Which drive for storage only

[burge666]

Hi all,

I bought a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 as a storage drive last month but it failed and was very noisy with a constant hum. I am in the process of receiving a credit and wanted some help on choosing a new drive. I have read that the Hitachi's are hit and miss and don't want to risk getting another one and was thinking of getting a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black instead but noticed that I can buy a 3TB Seagate Barracuda for £30 less.

I know that the WD Black drive is fast but not sure if it would be noticeable enough to justify it over the Seagate with an extra TB of storage. The other thing that had me going toward the WD drive was the 5 year warranty over the 1 year you get on the Seagate.

Any help would be appreciated

[Biscuit]

Do you really need maximum speed for the storage drive? I would have thought a 'green' drive with a slower rotation speed would easily have enough performance but would probably be better with regards to noise.

Green drives are still far from slow, because the platters are so dense they still pull pretty good speeds. The only time i have seen issues has been when using them for video or audio editing, but that was back in the day when the disks were only 250-320GB so the platters were nowhere near as dense.

Another option that might be effective, if you do need the additional speed, is using a SSD cache drive along with the HDD.

What kind of data are you going to be storing on there and what will it be used for exactly?

[burge666]

Sorry, I am clueless with HDD's. I have a 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD as main drive and will be using it for video editing (Adobe Premier Pro) and running Fraps to save to this drive when in game (which seems to take up a lot of space).

[mikeo01]

Storage drive, 5400RPM, green drives.
Other drives, I can say my Seagate drive is whisper quiet and is half decent (7200RPM). Also where did you find that drive for £30? That's awfully cheap.
Also depends what drive you get, not all are loud. Seagate I would say are very reliable, great drives. You can't go wrong with newer drives, all pretty similar these days

Funny enough I am looking at cache drives, so may be a cheap solution to look into if you are after a bit of performance with the HDD.

[Biscuit]

A hard drive isn't necessarily just a single disk, they often have multiple disks inside them called platters. Take for example a 2TB drive, it will probably be made up of 4 x 500GB platters.

In the days gone by, companies werent able to put as much data onto a single platter so even a 500GB drive would have been made up of multiple platters.

When these platters get more and more dense, the head that reads the data on them can achieve better speeds so technically, you don't necessarily need the disk to spin as fast. The advantage is that less rotations per minute (RPM) generall means less noise, the problem is that it will is also increase the access time. This is the time between getting a request to find the information you want and starting to retrieve it.

When working with raw audio and video, you will often have quite large files, so when for example, you preview a video in the time line, the hard drive has to access the correct part of the file quickly and then sustain a decent bandwidth whilst it plays. With the faster 7200RPM and above drives (such as western digital black) this isnt a issue, im not sure if the 5400/5600RPM (such as western digital green) drives still struggle in this scenario.

[burge666]

Mike, the 3TB seagate is priced at £98 which was £30 less/cheaper than I can buy the 2TB WD Black for. Only thing that puts me off the Seagate is the warranty (almost like they don't trust their HDD's to last)

Biscuit, thank you for the great explanation. Make things a lot clearer and think that a 7200 rpm drive is in order.

I believe the WD has slightly better performance along with a 5 year guarantee so think I may go down this route for what I need as 2TB will be more than enough space. Does anybody have any experience on the noise levels on this drive?

[Biscuit]

Mike, the 3TB seagate is priced at £98 which was £30 less/cheaper than I can buy the 2TB WD Black for. Only thing that puts me off the Seagate is the warranty (almost like they don't trust their HDD's to last)

Biscuit, thank you for the great explanation. Make things a lot clearer and think that a 7200 rpm drive is in order.

I believe the WD has slightly better performance along with a 5 year guarantee so think I may go down this route for what I need as 2TB will be more than enough space. Does anybody have any experience on the noise levels on this drive?

I don't have direct experience, but bear in mind this drive will probably have 4 x 500GB platters all spinning at 7200RPM. A single 500GB platter drive would probably be quite quiet (my old Samsung ones are) however I suspect any drive with 4 platters spinning at that speed will have a bit of hum.
There are solutions to try and isolate the resonance and noise available in the market, but they come at a cost. I'm on my phone at the moment so can't really be bothered to go searching for you :-P

[mikeo01]

Ohhh sorry, I thought you meant it was £30, was going to say, bargain

5 year warranty is good, but then if you treat a HDD right it should last 5 years anyway either way I can say my 7200RPM drive is inaudible.

[burge666]

Thanks Biscuit, I have seen the noise isolating kits and think I may get one to be safe as they are inexpensive and can't do any harm.

Mike, That is good to know mate thank you. My PC has plenty of cooling and is only ever moved to upgrade

[Biscuit]

I got some for my seagate momentus XT drives as the mounts in my case only have isolation for desktop size drives. The ones I have convert the drive to one size up (so laptop ones become desktop ones or desktop ones become optical drive size) and they're okay, sort of does the job of isolating but doesn't silence them. Sharkoon I believe was the make.

[DanceswithUnix]

My wife has a 1TB WD Black in her machine, it seems quiet enough. Like all performance drives it rattles during access, but it is quiet otherwise. My machine has a 1TB WD Blue which is a lot quieter because they tune it to not move the heads around quite as violently to keep the noise down. You don't get the 5 year warranty with the blue drive though, but the performance isn't that far behind the black.

[RhinoUK]

Ive just recently bought the 2TB Seagate drive after having Seagate for years and never having any problems with the drives. I replaced 3 x 300Gb raid drives with the one disk and have been happy with its performance getting exactly the performance spec on data transfer. Check out this review http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/buying-ad...pm-hard-drive/
If the 2TB is anything to go by then the 3TB should be ok as well, i am looking to buy this 3TB drive in the next few months myself as a backup drive to store a full system image. You read different things about everything with everyone having a different experience but if you ever get a bad product you normally give it bad press but i never have with Seagate so for me they are good reliable drives.

[burge666]

Just been looking at the 3TB Seagate and it uses 3 x 1TB platters and people seem to have only good things to say about it (also quiet) so I have just ordered one instead of the WD. Cheaper and and extra TB of storage so seems the best option. Also ordered a Sharkoon Vibe Fixer III for £7 just to be safe and reduce any vibration.

Big thank you to everyone for all of your input and help

[Biscuit]

Just been looking at the 3TB Seagate and it uses 3 x 1TB platters and people seem to have only good things to say about it (also quiet) so I have just ordered one instead of the WD. Cheaper and and extra TB of storage so seems the best option. Also ordered a Sharkoon Vibe Fixer III for £7 just to be safe and reduce any vibration.

Big thank you to everyone for all of your input and help

No worries, let us know how you get on.