Storage Solutions Urgent Internal HDD purchase

[axis.meister]

Apparently my 1TB WD Green internal HDD is at fault, I just found that the SMART status says "Read Failed" and "Disk contains some bad clusters" :scared14:. Thankfully, the drive is still in warranty and I have already copied most of my critical data to other HDDs and my Laptop. I will be initiating a RMA request, but for the time I need to get an internal disk.


I did some googling and found out that my current MoBo (Abit IP-35 E) has an old bios, and won't be able to boot of a 3TB disk or utilize anything over 2.1TB. So my options are further limited to 2TB internal drives or getting a 3TB and booting off my old 500GB disk(still working and SMART shows all OK).


My Options:
WD Black 2TB @ 10K with 5yr warranty
WD Green 2TB EZRX @ 5.8K with 2yr warranty confused between the variants:unsure:
WD Green 2TB EURS @ 6.4K with 2yr warranty
WD Green 3TB EZRX @ 8.5K with 2yr warranty
WD Red 3 TB @ 10K with 3yr warranty


Seagate Barracuda 2TB St2000DM001 @5.8K with 2yr warranty (not sure of the warranty details read somewhere Seagate has 1yr warranty)
Seagate Barracuda 3TB St3000DM001 @8.5K with 2yr warranty (not sure of the warranty details read somewhere Seagate has 1yr warranty)


1. WD or Seagate: With Samsung out of availability, these are the only two options. All my disks are WD, and the recent failed disk is also WD, so I am slightly concerned. However the warranty terms seem better with WD, with the option of 5yr and 3yr warranty with the Black and Red variants respectively.


2. Confusion between the Green variants : EZRX and EURS both with same warranty, performance difference between the two?


3. WD Black or Red or Green: So Red drives are targetted at NAS usage, benchmarks and reviews about their NAS usage are good. Not sure if they are good as desktop drives, but at 10K for 3TB with 1 yr added warranty over the Greens, they sure are tempting. I will be getting a SSD in the near future when I upgrade my PC, so paying the premium for a Black HDD now seems unnecessary.


Please help me out guys, I will be making the purchase today. :help:

I had posted a thread yesterday, and was wondering whether it makes sense to wait for the budget to make the purchase. But I am over that now, I don't want to risk my data and have my PC down over few hundred bucks.

Thanking everybody in advance.

-aX

 

[flash23]

@axis.meister

First question, will the rig be used for heavy downloads/operations i.e. disk usage more than 8 hours/day?

If the answer is Yes to the above question i'd recommend WD RED, if you have the cash or go with WD Blue or ST2000DM001. Under no circumstances go for the Green drive since they are not designed for sustained usage and will lead to premature failure. WD Black is a high performance drive and it is advised to used them for demanding application only next o an SSD. The fact fact that you be upgrading to an SSD as boot also makes Black somewhat of an overkill.

If your rig has disk usage less than 8 hours/day then you can go with EZRX or ST2000DM001. Do not go for EURS variant since these drives are meant for A/V purposes like DVR, video surveillance and designed to ignore certain errors which are not tolerable for a boot drive.

1. WD or Seagate does not matter since they have pretty much same failure rate and for the models under consideration same warranty period.

2. EZRX green drives for data dump not sustained writes,
EURS green drive for A/V not for OS boot and data dump.

3 Ideally SSD + Red --> SSD + St2000DM001 or WD Blue --> SSD +EZRX

 

[axis.meister]

axis.meister

First question, will the rig be used for heavy downloads/operations i.e. disk usage more than 8 hours/day?

If the answer is Yes to the above question i'd recommend WD RED, if you have the cash or go with WD Blue or ST2000DM001. Under no circumstances go for the Green drive since they are not designed for sustained usage and will lead to premature failure. WD Black is a high performance drive and it is advised to used them for demanding application only next o an SSD. The fact fact that you be upgrading to an SSD as boot also makes Black somewhat of an overkill.

If your rig has disk usage less than 8 hours/day then you can go with EZRX or ST2000DM001. Do not go for EURS variant since these drives are meant for A/V purposes like DVR, video surveillance and designed to ignore certain errors which are not tolerable for a boot drive.

1. WD or Seagate does not matter since they have pretty much same failure rate and for the models under consideration same warranty period.

2. EZRX green drives for data dump not sustained writes,
EURS green drive for A/V not for OS boot and data dump.

3 Ideally SSD + Red --> SSD + St2000DM001 or WD Blue --> SSD +EZRX

Thanks #flash23 for replying, I really need to make this purchase today and backup my 1TB WD disk before I start the RMA process.

My usage is typically 4-5 hours on weekdays and much higher on weekends. This is not a download rig, just a basic computing rig for Internet/Movies + some occasional gaming (very occasional nowadays since my Graphics card is badly outdated).

Thanks again for the difference between the EZRX and EURS variants, I was beginning to think that since the EURS drives are a bit costlier than the EZRX they may be better. I will keep your advice in mind.

So the Barracuda 2TB performance will be similar to WD blue and better than EZRX/EURS right?

Right now, I am leaning towards the Barracuda 2TB since it has the same warranty as the WD Greens and better performance. Plus my WD green 1TB lasted only 1.6 years(as per SMART) so that makes me a bit doubtful about WD green drives. What do you think?

My oldest still in use HDD is my external 500GiG WD essentials which I bought in 2005/06 in Germany, and I used it to backup my work partition on the failing 1TB green disk. Looks like WD has cut some corners in the Green series.

 

[flash23]

So the Barracuda 2TB performance will be similar to WD blue and better than EZRX/EURS right?

Yes

Right now, I am leaning towards the Barracuda 2TB since it has the same warranty as the WD Greens and better performance. Plus my WD green 1TB lasted only 1.6 years(as per SMART) so that makes me a bit doubtful about WD green drives. What do you think?

Green drives are designed as secondary drives as data dumps and having minimal writes. So considering their prices and warranty they are not worth it. WD is really pushing Greens by keeping the Blues out of the market, while the Seagate's Blue equivalent are widely available.

My oldest still in use HDD is my external 500GiG WD essentials which I bought in 2005/06 in Germany, and I used it to backup my work partition on the failing 1TB green disk. Looks like WD has cut some corners in the Green series.

Even my 2008 purchased Seagate 7200.12 last for 4 years of use with average of around 15hours/day, while my 2011 1TB ST1000524AS lasted for a year with similar usage.
Both Seagate and WD are indeed cutting corners in their manufacturing as drive reliability is nothing but dropping along with a major bump in prices. The floods were just a reason to jack up their profit margins as if they did not have insurance to cover the damages.

 

[axis.meister]

Yes


Green drives are designed as secondary drives as data dumps and having minimal writes. So considering their prices and warranty they are not worth it. WD is really pushing Greens by keeping the Blues out of the market, while the Seagate's Blue equivalent are widely available.


Even my 2008 purchased Seagate 7200.12 last for 4 years of use with average of around 15hours/day, while my 2011 1TB ST1000524AS lasted for a year with similar usage.
Both Seagate and WD are indeed cutting corners in their manufacturing as drive reliability is nothing but dropping along with a major bump in prices. The floods were just a reason to jack up their profit margins as if they did not have insurance to cover the damages.

Got the Barracuda 2TB internal HDD for 5.5K from Lamington road, just got a bit confused because I got suggested the 2TB external USB3.0 Seagate disk(expansion) which would have costed just around 1K plus and would have given me 3year warranty.

 

[flash23]

Got the Barracuda 2TB internal HDD for 5.5K from Lamington road, just got a bit confused because I got suggested the 2TB external USB3.0 Seagate disk which would have costed just around 1K plus and would have given me 3year warranty.

Nice deal.
Check the warranty on your new drive. I bought the same drive in Jan and it has warranty till 17-Mar-2015 i.e. 3 months extra.

 

[axis.meister]

Nice deal.
Check the warranty on your new drive. I bought the same drive in Jan and it has warranty till 17-Mar-2015 i.e. 3 months extra.

That would be nice to have some extra warranty.

BTW, are you using your drive as a primary/OS Boot drive or as a secondary storage drive?

 

[neomatictheone]

Go with

Seagate Barracuda 2TB St2000DM001 @5.8K with 2yr warranty

Avoid 3tb drives ... they have more failure rates

Seagate is faster in performance /price.

 

[govinda123]

Whether Wd red drives available in india? If available then where in delhi?

 

[flash23]

That would be nice to have some extra warranty.

BTW, are you using your drive as a primary/OS Boot drive or as a secondary storage drive?

Using it as storage drive. I use a 500GB Seagate St500DM002 as Boot and download destination, can't afford to lose truckloads of stuff in the event of 2TB's failure.
500 has a single platter so lesser chances of failure, it is cheaper, and small capacity means lesser space required for its backup.

Whether Wd red drives available in india? If available then where in delhi?

itdepot has it listed on their website.

 

[axis.meister]

Whether Wd red drives available in india? If available then where in delhi?

Primeabgb and theitdepot both have them listed. I did some more googling, apparently the Reds are not suited for single/desktop usage, they are designed specifically for NAS boxes. So unless you are going to use it for NAS/RAID, it is better not to go for them.

- - - Updated - - -

Go with

Seagate Barracuda 2TB St2000DM001 @5.8K with 2yr warranty

Avoid 3tb drives ... they have more failure rates

Seagate is faster in performance /price.

Yupp, got myself the same drive from Lammington Road at 5.5K with 2yr warranty. I am currently backing up my old HDD with it, and I must say it is quite fast.

I got 36MBps transfer rate for about 340GB of data that contains loads of smaller files. This is really impressive because transfer rate of larger files would be much higher, my data has large number of smaller files (pdfs, docs, dwgs, vsds and in many folders thousands of xmls).
I just checked one of the folders transferred and it is 105.3GB with 127K files in 11.8K folders, and that was also transferred at 36MBps. Respect.