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Best spinning platter Hard Drives for cMP?

M

MVMNT

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 28, 2010
535
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So my new-old cMP has a few HDDs in them but they're quit low capacity, 500Gb a piece, and pretty old to boot. This leaves me in the market for a few upgrades.

I'm thinking of adding in a pair of 1/2TB spinners for my heavy storage, possibly in a RAID config for that added layer of speed and security.

So, what would be the recommendations tried and tested by you good folk? The WD Blacks are my immediate go to, but am I missing something better?

(I'm also currently running a 250GB Samsung Evo Pro as the boot drive, but as i'm an iCloud user too on local storage, i'll need to upgrade that to a 1TB SSD/NVME in the future. Stupid iCloud.)
 
I use 6 WD greens and they work fine. The sata controllers altogether can not pass thru more than about 550MB per second so even slow drives will max you out. Pretty much any reputable drive will do.
 
The Firecuda's could be a shout. Anyone know what the failure rates are like?

I have a Momentus XT in my Macbook before SSDs became so cheap, and it was really temperamental.
 
Ran a Momentus XT hybrid SSHD in my mid 2012 Macbook for 5 years with zero issues. Maybe I lucked out but it booted fast, was quiet and the performance was far better than the stock drive the Mac came with.
 
I also ran a Momentus XT hybrid SSHD in my Mac Mini for years as well with no issue. It performed a lot closer to a hard drive than it did to an SSD though.
 
MVMNT said:
The Firecuda's could be a shout. Anyone know what the failure rates are like?
Click to expand...

I had a Seagate SSHD 1TB 3.5" Hybrid drive for 6 years before I replaced it with an SSD. No issues and it tested faster than a WD Black HDD that I also replaced with an SSD. The WD went in the trash. The Seagate is in my closet.

Lou
 
MVMNT said:
The Firecuda's could be a shout. Anyone know what the failure rates are like?
Click to expand...

I believe their failure rate should be quite low. Haven't heard any wide spread issue of these SSHDs. I have few 2TB SSHD. So far so good.

But I have one failed before. However, I must emphasis that SSHD is NOT using on the computer, but in a Xbox ONE. I re-partitioned and formatted it many many times (in macOS, Linux, Windows, and Xbox) to get the format right and make it 100% compatible in Xbox ONE. End up it failed in very short period of time.

Not sure what the actual problem is. Never found out if those multiple re-partition causing issues, or just bad luck. BTW, contacted Seagate, they suggested me to run their diagnostic tool. Confirmed real failure, and they give me a replacement straight away.

And I only need to partition and format once on the replacement SSHD to make it work flawlessly on Xbox ONE. Since then, it's working flawlessly until now.

Anyway, SSHD won't show significant improvement over HDD on regular benchmarks. But in real world, you can expect something like this.
Seagate-FireCuda-2TB-ChartA-BootRacer.png


When you access the same data multiple times, it will cache the regular accessed data into the SSD section. Which makes the loading time comparable to SSD (only for those cached data).

But in general, it's the very very small hurt the HDD performance, as long as those very very small files are all cached into the SSD part. The HDD will able to perform quite well for larger files. There, even only just few GB SSD actually available on the SSHD, that's generally enough for making it shows noticeable improvement.
 
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LorenK said:
My preference is for HGST, formerly Hitachi. I use spinning drives extensively, I have a 24 GB backup in RAID, and HGST drives have proven quite reliable.
Click to expand...

I second HGST drives - have three 3TB HGST drives in mine running nearly 24/7 since 2013 and no issues. 2TB of SSD storage for fast storage.
 
Where are you guys finding HGST drives? I can't find them anywhere, anymore. HGST was acquired by Western Digital and I figured the product lines had been merged.
 
smirk said:
Where are you guys finding HGST drives? I can't find them anywhere, anymore. HGST was acquired by Western Digital and I figured the product lines had been merged.
Click to expand...

the WD gold series, deskstar and helium series are the old HGST drives branded as WD
 
MVMNT said:
So, what would be the recommendations tried and tested by you good folk? The WD Blacks are my immediate go to, but am I missing something better?
Click to expand...
The enterprise systems that I buy come with Seagate and HGST drives - and even with hundreds of drives I only have a few failures per year.

For consumer drives - look at the warranty. If the vendor doesn't give it a five-year warranty, don't buy it.

For my home systems, it's mostly Seagate enterprise and NAS drives (with 5yr warranty). I've purchased a bunch of Seagate EXOS 12TB drives ($375 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1Z4-002P-006N4 ) to migrate some RAID-0 sets with 4TB drives to RAID-6 sets with 12TB drives.

One bit of advice would be to take a step back and realize that those disk drives slots are perhaps the most valuable/expensive things in your computer.

Don't replace a 500 GB RAID-5 set with a 1TB RAID-5 set. Get a pair of 8TB or 12TB drives in RAID-1.
 
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Just get SSDs. I personally can't stand hearing the spinning and clicking noises from HDDs lol. I use them as external backups. The FireWire/USB external enclosures from OWC are pretty nice.
 
MisterAndrew said:
Just get SSDs. I personally can't stand hearing the spinning and clicking noises from HDDs lol. I use them as external backups. The FireWire/USB external enclosures from OWC are pretty nice.
Click to expand...

That is only an option for those with small amounts of data. I agree that the OWC externals are nice - I love my Mercury Qx2.
 
Western Digital HDs (Black) are really good to prevent vibrations on the Mac Pro housing. With all other drives (Seagate, Hitachi) i get a hummmmmm.
 
AidenShaw said:
For active data, definitely most of the time.

Sometimes, however, the application is compute-bound. If the CPU can only process 100 MB/sec - paying five times more for SSDs isn't wise budgeting.

For archiving or seldom-used data, hard to justify SSDs.
Click to expand...

Not hearing the annoying spinning & clicking sounds is the only justification one needs. :)
 
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