[PatrickVogeli]

Hi there!

So my server is up and running, I'm only waiting for some more cables and fan regulators (once that is done, I'll open a thread showing it). At the moment it is running 3 HDDs as a Pooled array, without data protection. The drives are 2 seagates (st2000 and ST32000) and a Samsung HD204UI, all 3 ripped from external USB HDDs and that already had data on them. Oh, the server has room for 13 3,5" HDDs and a 2,5", and it has a 500W Corsair CX500M power supply.

Now I'm starting to think about what HDDs to get next, but after the floodings all changed a bit. I believe, before the flood we had 4 or 5 suppliers:

Seagate
Western Digital
Hitachi
Samsung
Toshiba (do they make their own HDDs?)

After the flooding, the game has changed a bit, and is still a bit on the expensive side:

Seagate, who bought Samsung. Also I've read they don't do 3,5" 5900rpm drives anymore, so a bit more power hungry I guess?
Western Digital, who bought Hitachi and renamed it to HGST
Toshiba (as before?)

EDIT: so it seems that Toshiba bought the Hitachi facilities, and that they are rebadget Hitachis. See here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.p...ic=22873.0

A little overview of the drives:

Western Digital:
Green: WDx0EZRX
Red: WDx0EFZX
AV-GP: WDx0EURS

The HGST 5K3000

The Seagate STx000DM

The Toshiba: in Europe it seems that we have 2 different series available, the DT01ACAx00 7200rpms drives and the DT01ABAx00 5940rpm drives. I'm especially interested in the last ones, as I can get them quite cheap. http://www.toshiba.eu/hard-drives/intern...e-desktop/#

What would you get? I've read that the Hitachi were very fine drives, but what happens now after the flood now that they are also WD drives? Still use Hitachi technology or have they gone the cheaper way?

I'm interested in opinions, experiences and anything useful you have to say, I would really love to know how's the HDD world now.

I'm still looking around for prices, but that is a bit secondary now, as I won't be buying until in about a week or 2. Once I have the cash, I'll decide if I buy 2TB or 3TB drives and if I can buy one or 2. Also, equally important as the price will be which supplier I can get them from, I always try to buy from amazon.de, even if its some € more expensive.

Let's the talk begin!

[flabbamann]

Hi Patrick,

I did a some research on HDDs recently.
The Idea was to upgrade my NAS with two more drives (I had one 2TB which was full), and switch from Openfiler to unRAID to get some protection.

Here is what I found out:

Some people said Toshiba does only OEM drives, so no Consumer Support, what could cause trouble if you want to RMA a drive.

I did not want Seagate, as they only produce 7200rpm drives, which I didn't want for my NAS (Noise, Heat, Energy..).

And then there are lots of big discussions on what Western Digital Drives to get.
I believe the drives are almost the same, the main difference between the red and green series is the Firmware.

There are some people who say "Never run those WD greens in your NAS!", and others say these are just doing fine in their NASs.


As I run a 1.5TB WD Green for years in my Desktop system now, without any trouble (the systems stays on most time of the day), and the price (115€ each) was better, I now got 2x WD30EZRX for my system at a local vendor. One for parity, and one for data.


Hope I could help you

[PatrickVogeli]

Hi, thanks for you reply.Yes, I've read some things about the Toshiba warranty and so on, but this HDDs seems to be destinated to the retail market, as you can see in the link I posted.

However, I've contacted Toshiba Germany asking about this, if I get a response, I'll post it here.

In the Backblaze blog about their storage pool, I read that they had very good luck with Hitachi drives, which had the lowest failure rate. And since it seems that Toshibas are rebadget Hitachis.. I may try them.

With WD I have read mixed reviews, with some people very happy, and some not. However, the whole wd3idle problem puts me a little back on those drives, also that the Red drives are quite pricey (nearly 140€)

[flabbamann]

Well, the 2TB drive I already had in my NAS is a Hitachi. It is running now for about 2 Years without causing any trouble.

But I can not tell you if the Toshiba drives today can be compared to Hitachi back then...

[Dougie Fresh]

I my WHS2011 server, I have a mix of Seagate, Samsung and WD Green drives and they're all running fine, some for a few years now. The Thailand floods shows you just how much these guys share component-wise. I'd buy based on price and warranty.

[joe_sun]

I have Seagate, Hitachi and WD drives in my server and so far no problems with any of them.

If I was doing it all over again I'd probably get nothing but WD Red drives but I've never had a problem with my greens in UNraid either. I'd get Reds because of the 3 year warranty.

I would also not buy anything less than a 3tb right now. They aren't that much more than a 2tb and trust me when I say you will start to run out of drive bays, SATA conectors quick when you start adding drives.

[wsume99]

I'd buy based on price and warranty.

+1

All HDDs fail. You'll be less dissapointed if it happens under warranty or if you paid less for the drive to begin with.

[joe_sun]

I'd buy based on price and warranty.

+1

All HDDs fail. You'll be less dissapointed if it happens under warranty or if you paid less for the drive to begin with.

When I did my cut and paste from Word somehow I left out the part where I wrote I'd get the Reds becuase of the 3 year warranty

[GortWillSaveUs]

In 20++ years,...I've only had one hard drive failure.
The majority of HD failures that I have seen were all SAS drives installed in server arrays.

In fact,..while I couldn't tell you what HDD I have installed in my unRaid server, I'd take a guess they're all Western Digital drives.
Maybe a 1-2 Seagates.
If you start chasing down reviews and such,..you'll always find people bashing one drive or another.

As Dougie said, buy based on price.
Personally,..I don't care much about warranties. They usually jack up the price, and then die just after the warranty expires.
I've had great luck with my drives,..but then again,...I shouldn't have just said that.....

[PatrickVogeli]

Hi all,

At the end, I went with those who said to go with the cheapest available. Yesterday I saw 3TB external HDs from Intenso for 99€, and I bought 2 of them and, as I read in the amazon reviews, they came with Seagate ST3000DM001 drives. I bought them because the enclosure is really easy to disasemble (just remove some screws) without breaking anything and has no warranty stickers or similar.

I've mounted them on my server and I'm running the preclear disk scripts from the unraid forums. Even though I'm not running unraid, I modified the script and got it to run under normal ubuntu. Once precleared, if they turn out fine, I will just format them to EXT4 and put one of them for parity duties and the other one for data.