at doing a single SDD just for my Win 7 x64 Ultimate install.

This. Get yourself a SATA3 to boot from and perhaps run Office or your favorite app, and move all the rest to whatever spinners you either keep or replace. With that CPU and mobo, your storage is definitely your bottleneck right now.

 

[FAUguy]

This. Get yourself a SATA3 to boot from and perhaps run Office or your favorite app, and move all the rest to whatever spinners you either keep or replace. With that CPU and mobo, your storage is definitely your bottleneck right now.

Yes, I got that part, and do plan on doing SDD sometime next year.
My question and concern is that since my 4 current HDDs are between 3 and 6 years old, which new HDD model to replace them with. I don't want cheap-o HDD that die after 1-2 years. I had a few Maxtor drives do that years back, but have been pleased with WD not dieing. I'd rather get two new HDDs in the next couple months and move everything over to them before one of my 4 HDDs eventual do fail.

 

[pitz]

Yes, I got that part, and do plan on doing SDD sometime next year.
My question and concern is that since my 4 current HDDs are between 3 and 6 years old, which new HDD model to replace them with. I don't want cheap-o HDD that die after 1-2 years. I had a few Maxtor drives do that years back, but have been pleased with WD not dieing. I'd rather get two new HDDs in the next couple months and move everything over to them before one of my 4 HDDs eventual do fail.

As I said earlier, if you're worrying about HDD failure, then you really should get yourself set up with some sort of managed storage solution that involves RAID-1. Trying to buy 'reliable' drives, and then praying that they'll continue to run is a fool's game.

On that same note, with redundancy, you could likely continue to use the drives you already own, until they actually die, with no risk of data loss due to drive failure. And in a properly implemented RAID-1 solution, the more spindles in a system, potentially the greater the throughput possible.

For instance, you could take your 1Tb + 320 + 320 + 160 drives, put them in a FreeNAS box, buy a 2Tb drive, and then mirror the 2Tb drive onto the combination of the 1Tb + 320 + 320 + 160gb drives. With only the purchase of a single 2Tb drive, you would have ~1.8Tb of redundant space. When one of the drives fails, buy a 3Tb drive, and mirror the 2Tb drive you bought, along with your existing 1Tb drive, onto the 3Tb drive. And so on and so forth. Failure, needing more capacity, or simply running out of slots in your system, should be the only reason to throw out a drive these days.

Oh yeah -- you can stick the machine with these drives in a closet somewhere, so you'll never hear it. And just access it either through SMB/CIFS mounts, or iSCSI (as a drive letter, or even booting off of it). With multipathing, and dual Gig-E ethernet, speeds are just as fast, in most cases, as locally attached disks (and sometimes much faster because you can stick an enormous amount of cache onto the machine). And the RAM in the SAN/NAS box definitely helps cache in addition to whatever RAM is on your client machines.

 

[FAUguy]

Since my 1TB drive is setup as a tri-boot for Win 7 x64 Ultimate, Vista, and XP, my initial thought was to just use a clone program to migrate everything to the new HDD and avoid re-installing 3 versions of Windows and programs.

If I went with two 2TB or 3TB HDDs, such as the new Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM00, and wanted to do a RAID-1 (mirroring), would I have to do a clean install of all my versions of Windows, or could they be cloned from the current 1TB HDD to two new HDD that are set up as RAID-1?

 

[Blain]

As long as you're staying with 1950's technology get a 2TB WD Black.

 

[Burner27]

Since my 1TB drive is setup as a tri-boot for Win 7 x64 Ultimate, Vista, and XP, my initial thought was to just use a clone program to migrate everything to the new HDD and avoid re-installing 3 versions of Windows and programs.

If I went with two 2TB or 3TB HDDs, such as the new Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM00, and wanted to do a RAID-1 (mirroring), would I have to do a clean install of all my versions of Windows, or could they be cloned from the current 1TB HDD to two new HDD that are set up as RAID-1?

I wouldn't bother with a tri-boot setup anymore. Use Win7 64bit as your main OS and use Oracle VirtualBox for the other two OSes or whatever OSes you'd like to try in the future.

 

[FAUguy]

I wouldn't bother with a tri-boot setup anymore. Use Win7 64bit as your main OS and use Oracle VirtualBox for the other two OSes or whatever OSes you'd like to try in the future.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I do use Win 7 x64 Ultimate 98% of the time. The ONLY reason I have to keep my XP and Vista installs are because I have some Motorola and LG phone-tools programs that ONLY work in those versions of Windows. I have tried the Win XP Virtual Machine within Win 7 Ultimate, and it did not work well at all.

So that is why I need to keep XP and Vista, not because I use them a lot, but on occasion I do have to use those phone programs in them. I also have a version of Nero that I use on occasion that only works in XP.

Regardless, with all the programs and drivers installed in them, I'd have to use a clone program to migrate everything to the new drive. I know it can be done from the 1TB to a new 2TB (or 3TB) single drive, but wasn't sure if it could be done to two drives set as a RAID-1 mirroring.