I'm in that window shopping mood and ended up looking at drives again. My actual/eventual need would be to store a slowly growing data/music/picture/video archive that is currently spread across multiple drives (less than a Tb overall atm). Ideally, I'd look at a twin drive configuration for redundancy, but I've been lucky so far with SATA drives in the 3-5y/o range. Hell, my IDEs died after 10+yrs!
When I first started looking into high capacity drives I started to notice some trends. Not all drives are 1Tb/platter. Some have crappy 1-2yr warranties. Then there was my reminder of the 2.5Tb threshold. For this discussion we'll not worry about that last part as my current and future setups will be able to natively read a GDP data drive.
Generally speaking, my searches over the years have narrowed down to Seagate and Western Digital. The former is usually cheaper and has the 1Tb/platter configuration I was directed to stick to, but their warranties have dropped to minimal. Conversely, WD Black drives boast 5yrs, but the price is higher and I can't find any data on the platter configuration beyond a quick blurb on N.E. about 5 platters.
Opinions? Experiences? Am I missing some other vital thing to look for besides where to pull the money out of?
Seagate 3TB drive that I have has been great so far - I would stay away from any Hitachi drives though (1 repair and 2 DOA's)
I would avoid any kind of green drive, I had a bunch of them and recently they've all started failing. I've had a good experience with western digital red drives, they're good if you're planning on having them run 24/7 or in a raid configuration. If you want redundancy but don't want to have use raid then check out a program called disparity, it's let's you use a bunch of drives of any size and another drive for redundancy, that way if one drive fails you can rebuild it, and if two fail then you only lose the data on those two. This makes it easy to expand later.
Yeah, I figured as much about the Hitachi (or Fujitsu for that matter). Green drives are thought of more for archiving (more for write, not read), but there's a reason for their 1yr warranty. If I Was going to do a RAID, then the Red drives are Awesome for that, but I try to say somewhat simple.
And then he says.... :-p
If I get around to it, I'd likely use my older/smaller internal drives to run test/play OS' like Win8 or that Hackintosh build. I'm not worried about drivers as Paragon does well coming up with stable ones for cheap/free. I'm still sorta hung up on capacity vs value, but the smartest thing to do would be to go bigger or risk my current setup where there's half a dozen different drives in my collection, making data shuffling a pain.
Something I've found out in my re-research. Seagate doesn't want you to know that they're $100 cheaper because their drives run at 5400 RPM, not 7200 RPM like the WDs do. That and the reduced warranty period.
Just buy a pair of 4TB Seagate Constellation drives and RAID 1 them. You are better off not buying new consumer grade HDDs because they are all junk. WD and Seagate have scaled back their consumer grade HDDs so much that the quality of them is just not worth it. This is in line with trying to compete with the ever lowering price of SSD NAND flash.
Have you seen the price of those things for the amount of data you get? I get shivers down my back.. brr... They are built top notch, but they also are meant to go through waaaaaay more tear than any consumer grade product.
Honestly, the best thing to do is get a consumer grade Hard Drive, whatever size you need and if you really want to play safe get two for raid 1, and set up your main drive to be an SSD which will last you quite nicely if you're not rewriting the whole thing every day.
Consumer grade are going to last you 3 years brand new from the production quality they are pumping out right now. A Constellation drive is going to last you 10 years and it has built in encryption features to prevent theives from stealing your data if your computer is ever stolen.
I can't honestly recommend a consumer grade HDD right now because of how ridiculous the production quality is. Consumer grade HDDs from 6 years ago used to be manufacturered to last 5-8 years now they are manufactured to last 3 years if you are lucky.
Agreed, but 3 years as a primary drive. He can take the money saved and get an ssd -greatly improve performance and some of them come with 5 year warranties. Plus that drive he has is going to last much longer than 3 years, it's not his primary drive anymore
I would take the price of encryption and higher quality over an SSD with a consumer grade data storage HDD. The only reason why I personally haven't switched over to an SSD is I'm waiting for the 1TB Samsung 840 Evo. If it is priced reasonably I may buy it only becasue I want an SSD that can store the OS, all the relevant programs I use, and any games I have all in one place. This is the only scenario where SSD with a consumer grade Storage HDD I will accept. Currently there are no options like this for a reasonable price.
If it wasn't hard enough saving up for one, then I'd consider a RAID configuration, but I can't see the benefit of spending the money on a commercial grade drive when odds are something else will trigger the need to replace it down the road (holographic storage maybe? :-P). While I do agree that as time passes, they find ways to 'cheapen' their production lines, but nobody seriously believes that Flash storage (as it stands now) is going to replace conventional drives in the near future. Yes, it is replacing our everyday, normal use drives, but not our semi-long term storage.
Magnetic storage isn't going away for a while but I absolutely despise the only two competing companies for low-balling their consumer grade products. They feel the need to rake in a better profit since NAND flash is more popular for OS drives right now to keep their higher capacity drives more relevant in the scheme of the price wars.
I forgot to mention the updated build is under my profile and should clear a few 'what ifs'.
That said, In exception to Fujitsu and HItachi, most of my drives have lasted atleast 5-15 yrs depending on the extent to which they were used/abused. The afore mentioned failed within a couple years and both were factory installed. I had a Maxtor and WD internal fail around 10-13yrs of age. Thinking back, I had the enclosures for a set of twin green drives fail within a year of purchase. They now make up my G4's internal storage configuration. A seagate external keeps my PS3 backed up and I have a range of capacity WD externals that have yet to fail me. I'm rough on things, but I've got the tools to recover or know where to acquire them if they become out of date as needed.