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Best drives for WHS? (ie: is Seagate still having problems & WD greens still spin down?) RRS feed

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    Hi.

    After loads of research on what drive to buy next for my home-built, I settled on the 1T WD green. I decided this despite the things I had read on all the forums about people having problems with them spinning down and becoming unrecognized, MS not recommending, etc.  I went this way because there were an equal number of discussions singing the praises of these drives.

    Anyway, when I got the the store I saw that they had a Seagate Barracuda 1.5T 5900 RPM for the same price (and came with cables), so I got that one opting for the extra 500G.  Now when I got home I'm reading all the horror stories from last year about barracudas dying. To make things more conflicted - Micro Center's ad today showed the WD green 1.5T for the same price! :|

    So, does anyone "in the know" with these things have any input on which of these 2 drives would be better for my WHS, or does it matter? Is Seagate still having problems and that's why it was on sale? Do the WD greens really cause problems in WHS? Either of these would be for internal use only (no USB or eSATA).  Should I stay away from both and go with a Hitachi or something?

    Thanks for any opinions!

     

    • Changed type kariya21Moderator Wednesday, March 24, 2010 3:22 AM not a technical question
    Tuesday, March 23, 2010 5:12 PM

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    If your seagate was manufacturerd recently then you can assume that it's fixed.  However, I've found in the past seagate tech support (or pre-sales) to be very friendly and if you quote the serial number of your drive then can reassure you.

    Over time all the hard disks manfs have had their problems - personally I steer away from Maxtors but then the industry I am in prefers them and so statistically I see more of them fail.  Also as soon as you buy anything tech these days the rule of the sod says you will see a better offer within days ;-)

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    Tuesday, March 23, 2010 6:05 PM
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    ...
    Over time all the hard disks manfs have had their problems - personally I steer away from Maxtors but then the industry I am in prefers them and so statistically I see more of them fail.  Also as soon as you buy anything tech these days the rule of the sod says you will see a better offer within days ;-) ...

    Heh. Google researched the question of hard drive failures a few years ago. (Being one of the largest consumers of hard drives in the world, they are understandably interested in the topic.) Their conclusions were interesting. One is that with a large enough sample size (and all the hard drives a single person will buy for his and his family's use in his lifetime is not a large enough sample size), all manufacturers have similar failure rates. As Al points out, there are variations due to manufacturing issues, etc. but the average is pretty steady.

     

    Other (and more interesting to me) conclusions include:

     

    • Certain SMART parameters are good indicators of imminent drive failure, i.e. if you have this parameter your drive is likely to die soon.
    • The absence of a SMART parameter  is a very poor indicator of drive health, i.e. your drive may die even though there's no indicator that anything's wrong.
    • Drive temperature and activity are much less important considerations than previously believed. Basically, if your drive is within manufacturer's specifications, temperature is insignificant. In other words if your drive's manufacturer says a drive will operate reliably in 65° C ambient, it will run for years in 65° C ambient. Even if that means the drive's internal temperature is 75-80° C. (Also, they concluded that running a drive below temperature specifications is quite bad for it...)

     

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Tuesday, March 23, 2010 6:49 PM
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