Which 2TB Drive?

sechs

sechs

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What 3.5" 2TB drive do folks here suggest?

It's about time to upgrade the 1TB drives in my NAS, and now that we're down to 2.5 manufacturers, they all seem like shit.
 
I've been buying Seagate drives of late, though very few 2TB units. I'm not super-thrilled with them, but they're definitely the inexpensive 7200rpm option.
Out of all the Samsung HD103UJs I had, five dozen or so, I believe only one failed, and that was after five and a half years of operation. Out of 34 3TB Barracudas I've bought for myself in the last year I've had two DOAs and two with unrecoverable sectors.
 
I'm buying Seagates because:
  • a: There is no Samsung option
  • b: Seagate is the easiest - both of my main suppliers happen to be Seagate dealers
  • c: Hitachi are always too expensive in this country - the last time their drives were reasonably priced was when they had IBM badging. The main importer at that time went broke and IBM/Hitachi seem to have never quite managed to find a decent replacement.
  • d: I don't like Western Digital drives. Too many bad experiences
  • e: see (a)
 
I'll agree that Seagate seems cheapest.

Stereodude said:
I've been buying Hitachi, now Toshiba drives.
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Have there been any improvements, or are they literally just slapping their label on the old models?

Has anything changed in the last few years except the number of manufacturers?
 
WD clogs the marketplace by deliberately crippling firmware and multiple SKUs for what are ultimately the same part. Plus there's the whole born to die thing and oh hey I'm 0 for 2 on WD Reds so far.
Seagate's standard warranty is two years right now for consumer drives. It also has the most reasonable price on 7200rpm drives and drives that will generally behave in RAID arrays.
Toshiba drives are hard to come by. I have a few because Toshiba branded 4TB externals were for a time the cheapest 4TB drives available, but I haven't seen a price-competitive internal 3.5" drive since the drives were rebranded.
 
Mercutio said:
Toshiba drives are hard to come by. I have a few because Toshiba branded 4TB externals were for a time the cheapest 4TB drives available, but I haven't seen a price-competitive internal 3.5" drive since the drives were rebranded.
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Newegg was peddling retail Toshiba's 3TB 7200RPM drives for $109 with free shipping back when I put my Haswell box together several months ago. I think they've sold them for $99 one or two times since.
 
Stereodude said:
Newegg was peddling retail Toshiba's 3TB 7200RPM drives for $109 with free shipping back when I put my Haswell box together several months ago. I think they've sold them for $99 one or two times since.
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This one? It's $120 now. $110 if you enter the promo code by Sept 30th. Wonder if that is a 3 or 4 platter drive?

I'm also looking for a 2 or 3 TB drive that uses one TB/platter tech.

Edit: Holly crap...39% one egg reviews. I wonder if Newegg got a bad batch...or a bad batch of novice reviewers?!?
 
snowhiker said:
This one? It's $120 now. $110 if you enter the promo code by Sept 30th. Wonder if that is a 3 or 4 platter drive?

I'm also looking for a 2 or 3 TB drive that uses one TB/platter tech.

Edit: Holly crap...39% one egg reviews. I wonder if Newegg got a bad batch...or a bad batch of novice reviewers?!?
Click to expand...

What do you expect? Perhaps Hitachi gave them the bottom end manufacturing equipment and the highly skilled Newegg warehouse staff play football with the OEM drives.
 
I can't lend any credence to Newegg reviews for most products. The people making the comments generally don't have enough experience with the products they're reviewing, or the alternatives, to place any faith in their rating. This is especially true on Newegg, where people often rate up or down because of shipping problems or customer service interactions.
 
snowhiker said:
This one? It's $120 now. $110 if you enter the promo code by Sept 30th. Wonder if that is a 3 or 4 platter drive?

I'm also looking for a 2 or 3 TB drive that uses one TB/platter tech.

Edit: Holly crap...39% one egg reviews. I wonder if Newegg got a bad batch...or a bad batch of novice reviewers?!?
Click to expand...
This one. I'm pretty sure they use 1TB platters. You'll note the retail ones have better reviews.

I was wrong about the price though. They were $120 when I bought them.
 
Mercutio said:
I can't lend any credence to Newegg reviews for most products. The people making the comments generally don't have enough experience with the products they're reviewing, or the alternatives, to place any faith in their rating. This is especially true on Newegg, where people often rate up or down because of shipping problems or customer service interactions.
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Not to mention the stupid guidelines Newegg wants you to follow when you write a review.

Product Review Guidelines
Newegg.com reads all reviews before posting them and reserves the right to deny any review. Here are some of the things that can cause a review to be denied:

  • Offensive or abusive language.
  • Prices and availability can change very quickly on the Newegg.com website, so please leave such information out of your review.
  • Hyperlinks / URLs.
  • References to other stores / resellers.
  • Comments on products that were either physically damaged or misused.
  • Replies to existing customer reviews; please do not attempt to initiate discussions here.
  • Comparisons to competing brands / products of competing brands.
  • Criticism of Newegg.com's service or the service of our operations partners. (FedEx, UPS, Paypal, etc.)
  • References to aftermarket procedures or installation techniques not mentioned specifically in the original product documentation (overclocking, hacked drivers, tweaking/modding, etc.)
  • Illegal content
  • Invasions of personal privacy
  • Pornography or obscenity
  • Hate or incitement of violence, threats of harm or safety of a person
  • Graphic violence or other acts resulting in serious injury or death
  • Any violations of copyright. Please see our DMCA policy for more information.
  • Any violation of laws and/or copyrighted musical works.
We may change these policies at any time without notice.
 
On a related note, I wrote a scathing review of an ASUS DRW-24B1ST drive and submitted it to Newegg today. I believe I followed all their guidelines. We'll see if it gets published or not.

PS: It's the worst DVD burner I've ever tested.
 
Stereodude said:
Not to mention the stupid guidelines Newegg wants you to follow when you write a review.
Product Review Guidelines
Newegg.com reads all reviews before posting them and reserves the right to deny any review. Here are some of the things that can cause a review to be denied:
Click to expand...
That's why there's a "lifecycle" for businesses. Where are Sears, IBM and other great companies of yesteryear? The itch to fix something that ain't broke is so strong, it overrides everything else. Happy customers become critics. Newegg became a colossus because of how it operated in the early days. They've lost that edge now, looks like. After I moved out of the US, I haven't bought a single thing at Newwgg; they won't accept international cards. My business has gone to Amazon and B&H mostly. So I've kind of out of touch with the 'egg experience, but it is sad to see them sliding downhill.
 
Not that I've submitted very many, but they posted all of them.
 
Stereodude said:
PS: It's the worst DVD burner I've ever tested.
Click to expand...

I recall seeing an Asus DVD burner a few years ago with gearing that was actuated with rubber bands. The kind that go around newspapers. I do not find this shocking in the least.

I will say that when I have posted truly negative but relatively objective reviews on Newegg I have usually gotten a reply from the impacted company. Cooler Master has contacted me about its shitty cases AND its shitty heat sinks, for example.

Anyway, now I have to work pornographic content into a Newegg review. I did stuff like that in college for my own amusement. Something about the "satisfying feel of the female input" or the like.


mubs said:
Where are Sears
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One of the biggest problems Sears has is its current CEO, Ed Lampert, whose Objectivist beliefs demand that all internal business units exist to compete with one another. That's not to say that Sears and KMart have to compete, but that Sears Women's Apparel has to compete with Kmart's Small Appliance division. INTERNALLY. Yes really. It's incredibly divisive and the biggest single reason why Sears went from the biggest retail operation in the world to a third-rate organization over the last 15 years.

Really, read about Lampert. The guy is fucking insane.
 
Decades ago, Sears was a case-study (in the good way) when I went to business school for my MBA. How times have changed.

How come Lampert is still around? I'd think the shareholders (or banks who've lent them money as they continue to hemorrhage) would have booted him off a long time ago. Another reason is that they were one of the last ones to go online, and that to in a half hearted way. None of the big retail stores have a web site worth visiting - Target, Wal Mart, whatever. Utter waste of time. They were that way from the time they went online till about 2006 when I stopped going to their sites.
 
I believe he simply owns enough shares in the company so that he gets to do whatever he wants. I don't understand why he continues to run the business. It's clearly not a rational decision. He's an investment guy, not a leader or manager, but his political/philosophical beliefs and ego seem to prevent him from recognize all the ways his lunch is being eaten, which is immediately apparent to anyone who has been in a Sears store in the last decade.

I actually think Walmart does OK with online stuff. I've been able to buy things for other people so they could pick up at a retail location. You can actually send money and sometimes even pay bills since Walmart in a lot of places acts as a quasi-bank. There are, and I'm not even joking, employers who now pay people in Walmart gift cards rather than cash or check because their workers aren't likely to have bank accounts.

But anyway, Walmart isn't as easy to deal with as Amazon - not even close, but it's at least possible to get things where they need to be in small amounts of time, and there's a lot of value in that.

This is off topic as all hell but I do think it's an interesting subject. Perhaps it should be its own thread?
 
mubs said:
That's why there's a "lifecycle" for businesses. Where are Sears, IBM and other great companies of yesteryear? The itch to fix something that ain't broke is so strong, it overrides everything else. Happy customers become critics. Newegg became a colossus because of how it operated in the early days. They've lost that edge now, looks like. After I moved out of the US, I haven't bought a single thing at Newwgg; they won't accept international cards. My business has gone to Amazon and B&H mostly. So I've kind of out of touch with the 'egg experience, but it is sad to see them sliding downhill.
Click to expand...

I've actually made the same switch from newegg to Amazon and B&H. The last time I bought something from newegg was a few years back when I built my NAS. I got sick of having to pay for return shipping costs of DOA drives (or other products). Now I just buy them from Amazon which are typically packaged better anyway. If the drive is dead, Amazon pays for return shipping.
 
If you need parts for anything you bought at Sears, you have to order it online, and pay shipping to your home. If you try to use 'Store Pickup' you may or may not get your part.
I've used Walmart's online shopping a few times. Always used their 'Store Pickup' option. Haven't had a problem yet. A few years ago I bought a lawn mower at Walmart online, had it delivered to a Walmart close to work [ for free ], and picked it up on the way home from work.
 
Mercutio said:
I recall seeing an Asus DVD burner a few years ago with gearing that was actuated with rubber bands. The kind that go around newspapers. I do not find this shocking in the least.
Click to expand...
As far as I know ASUS has always been a re-badger of optical drives. Putting their name on someone else's drives. The DRW-24B1STi is a clone of the Lite-On iHAS_24 E. The DRW-24F1ST is a Samsung clone.
 
Bozo said:
If you try to use 'Store Pickup' you may or may not get your part.
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Exactly! A few years back I tried Sears buy online, pickup in store scheme on some tool deals that popped up on some of the deal sites. Somehow despite getting e-mails telling me my order was ready for pickup more often than not when I got to the store (within a few hours) at least some part of my order was missing. The best I could figure it the employees had no problem taking an item from a prepared online order waiting for pickup and giving it to a customer in store looking for that item.
 
Handruin said:
Now I just buy them from Amazon which are typically packaged better anyway. If the drive is dead, Amazon pays for return shipping.
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Amazon doesn't work for 100% of everything, but it does work for NEARLY everything. I've literally gotten a box with a personal massager, some little plastic interior pieces for my car, two hard drives and a pepper mill.

So yeah, I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon. Mostly because I can get almost everything I want in one place.
 
I don't know why a young lady such as yourself would have any experience with such things, but fortunately, the peppercorns were not included in this case. ;)
 
That's too much effort to complain for a $20 expendable drive. lol I get the $16 jobbies from microcenter (LG I think). If they last 6 months I'm happy. Most have lasted several years without fault. One just failed recently but I also don't have the same stringent criteria as you have.
 
Handruin said:
That's too much effort to complain for a $20 expendable drive. lol I get the $16 jobbies from microcenter (LG I think). If they last 6 months I'm happy. Most have lasted several years without fault. One just failed recently but I also don't have the same stringent criteria as you have.
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It was a $17 drive when I bought it. I did buy a GH24NS95 from Microcenter for $16 not too long ago. It uses the same chipset as the crap DRW-24B1STi, but apparently LG knew how to implement it. It's a much better burner.
 
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