What is a good 2TB drive?

N

Nimrod

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 14, 2005
Messages
244
I was thinking about getting the WD20EARS or the HITACHI 5K3000 would either of these drives be good?

I just need something to store my movies on so don't really need them for performance but defiantly want them to be reliable.
 
I am a huge fan of WD but those EARS drives had a bad failure rate! I have seen 3 myself be either doa or die soon..

Avoid ears's....
 
Uhhh, are you me from two days ago??

I had the same question and ended up buying 10 Hitachi 5k3000 drives (for ZFS). If you're not using ZFS you might also want to consider the Samsung Spinpoint F4 (but they have a 4k sector size if that matters to you).
 
I'm curious about this as well, the 3 options to me are basically -

Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 2TB
Western Digital WD20EARS Caviar Green 2TB
Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB

Now I heard the 4k drives can theoretically be better for error correction?

I'm also wondering if there will be any issues running RAID 1, which I may do for some redundancy. I heard the WD greens for instance have some issues with RAID?
 
I would recommend the drives in the order you have Hitachi first. Then WDC.

However with all of this said we have these kinds of polls here at least a couple of times a month and everyone gives an opinion but almost none of the people who give an opinion really can say statistically that one drive is better than a second. The reason is none of these users have purchased 10 thousand drives. Even my ~200 drives I have at work do not say much statistically. I can say that whatever drive you buy the expectation from google is that 2% to 8% of all drives will fail annually. And these failures are not always caused by old age or usage. At work I have seen a little lower ballpark 1% to 7% over the 15 years I have been in control of the department's computer network.
 
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The green EARS has known issues of higher than average failure. Seen it with my own eyes. Read eggs feedback on any/all parts you ever buy...even if you don't buy from egg.....it is generally honest and unbiased builders leaving genuine feedback...and that EARS ain't good!
 
Does Seagate make the Samsung F4 now? That is the reason why I don't want to buy that because I've heard too many bad things about Seagate. If I can order one from newegg that is still made by Samsung I probably would get that over the hitachi
 
locally I can only get WD20EARS or 5k3000, which poison shoud I pick... All I want is to store audio/video files on it... I would order Sammy F4, but I'm affraid I might get DOA...

Please advise...
 
Welp I ordered 5 F4 2TB's to replace my 5 WD10EALX's - need more space. I really hope these things aren't too loud and obnoxious - if they are I'll just send 'em back. Hopefully they'll all have the latest firmware as well. I next day air'd 'em so I'll give some feedback here soon.
 
I think I'm gonna like these F4 Samsungs :) Pretty darn quiet n cool so far. Currently building my R10 array...
 
When I did some research about a month ago, I found issues with the 2TB EARS series, especially if one wanted to use them in a RAID setup or even WHS. The Seagate Green series has conflicting reviews. Most people recommended Samsung F4 or Hitatchi. I ended up buying two Hitatchi 5K3000, decided to go with the 3TB as they were on sale locally. Hitatchi has 512-byte sectors (no problem with older OS), no idle head parking issues. Surprising speed for large file transfers as well which is most of what I use them for (backup of media). So far so good.
 
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