1TB HD

ssri said:

Mellon Head said:

I have a couple of the WD 1 TB Greens and they work just fine for data backup and storage. Mine run at 5400 to 7200 it seems, but I don't know how the speed shifting works. Data retrieval is only slightly slower than my two 500 GB Blacks.

I stopped using Seagates altogether a couple of years ago, but I've been using WD drives for over ten and never had a failure.

Funny, I've been using Samsungs and WDs for the past seven years. I can say that the Samsungs have held up well, whereas I've had WDs (3) with bad sectors, corrupted FATs and outright failure, go figure.

For any drive seeing bad sectors there's a program called HDD Regenerator that can usually restore drives back to factory condition. HDD Regenerator 1.61 - Free Download. HDD Regenerator is unique software program for regeneration of physically damage

A friend has a Hitachi drive that came with bad sectors out of the box apparently and will be seeing a run on the program on it. In the last 12yrs. roughly only one WD ide suffered a problem when being loaned out where you could no longer write to the drive but could read from it. I accounted that to wear mostly.

ssri said:

Didn't Hitachi purchase IBMs harddrive unit? The unit also known for its Deathstars? In all honesty, the gap (in years) between IBM's Desk(Death)stars and Hitachi's current offerings is quite large.

But then Seagate made the 7200.11 series Barracuda drives with screwed up firmware that bricked tons of drives. My point: Every brand goes through issues from time to time.

pparks1 said:

ssri said:

Didn't Hitachi purchase IBMs harddrive unit? The unit also known for its Deathstars? In all honesty, the gap (in years) between IBM's Desk(Death)stars and Hitachi's current offerings is quite large.

But then Seagate made the 7200.11 series Barracuda drives with screwed up firmware that bricked tons of drives. My point: Every brand goes through issues from time to time.

Point taken here. I would have to say I've been a bit more fortunate then others however as far as drives are concerned.

You have to look at why drive manufacturers provide warrantys on their products in case of any defects being found in the first place. Just as with any other large scale manufacturing process you have the occasional "bad batch" of whatever that can get out.

For a period of time bad boards by different companies were being seen when the main manufacturer of certain capacitors was seeing problems. That effected some of the better rated brand name makes of boards.

Another element that effects everything of course is the temp environment any drive is subjected to. For many old style cases that lacked good air flow people opted for adding on hard drive coolers for their internal to keep them from cooking.

On the cooling issue that's one thing I noticed with docking stations. Most just rely on the fact they are open to the air. I have a couple of BlacX USB 2.0 docks, and a couple each of Sharkoon and SIIG USB 3.0 docks. The SIIG have a fan that's on when the power is on. The Sharkoon spins the drive down after 10 minutes of idle time. I got the SIIG docks because the Carviar Blacks do get kind of hot to the touch.

For occasional use the Sharkoon is ok since it will spin down even the Caviar Blacks on idle time-out. For constant use the SIIG is better with the fan. The BlacX are really only good now for connection to my set top box to play videos on TV and restoring a backup image(most image backup software doesn't have USB 3.0 support on the boot CDs.)

In any case if you are going to buy the 3 Gb/sec 32 MB cache models look for sales because I think they'll be dumping them soon. I get a lot of stuff from Egg but for bare drives I like to go with ExcaliberPC. Often the price comes out the same or a bit lower than Egg when you take the shipping into account, but ExcaliberPC uses FedEx. I've heard bad things about "head slap" and UPS shipping afa DOA drives. I bought one WD caviar black from Egg but I paid extra to get the FedEx shipping.

Of course it's like new cars and lemmons. If you got a good one, that model is great and you can't understand why people talk about that model car as if it's no good. If you got one of the lemons, then you know why. :)

The host drive in now is the 32mb Black edition model with a second Sata II version caught marked down until today! That $10 off the $89.99 seen for that when using the promo code ending up only $5 more then the Blue edition for the 1tb size. Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

That's a bit less when grabbing the smal discount then seen for the GP models. But by next year at this the 2tb verion will likely be seeing around the same price range during the summer clearances.

If the drive was just bought recently I would. The program there is good to have when working older drives long past the vendor return and even warranty periods or simply to save time with a quick effort if any problem found is minor.

I still haven't even had a chance to use that one even on some older builds since the drives are found without any bad sectors. That seems to be one problem I don't run into.