Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Looking for internal drive recommendation

shmerls

shmerls

macrumors member
Original poster
Apr 9, 2009
42
0
white plains
If we're not allowed to request product recommendations, apologies. If OK...

I need a new main HDD (bay1) and duplicate to make mirror backups (bay2). I'm thinking Seagate Enterprise Capacity, 7200 rpm, 5 yr warranty, ST300NM0033 - because per Seagate they are Biz quality, more rugged, quiet with less vibration than typical home models like their Barracuda, hence the 5 yr warranty.

I'm a home single user but leave my box on 24/7, so I love less vibration (all my 4 bays are filled), longer run time design. I don't Need the more expensive NAS raid version.

It seems ideal for reliability and 24/7 use and a step up from the Barracudas I've used for years, which then had 5 yr warranties, but are now only 3 years.

Can anyone recommend a better, more rugged, reliable, designed for 24/7 use, with 5 yr warranty, SATA internal drive?

THANKS!
 
shmerls said:
It seems ideal for reliability and 24/7 use and a step up from the Barracudas I've used for years, which then had 5 yr warranties, but are now only 3 years.

Can anyone recommend a better, more rugged, reliable, designed for 24/7 use, with 5 yr warranty, SATA internal drive?

THANKS!
Click to expand...

Why not just get an SSD? Samsung 850 EVO or something similar?

Certainly rugged, reliable, and as they have lifetime read/writes of over 2 petabytes I'd wager they're great for 24/7 use! Increased performance, not affected by drops, and some SSDs have 10 years' warranty rather than 5.

EDIT: Sorry, misread your post. SSD isn't right for your usage. Please ignore the above :)
 
I also like my drives silent, unfortunately there's no way of knowing if a hard drive is silent or not prior to buying it. Thorough hard drive reviews are becoming scarce as nobody cares anymore.

Currently I have a pair of WD Green 2TB (WD20EARS -5400rpm) and a pair of Seagate Barracuda 3TB (ST3000DM001 - 7200rpm). Both are consumer drives and not meant to be used 24/7, I don't have much experience with 24/7 drives but I always like to take part in those drive noise discussions.

I've bought the WD because these were the cheapest of the highest capacity available at that time. I was very surprised with how silent these drives are. There is absolutely no way of telling if the drives are spinning or not, they are absolutely silent. At that time I didn't think a hard drive could achieve that level of silence and while that was unexpected I was very pleased with it.

On my next purchase I had the choice between the WD Green 3TB and the Seagate Barracuda 3TB. Both were advertised (one of them falsely) as economical/silent drives while the Seagate leaned more towards performance. In fact it was the fastest consumer hard drive at that time and every review described it as "quiet". The only reliable source of information I found was on silentpcreview, on which you could tell that it was slightly noisier than my previous drives (too bad they don't test new drives anymore). Oh my what a deception when I turned them on. When you've gotten used to silence there's no way going back. While it's nothing like a 90's or early 2000's hard drive, they're still annoyingly noisy, with both platter vibration and head seeking noise. They also turned out to be the most unreliable drives recently made although mine are still working.

In my opinion if noise is your priority, you should stick with 5400rpm drives. In those cheese-graters the path between the drive and your ears is straight and unobstructed. While hard drive performance was essential prior to the SSD era, it's now pretty pointless unless you have specific needs (which you may have). Once you've tried an SSD you can't feel much of a difference between a basic hard drive and a fast one. They're both painfully slow on random access and have both decent but not great sequential throughput. I couldn't feel the difference between the stock 640GB WD Black in my MP and the pair of 3TB Seagate drives in RAID0 as a boot drive (this was before my first SSD). Sequential throughput was much better though.

My point is you should choose between silence and performance. If you make a tradeoff in between those aspects you might be deceived by both. It's hard to speak about reliability as the only true metric is the actual failure rate over time, which you never get on current generation drives.

I'd also be interested to know if anybody recently bought a high capacity hard drive that turned out to be absolutely silent.
 
Last edited:
Those seagate server drives are great I had one really liked it but don't get a used one from amazon mine went belly up in a year
 
id look at WD red drives or WD black drives, WD black are my preferred drives.
 
  • Like
Reactions: jbarley
orph said:
id look at WD red drives or WD black drives, WD black are my preferred drives.
Click to expand...

Orph, could you explain the diff between WD Red and Black? And if you know, how they compare with Seagate Enterprise Capacity drives? I always wondered about WD drives, but somehow years ago got into owning Seagates and when the Baracudas had 5 yr warranties, they lasted about 4 years so I kept getting new replacements almost free other than shipping so I ended up with each Seagate drive for 8 to 9 years and got to know Seagate pretty well trouble shooting with their tech support and customer service when replacing them. I don't know WD at all. They seem great though, reputation wise.

Re noise which seems related to vibration, Seagate had a problem with their 1TB drives from Thailand. Vibrated and noisy. They replaced a few of mine because of this, but the issues persisted and they finally replaced the 1TB with 1.5 TB drives, and they were the smoothest most quiet drives I had ever had! But I've filled them to 1.3TB and thus looking at 3 or 4TB replacements. The 4TB is only $20 more than the 3TB at Amazon!

But if the WDs are better meaning: quieter, less vibration, lasting longer, at least 5 year warranty, I'd definitely check them out.
 
green v red https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Green-vs-Red-Hard-Drives-602/

wd black v wd re drives https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Black-vs-RE-Hard-Drives-601/

and a look at all WD drives https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/

im not shore what warranty the reds have, think it's 3 years & the blacks have 5 years (depends where you live)

not shore about nose, i never relay notice it to much over my macpro fans & i run my os from a SSD so most the time there sleeping.
WD reds are for raid setups but iv had no problem with it as a single drive
WD black are near the top of consumer drives for speed and life span
greens have been reported as being to aggressive with the head parking which some have a problem with
wd blue have a good name but only 1 year warranty

iv got 2x 1tb black drives and 1 2tb red + 1 2tb blue in my system they all seem fine (ssd for osx) they have all lasted fine so far, had 2x 1tb wd greens in my G5.

iv not had any real problems with WD so iv just kind of stuck with them, but im not an expert on HD's so ~_~ take it with a pinch of salt

i dont know a lot about drives but http://www.storagereview.com/ is worth a look


ps almost all my drives are WD the 4 in my macpro listed, 2 WD green in my G5 & 11 external WD drives since 2008 iv only had one die, an external one (i think the externals are mostly greens not shore tho)
pps + 1 wd black i
 
Last edited:
You're probably over thinking this. I have a number of systems that run 24 / 7 and have done so for years. Never a hiccup with the hard drives in them. Given the diverse nature of the systems I suspect they have all kinds of different drives.

As for warranty lengths I suspect it has more to do with accounting than faith in the drives. Manufacturers have to carry a certain amount of money on their books to cover warranty work. Lowering the warranty time means they have to carry less money. Think of it this way: You write a check to someone and, months later, it still hasn't been cashed. What do you do? Do you return the funds to your available balance? That could be a mistake as the person could cash it in the future. By putting a time limit on it you know you can eventually return those funds to your available balance when the time expires. Would you prefer to wait three years or five?

My recommendation is to consider capacity, noise, vibration, etc more than reliability. All manufactures make reliable drives.
 
ah yes there's a post here somewhere where someone pulled out a white paper on drive life from a dater center, i think most drives had about the same lifespan & wide tempter changes where the biggest lifespan danger.
 
orph said:
green v red https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Green-vs-Red-Hard-Drives-602/

wd black v wd re drives https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Western-Digital-Black-vs-RE-Hard-Drives-601/

and a look at all WD drives https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/ i
Click to expand...

Orph, great reply and amazing articles. Thank you! I feel much more aware about WD and more so, WD RE now. I posted to Matt to see if I could get his thoughts on WD RE vs Seagate Enterprise Capacity, but have to assume that if he liked any other brand/model better than WD, he'd have mentioned it in his in depth analyses.

I really need to consider WD RE vs Seagate's Enterprise now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back