2TB drives under the duopoly

[time]

It's crunch time for me, I have to decide between WD and Seagate. Samsung is gone and there are no suitable Hitachi drives available. So should I go for the devil or the deep blue sea?

WD WD20EARX 5400rpm unknown mS $123-$132 (WD doesn't like to reveal specifications - customers might get the wrong idea about their products)
Seagate ST2000DL003 5900rpm 12mS $123
Seagate ST2000DM001 7200rpm 8.5mS $141

All these quote an unrecoverable error rate of 1 in 10^14 bits.

Which of these is the least bad?

I've just found stock of 2-3 of these, probably the last I'll ever see:

Samsung HD204UI 5400rpm 8.9mS $129

Samsung quotes an unrecoverable error rate of 1 in 10^15 bits.

 

[Mercutio]

You realize that this is like asking which testicle you'd prefer to have a slow yet tragic encounter with a garlic press, right?

But... Samsung for as long as you can get 'em.

 

[Bozo]

I've had more Seagates fail than WD. I'd go with WD

 

[CougTek]

My experience is similar to Bozo's. My advice too.

 

[Mercutio]

It is honestly my hope that Samsung's engineering makes its way into next generation Seagate drives. Western Digital is beyond unforgivable and the sooner the rest of humanity understands that the better off we'll be as a species.

 

[Handruin]

That's basically saying that WD is not capable of every improving. If they do, then they would be the best of both worlds because their RMA process is solid and if their product is solid, then the small times you need to use the RMA you're golden.

For whatever it's worth, I put in support tickets roughly 1-3 per quarter to replace a failed Seagate drive in our clariion...both SATA II and Fibre Channel. It's anecdotal data...but they fail frequently.

I do own a single WD Raptor drive that's been spinning pretty much 24x7 for over 3 years and it's been ok. I've had two Samsung drive failures in that same time frame. One a 500GB, another a 1.5TB.

 

[Mercutio]

My first "never again" with WD was 1995. Eventually, after people talked them up on SR, I started buying them again in 2000 or so. By 2003, they were back in "never again" territory. I don't care if they ever improve their drives. The company has used up all the chances it will ever get from me.

I'll only be satisfied when I have graves I can piss on.

 

[BingBangBop]

The problem is that if there are only two choices and you exclude one then you are left with only one and Seagate is a very bad choice in the 1.5-2TB range. I am not happy with WD but my recent experience with Seagate is even worse. My sample size is small but still it is my recent experience.

 

[CougTek]

So here we have :

Bozo : WD not good, but Seagate is worse.
CougTek : WD not good, but Seagate is worse.
BBB : WD not good, but Seagate is worse.
Handruin : WD ok (sample too limited to tell otherwise), Seagate not good.
Mercutio : Seagate not good, but can't compare with WD because I haven't bought their products for the past nine years.

Verdict : Seagate worse than WD four times out of five, the other one only knowing that Seagate is not good, but he can't compare to WD current products. Statiscally speaking, WD should be the way to go over Seagate.

 

[ddrueding]

I've officially stopped paying attention. I feel that they are all crap and within the margin of error on their crappiness. I don't even look at the brand anymore, it is purely a price/capacity thing now.

 

[MaxBurn]

Right now I have 16 seagates here around me and none have been replaced because they were bad. 13 are 5900rpm 2tb models. I replaced one just on principal because my perc 6i called it bad twice but that turned out being a bad cable as I found out later. A small sample size but I'm happy. Also a good four or five of them are refurb drives. I have never had one of seagates refurb drives go bad, I actually like them better than retail and was snapping them up when I could when building out the server and backup tower.

Besides the seagates I have two intel x25m, a toshiba, a wd green in the time capsule and in the work computer is a wd black but it originally came with a samsung (for some reason our IT staff likes the wd). I have had some bad experiences with wd but it was also five plus years ago. People building those home theater servers like those wd greens but I can't understand why with all the raid troubles they mention.

 

[Handruin]

My sample size for the Seagate drives is out of:

90 x SATA II 1TB 7200 RPM
1 bad drive this past week

15 x 600GB FC 15K RPM
1 bad drive this past week

15 x 400GB FC 10K RPM
none bad this past week

 

[Mercutio]

We're just going to have to face the fact that modern drives are going to be shit. The only real good news is that they're generally so cheap (or will be again some day) that we can afford to buy more of them and still have incredibly dense storage systems.

For what it's worth, I've had very good luck with the 1.5TB 7200rpm Seagate drives. I know they were horrible for early adopters but I didn't start buying them until much later.

 

[sechs]

This makes me so sad.

 

[Stereodude]

There's a reason everyone shortened their warranty to 1 year.

 

[Bozo]

I must say that the Seagate 'enterprise' drives the SCSI Cheetah [ 15K RPM, 18GB ] were excelent drives. In 2003 I installed 36 of the drives. In October of last year I retired the last two. Although they all ran 24/7/365, none of them failed. Broke my heart to send them to the recycler.

 

[BingBangBop]

I would argue that enterprise HD's are a different beast than consumer HD's. I don't think that comparing 18GB 15K RPM Cheetah's to 1.5TB 7200 RPM drives is a fair comparison for they are just too different.

 

[Chewy509]

I tend to agree with B^3. Out of all the SCSI drives I've had, they tended to fail less than IDE/SATA drives. (I can think of only 3 failures in 100's of drives - with all running 24/7 for 3 yrs).

However, I will stress this, all those drives were hot-swap 80pin in proper chassis with adequate cooling, something I can't say about all the IDE/SATA drives I seen fail.

 

[Bozo]

I wasn't comparing the SCSI drives to the desktop drives. I was just making the point that Seagate does make some good drives.

 

[Santilli]

Bozo:
Are there any enterprise, (SAS?) type drives that are worth buying, or even worth considering? This is for storage, and not SSD type OS disks.

 

[Bozo]

I haven't bought any SAS drives. All the drives I have used in the last two years have been WD RE4 enterprise drives. Right now they are pricey and in short supply.

 

[CougTek]

There's a reason everyone shortened their warranty to 1 year.

Seagate cut it back to a laughable single year. WD only removed a year of their past three years warranty for their Green and Blue series.

 

[Handruin]

Bozo:
Are there any enterprise, (SAS?) type drives that are worth buying, or even worth considering? This is for storage, and not SSD type OS disks.

From my line of work an enterprise class drive is typically one meant for performance and not specifically bulk "storage". The SAS drives we run are usually 2.5" 15K RPM SAS drives and since they're physically smaller, they tend not to be as large in capacity as the 3.5" SATA II drives. To answer your question, yes they're worth considering to an enterprise who usually has cash to spare, but for a consumer, your money would probably go further with a WD Raptor on a SATA II bus than investing in a SAS controller and expensive SAS drives.

 

[Mercutio]

3.5" hard disks were universally more reliable than any 5.25" disks that were ever made. It's been my experience that 2.5" disks are more reliable than 3.5" models, even when they're normally used in portable applications. I wonder what impact the smaller components has on reliability over and above what we assume to come from enterprise class engineering and validation?

 

[BingBangBop]

I thought I read somewhere a while back that the 15K Cheetah's used 2.5" platters even though it is a 3.5" form factor.

 

[Mercutio]

I believe that's correct.

 

[Santilli]

I notice the enterprise drives I could find are around 350-500 in 7200k 2 TB. What is the warranty, and are they any more reliable then the cheaper ones? Warranty service?

 

[LunarMist]

I thought I read somewhere a while back that the 15K Cheetah's used 2.5" platters even though it is a 3.5" form factor.

Yes, since the very beginning when many of us started using the X15 in 2000. I don't have that first gen drive around now, but I have a 15K.3 that was finally retired after 5 years of use.

 

[CougTek]

I saw the Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB (0F12455) with SATA 6Gbps interface, 2 million hours MTBF rating, 5 years warranty at 221$ plus shipping on a Canayan web site. I'm sure you can find equal or better deal south of the border.

I was replying to Santilli.

 

[CougTek]

Ok, it was back ordered, but EIO.com, at Torrance in CA, is supposed to be able to ship it in 1-2 days and sells it for 246$.

Electronic Inventory Online, Inc. 22412 Normandie Ave. Unit #A Torrance, CA 90502 (USA)
Phone : 1 (877) SHOPEIO (746-7346) or local (310) 533-5150

 

[Santilli]

Not familiar with SAS. Cards seem pretty cheap. Motherboards have ports, that aren't absurd?

 

[Santilli]

Considering the Warranty, does this seem like it's worth the money? Any longevity data to support the price, or the drive?

Ok, it was back ordered, but EIO.com, at Torrance in CA, is supposed to be able to ship it in 1-2 days and sells it for 246$.

Electronic Inventory Online, Inc. 22412 Normandie Ave. Unit #A Torrance, CA 90502 (USA)
Phone : 1 (877) SHOPEIO (746-7346) or local (310) 533-5150

 

[CougTek]

Considering the Warranty, does this seem like it's worth the money? Any longevity data to support the price, or the drive?

The 3TB Ultrastar family is similar in design to the 3TB Deskstar drives and the folks at BackBlaze servers, who use a lot of large drives for their storage servers, wrote that multi-terabyte Hitachi drives were significantly more reliable than those from Oceanfence.

As of this week, Backblaze has more than 9,000 hard drives spinning in the datacenter, the oldest of which we purchased four years ago. We see fairly high infant mortality on the hard drives deployed in brand new pods, so we like to burn the pods in for a few days before storing any customer data. We have yet to see any drives die because of old age, which will be fascinating to monitor in the next few years. All told, Sean replaces approximately 10 drives per week, indicating a 5 percent per year drive failure rate across the entire fleet, which includes infant mortality and also the higher failure rates of previous drives. (We are currently seeing failures in less than 1 percent of the Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3030ALA630 drives that we’re installing in pod 2.0.)

 

[Bozo]

I just ordered 18 of the Hitachi 5K3000 [3TB] drives mentioned in the BackBlaze blurb. I went with the Hitachi because I got them for $235.00 each.

 

[DrunkenBastard]

Not familiar with SAS. Cards seem pretty cheap. Motherboards have ports, that aren't absurd?

Serial Attached SCSI (SA-SCSI), the next step after Ultra320 (where they go from parallel to serial signalling).

Available on-board some server motherboards but generally not cheap, cheapest one I've seen is this single socket C32 model for $340:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813151250

 

[CougTek]

I just ordered 18 of the Hitachi 5K3000 [3TB] drives mentioned in the BackBlaze blurb. I went with the Hitachi because I got them for $235.00 each.

If that's for the Deskstar 5K3000 (0F12460), it seems expensive. One local computer store sells them for ~180$-190$ (had them stock two weeks ago, but none currently) and I can get those even cheaper from my supplier. My supplier has had a hard time getting large Hitachi drives recently though.

Good thing you could grab that many, despite the substantial price. You should not be disappointed with their reliability.

 

[Stereodude]

FWIW, I just filled out a RMA on a nearly 5 year old 500GB 7200 RPM PATA drive with Seagate. The RMA process wasn't difficult. $9.95 for advanced replacement + a prepaid return shipping label. It'd cost me more to ship the old drive back FedEx Ground or UPS walking into either and this way I can re-use the packaging.

 

[sechs]

I thought I read somewhere a while back that the 15K Cheetah's used 2.5" platters even though it is a 3.5" form factor.

For a while there, 3.5" 15k drives and 2.5" 10k drives were using the same platters.

 

[Mercutio]

The RMA process wasn't difficult.

The problem I have with Seagate's RMA process is that it doesn't accept my shipping address and won't allow me to submit a return via the web form. Their address-validating doohickey says I'm either providing an incorrect ZIP code or street address. If I want to do a Seagate RMA, I have to phone it in, every single time.

 

[Stereodude]

The problem I have with Seagate's RMA process is that it doesn't accept my shipping address and won't allow me to submit a return via the web form. Their address-validating doohickey says I'm either providing an incorrect ZIP code or street address. If I want to do a Seagate RMA, I have to phone it in, every single time.

It would be nice if they accepted AmEx instead of just Visa and MasterCard, but other than that I didn't have any issues. I received the replacement drive today and already have the bad drive boxed up ready to ship back on Monday.