Which 3TB drive would you buy?

[Mucka]

Hi

I'm just looking at upgrading my old 1TB disk and saw the 3TB's are a decent price.

Which would you recommend and which would you avoid?

Thanks

[jigger]

Depends what you are looking for in the drive. I would avoid Seagate desktop 7200 RPM drives.

[Mucka]

Its a second drive primary is ssd, I have a HP microserver as a NAS so its only for local non essential storage.

Are the Seagates as bad as their old deathstar drives where?

[GoNz0]

WD Blue or a Toshiba as the Toshiba prices are quite low.

[jasonmav]

Are the Seagates as bad as their old deathstar drives where?

The new Seagate NAS drives are very good imo. I love the WD Reds for most uses (NAS or 2nd drive) but have recently found the Seagate NAS drive to be very good too. Picked up a 3TB for £75 last week.

[Agrippa]

Given all the bad press the 3TB Seagate models quite rightly received, they are very likely to be among the safer consumer options available right now. After all, it's not as if manufacturers sit back and look at the feedback they're getting and then just yawn, scratch their asses and ignore it all. The Seagate 3TB desktop model has no doubt received more engineering attention than any other established drive has done for a very long time and the problem, whatever it was, is likely long gone.

[DanceswithUnix]

Given all the bad press the 3TB Seagate models quite rightly received, they are very likely to be among the safer consumer options available right now. After all, it's not as if manufacturers sit back and look at the feedback they're getting and then just yawn, scratch their asses and ignore it all. The Seagate 3TB desktop model has no doubt received more engineering attention than any other established drive has done for a very long time and the problem, whatever it was, is likely long gone.

Or you could be getting old stock. Without knowing what happened in those drives and a date code after which it was fixed if it ever was, it seems one heck of a punt when the Toshiba P300 is a quid cheaper. I would have thought if Seagate had done something about the drive they would have upped the warranty to more than a year to show their confidence in their product.

I know the backblaze data gets rightly slated for all sorts of bias, but one interesting thing I have noticed is that their 4TB drives seemed a lot more reliable than their 3TB drives. Storage is always a bit of a gamble, hence backups, if I really needed that amount of storage I would be tempted to go for http://www.ebuyer.com/721597-toshiba...e-hdwe140ezsta on the grounds that the WD black and HGST drives are stupid money to the point where I would rather put a pair of £95 Toshibas in a mirrored pair than pay £180 for a WD Black.

[peterb]

Tricky one because statistics apply to populations, not individual units, so you are looking at failure probability.

I suspect that some disk failures have their origin in bad shipping, which will lead to premature failure. Published statistical tables (like backblaze) don't say when in their service life the disks fail, and so can be unreliable indicators. The other caveat is that the mode of operation in a data centre is very different from home use.

One indicator might be the confidence a mfr has in their product, so the length of the warranty could be a good indicator.

You should be taking backups anyway, so drive failure should not mean massive data loss.

However, bear in mind that if you do make a warranty claim, you have to return the disk, and if the disk has failed, you can't do a secure wipe, so your data remains and could possibly be recovered.

[Kumagoro]

We have many of the infamous Seagate 3tb drives and they are dropping like flies now After a years use

[DanceswithUnix]

I suspect that some disk failures have their origin in bad shipping, which will lead to premature failure.

These days bad shipping has to be very very bad to really matter. This was something that Quantum made a big push for, back in the days when Quantum actually made hard drives which says how long ago that was!

Edit to add: From what I remember, about 20 years ago Quantum worked out that most drive damage happened either from bumps in shipping or from gently bumping the drive against the PC case drive cage it was being inserted into, causing drive failure roughly 3 months after the impact. They designed their drives so that the head was parked locked well up and out of the way during transport so it could't slap against the platter.

[peterb]

It's a pity HGST have stopped making small drives (funny to think of 4TB as small, when the first hard drive I bought was 10MB). They were lovely drives.

Ah yes, Quantum, Rodime, etc, names from the past!

[DanceswithUnix]

It's a pity HGST have stopped making small drives (funny to think of 4TB as small, when the first hard drive I bought was 10MB). They were lovely drives.

Ah yes, Quantum, Rodime, etc, names from the past!

I thought they did. You can certainly still buy them: http://www.ebuyer.com/393234-hgst-4t...ds724040ale640

[peterb]

Thanks, I thought they had stopped to concentrate on the 8TB and above. In that case I'd recommend the OP to go HGST.

(I think it was a backblaze website that said something about HGST which was why there HGST sample was low)

[DanceswithUnix]

Thanks, I thought they had stopped to concentrate on the 8TB and above. In that case I'd recommend the OP to go HGST.

(I think it was a backblaze website that said something about HGST which was why there HGST sample was low)

They seem to have a lot of HGST drives in their latest survey, though Seagate is still the standard purchase for them. Not the 3TB ones though, they are all gone: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...ility-q4-2015/

I took backblaze's comment about 4TB HGST drives to be about the specific model they were used to using.