What is the Best Hard Drive?

Page 2 of 4 FirstFirst 1234 LastLast

  1. mjf
    Posts : 5,969
    Windows 7x64 Home Premium SP1
       #10

    I have 5 Seagate 1TBs in operation on 3 PCs spanning 2-5 years and none failed or developed any reallocated sectors. One is close to 12,000 power on hours. (Famous last words maybe but I hope not). Note that I stuck with 1 TB for internals not higher capacity HDDs which the study focuses on.
    I think overheating is the worst enemy for any HDD apart from dropping them :)

    Listening to "evidence" I buy WDs now.
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 12,012
    Windows 7 Home Premium SP1, 64-bit
       #11

    Lady Fitzgerald said:
    ignatzatsonic said:
    How well documented is the notion that "enterprise" drives are more reliable than "consumer" drives?

    Failure rates per se, with no reference to warranty, customer service, total cost of ownership, etc.
    Just based on customer reviews, I would say they enterprise drives are no better than consumer drives for lifespan, despite costing more. Keep in mind, however, most consumers don't run their consumer drives 24/7 (like someone I know ) and enterprise drives are designed for 24/7 operation.
    Hmmmm.....................


    Lifespan as measured in days owned? Hours of operation with discs spinning at full speed? Start/stop count or some other SMART metric?

    I'm wondering what "designed for 24/7 operation" means in the real world.

    If it didn't ultimately translate to a lower chance of failure per X hours of operation it would have no importance to me at all.

    I'm aware of that study Google did regarding their own drives maybe 10 years ago. I think I still have the PDF. But it's outdated now.

    You'd think there would be some well-established and documented dollars and cents reason why an enterprise would buy "enterprise" drives.

    The reason may have nothing at all to do with failure rates and instead may amount to hand-holding, longer warranties, expedited customer service, etc. This is my suspicion until and unless I can find a study which points to different failure rates per X hours of operation.

    I dunno, just asking.
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 51,383
    Windows 11 Workstation x64
       #12

    Layback Bear said:
    So my questions to you Shawn.

    With all the forums how many hard drives are use and what size and brands?
    What is the failure rate of each brand and size?
    WEB1 (SF/EF/VF)
    4 x 200GB Smart XceedIOPS SSD riad10

    WEB3 (TF/PCHF and others)
    4x 960GB SanDisk CloudSpeed 1000 SSD raid10

    With the current two front facing web servers above so far there has been no failures, the previous server that SF was on did lose an SSD a couple of years back wiping a full days data.
      My Computers


  4. Posts : 25,847
    Windows 10 Pro. 64/ version 1709 Windows 7 Pro/64
       #13

    Thanks John for the information.

    Looking I noticed you bought Enterprise level SSD's.
    Until I looked up what you posted I had not even heard of those SSD's.
    Price per gig is high but that is the price you pay for reliability.

    For some reason I thought you would need more GB's for all the storage needed for all the forums. Goes to show how much I don't know about Enterprise anything.

    For my home use I lean to Intel which are never the fasted ssd's on the consumer market but have a great reports on reliability.

    I just picked up a couple of Intel 730 series 240 gb because at the time they were priced right. Haven't used them yet. They probably won't break any ssd speed records either. It's hard for me to stop using Intel products because they just keep working as they should so I don't have to worry about them.
      My Computer


  5. Posts : 4,049
    W7 Ultimate SP1, LM19.2 MATE, W10 Home 1703, W10 Pro 1703 VM, #All 64 bit
       #14

    Lady Fitzgerald said:
    The first WD to fail was one an early Green (1.5TB) a supposedly reputable computer shop installed in an older machine of mine to replace the two Seagates that previously failed (the shop should have known better than to use a green drive for a one drive machine; that experience was the reason why I learned how to build and maintain my own machines). The early Greens had an issue with excessive head parking that caused them to wear out prematurely and has since been corrected.
    The WD Green HDDs are still set to 8 second parking.

    Worse unlike the older models (EARS) the timer cannot be disabled in the new models (EZRX).
    The best you can do is set them to use 300 second parking.

    I disabled the timer in my older WD Green 1.5 TB and WD 2 TB HDDs.
    The 1.5 TB HDD had already racked up 10s of thousands of parks by the time I heard of the issue.

    I couldn't disable the timer in my WD Green 2 TB EZRX HDD and I actually emailed WD about this.
    Their reply indicated that the timer in new WD Green EZRX HDDs couldn't be disabled.
    I had to set the HDDs to 300 seconds.

    The 1.5 TB EARS HDD has racked up >1200 days of Power-On Hours. :)

    The 2 TB EARS HDD started playing up (~April last year, just before the warranty expired) and I removed it when I rebuilt my system last month.
      My Computer


  6. Posts : 9,600
    Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit
       #15

    lehnerus2000 said:
    Lady Fitzgerald said:
    The first WD to fail was one an early Green (1.5TB) a supposedly reputable computer shop installed in an older machine of mine to replace the two Seagates that previously failed (the shop should have known better than to use a green drive for a one drive machine; that experience was the reason why I learned how to build and maintain my own machines). The early Greens had an issue with excessive head parking that caused them to wear out prematurely and has since been corrected.
    The WD Green HDDs are still set to 8 second parking. ...
    True. They are designed to park the heads and spin down when not in use to reduce power consumption. That, along with the slower top rpm, is what makes them green. The problem with the early Greens was the heads would park, then unpark, then repeat that cycle continuously until they reached their maximum cycle rating; they would fail shortly after that. As I said before, that was fixed a long time ago. It's also one reason why these drives are unsuitable for use as a boot drive; too much on and off activity. However, they are suited for pure storage. Since my computer runs 24/7, I prefer to use a higher quality drive for storage in it—the WD Blacks—especially since they have a longer warranty.

    However, I use them for my backup drives. I plug them into the 3.5" hot swap bay in my computer, let them spin up and index, then fire up my backup program (FreeFileSync). When the backup is finished, I wait a bit for the heads to park and the drive to spin down (roughly ten seconds seems to be plenty), then pull the drive out of the swap bay and put it away.
      My Computer


  7. Posts : 12,012
    Windows 7 Home Premium SP1, 64-bit
       #16

    lehnerus2000 said:
    The WD Green HDDs are still set to 8 second parking.
    This may be true, but I'm not sure it's significant.

    Here's my experience:

    I have a 7 month old WD Green 3 TB WD30EZRX-00D8PB0. Three platters, manufactured in Thailand.

    Power on hours: 3344; in operation pretty much when I’m awake, 15 or 16 hours a day.

    I do not use sleep or similar settings. Other than my monitor, stuff is either on or off.

    Load/Unload cycle count: 3488, about once per hour. I’ve tracked this since installation and it’s steady at about that rate---on a schedule for maybe 6000 per year given 15 or 16 hours a day of operation. The drives are rated for several hundred thousand cycles.

    I did run the Wdidle3 app and it said head parking was set to 8 seconds. I am aware of the s/300 switch. I did not even attempt to change settings, leaving it at 8 seconds.

    In spite of what Wdidle3 says, it appears my drive heads are not parking every 8 seconds. About once per hour.

    Or do you refer to some metric other than load/unload cycle (LLC)?

    Or do you not believe the LLC count as reported?

    Or?

    I know that some earlier WD drives would reach 100,000 LLC count within weeks, sometimes after behaving properly for months.
      My Computer


  8. Posts : 9,600
    Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit
       #17

    They aren't designed to park every 8 seconds. They are designed to park 8 seconds after they become inactive.
      My Computer


  9. Posts : 12,012
    Windows 7 Home Premium SP1, 64-bit
       #18

    Lady Fitzgerald said:
    They aren't designed to park every 8 seconds. They are designed to park 8 seconds after they become inactive.
    What does "inactive" mean in that context?

    Heads not spinning?

    Not overtly accessed as when opening a file through Windows Explorer?

    Powered off?
      My Computer


  10. Posts : 9,600
    Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit
       #19

    ignatzatsonic said:
    Lady Fitzgerald said:
    They aren't designed to park every 8 seconds. They are designed to park 8 seconds after they become inactive.
    What does "inactive" mean in that context?

    Heads not spinning?

    Not overtly accessed as when opening a file through Windows Explorer?

    Powered off?
    Not overtly accessed as when opening a file through Windows Explorer.
      My Computer


 
Page 2 of 4 FirstFirst 1234 LastLast

  Related Discussions
Our Sites
Site Links
About Us
Windows 7 Forums is an independent web site and has not been authorized, sponsored, or otherwise approved by Microsoft Corporation. "Windows 7" and related materials are trademarks of Microsoft Corp.

© Designer Media Ltd
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 10:07.
Find Us