Hard disk recommendations (2TB) SATA III

I currently run several WD20EARX and WD20EARS drives (Sata 3 and Sata 2 respectively). Sadly the sata 3 drives perform worse than the sata 2 drives.

I'm looking to replace 4 of my drives. I like the reviews and performance of the Seagate ST2000DM001 drives, however, they are a little greedy with power consumption and only have a 1 year warranty.

Does anyone know of a good 2TB drive that is low power, has ratings equal to or better than the ST2000DM001, but with a minimum of 3 years warranty.

These drives are going to get quite a bit of use. Mostly used for media storage (such as movie backups and TV recordings).

I'd like to keep the price to AUD $600 if I could, but can go a litle higher if I must

I'd be willing to run 3x 3TB drives in place of 4x 2TB drives, as long as my Z68X-UD3R BIOS will support it. I would still boot from one of the 2TB SATA II drives.

Any advice is greatly appreciated

Edit: NCQ support would be preferable.

WD RE4-GP, WD AV-GP, and WD Caviar Green are the 3 WD energy saving flavors with the RE being the enterprise series. The AV-GPs use IntelliPower for IntelliPark and IntelliSeek.

Thanks for your reply. The RE4-GP are $350 each, putting the total at $1400. Somewhat outside my budget. The power consumption is on par with the current drives (which is good), but the read/write performance is somewhat less than the ST2000DM001, and they are SATA II only.

The AV-GP are pretty similar to the RE4-GP, with a better data transfer rate, but still somewhat down on the Seagate. The price is also more affordable.

The 5 years warranty is good, but the rest is nothing better than what I already have which is the consumer "budget" (read that as "cheap"), WD green drives.

With performance way down on the Seagate drive, they would have to be discounted as possible contenders.

I've spent the last 3 days searching for some good drives, but there doesn't seem to be a lot around.. At least, not that I've found so far...

This time of year is also bad since vendors love to run summer specials to clear out old inventory! As for the GPs they are power savers but not performers. I was looking at buying a 2tb or 2.5tb Caviar Black edition to hold system images on since a 1tb drive gets cramped until freeing up the second OS drive a bit.

As far as Seagate their prices are always way up there when comparing the two brands. Yet lately I've been finding the 2tb Sata III drives are going for less then the Sata II equivalent! All the new boards are S3 likely explaining why the vendors drop prices on those for bundles.

The ST2000DL003 is the green version and scores higher in performance than many of the green drives out there,
because of the 64MB cache and the technology that Seagate uses.
The ST2000DM001 scores higher than the previous champ, the Seagate/Samsung HD103SJ in performance benchmarks,
so it's going to be hard to find a green drive that can meet or surpass the performance of the ST2000DM001.
You'll probably have to make a few compromises.

PassMark - Seagate ST2000DM001-9YN164 - Price performance comparison
PassMark - Seagate ST2000DL003-9VT166 - Price performance comparison
PassMark - WDC WD20EARX - Price performance comparison
PassMark - WDC WD20EARS - Price performance comparison
PassMark - WDC WD20EURS - Price performance comparison

Sardonicus said:

You'll probably have to make a few compromises.

I think you might be right. Perhaps the reason the ST2000DM001 has only a 1 year warranty is that it is a performer and therefore has a shorter life expectancy.

I had already seen those comparisons (thanks for posting them though), and I already knew the EARS, EADS and EARX are terrible - I have all of those already (not the EURS though). The EARS sata II actually outperforms the EARX Sata III drive, which was disappointing.

Perhaps I'm just going to have to get 4 now, and replace two each year as they come out of warranty and hope the ones I don't replace will make it through the second year.

EDIT: perhaps, if I put 3 x 3TB drives in, that max power consumption is 24W, whereas 4x 2TB is 32W. That will give me essentially the same capacity and a comparable power usage to what I have now.

When going to build the present case here I simply went with a pair of S3 along with the two S2 drives and called it a day! But these are the WD Caviar Black edition 1tb models. I was also considering the REs but as you know "pricey" is the operative word there!

At first I ran 7 on one of the Sata III drives and later due to a hardware change was forced to reinstall 7 which went onto a Sata II instead and the comparison was "no noticable difference"! That was a let down to some extent.

As for power saving with any drives regardless of performance however your default Windows power plan can be set to turn drives off after 20 minutes.

Ok, depending on how things pan out with the next question, I anticipate going for 4 x 3TB ST3000DM001 drives. This is a little more than I wanted to spend, but is going to give me increased storage without any great increase in power consumption.

Right now I have a Z68X-UD3R-B3 supporting 3 x WD20EARX, 2 x WD20EARS, 1 x Seagate 1.5TB (can't remember model number), and a WD15EADS drive, totalling 13TB. Also connected is a WD 1TB USB drive for backups.

I think I'm going to go with 4 x ST3000DM001 + 2 x WD20EARX.

My OS is currently on Disk 0, WD20EARX. The mobo supports 3TB+ drives.

But, if I leave the OS on the existing WD20EARX, what complications are there for the new 3TB drives, if any?

I believe the 3TB drives need to be configured as GPT? Will this work with mixed 2 and 3 TB drives?

I assume the 2TB drive would remain MBR?

With GPT, because the MBR is retained, the start of the partition is at LBA34, which will cause a 4KiB misalignment. (Refer GUID Partition Table - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

I am also looking into setting up the 4 x 3TB drives as a RAID 0 array, but this seems to have alot of problems from all the posts I have found. I'm not concerned about redundancy since stuff is regularly backed up. I'm curious about RAID 0 more from a performance and cost perspective. Any comments?

Any advice on this is greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I also run AHCI mode.. WIll that complicate matters?

Simply adding on new drives or swapping ones out for others simply requires seeing them initialized properly as new logical drives. Other then that since none of them will be set up for dual booting OSs you wouldn't expect to do anything other then to partition, format, and decide on which drive letters will be used for each one.

Night Hawk said:

Simply adding on new drives or swapping ones out for others simply requires seeing them initialized properly as new logical drives. Other then that since none of them will be set up for dual booting OSs you wouldn't expect to do anything other then to partition, format, and decide on which drive letters will be used for each one.

Apparently there are other issues.

The mobo has 2 sata 3 controllers. To setup a 4 disk raid 0 set I have to put it on the sata 2 controllers or set up 2 x raid 0 sets.

Also, since the boot drive is set to ahci, on the intel ports, I'd have to move that drive to the marvell port, which is port 6 or 7. Hopefully won't be any issues there...

I'm still fuzzy on GPT. It seems I set the BIOS to raid, boot, create the raid array, boot from windows dvd and run diskpart. Convert the array to gpt with "convert GPT" command, and then create the partitions..

Does that sound right?

And since I have to put the raid array on the sata 2 ports, I'm wondering whether I should create a raid array at all, or whether I should even bother upgrading the drives at all... Right now, I click open on a file in VLC from another computer for example, and have to wait 30 seconds for the open dialog to appear.. That may be simply because of the power plan, or the default drive cycle behaviour... <sigh>