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Best Internal Hard Drives?

G

Garnick

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 19, 2012
22
0
After much research I had decided on Hitachi drives for the refurb MacPro. I placed the order a couple of days ago and was notified yesterday that they are all back ordered, with no ETA yet. In some ways that didn't surprise me, since these drives seem to have been very hard hit by the problems in Japan and the lack of production facilities. I'm now starting my research again. I'm looking at Seagate Barracuda vs Western Digital(probably black). Of course there are other brands as well, but these two now have most of my attention if the Hitachis are ruled out. I have had good experiences with the Seagate drives in the past, both external and internal, but I'm not yet making that decision. I'd like to get some feedback from the group concerning this issue if possible.

Any and all opinions will be greatly appreciated. Thank you all.
 
In the recent year or two I've had better luck with WD reliability and real world performance. Especially the models that run cooler. I have three or four that pretty much run 24/7 capturing video. The Hitachi I have is OK, a little noisy. Otherwise six one way, half dozen the other. Perhaps check newegg feedback to identify those specific models that may be troublesome. I don't think you can generalize by brand, you need to look at specific models or model lines.
 
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Western Digital owns Hitachi so I would not expect one to be better than the other. I have had the best luck with my Samsung drives, but realistically they are all about the same and you can get a good or bad drive from anyone.
 
Great timing for this thread.
I was just about to start one like this.
My question would have been to find the fastest Hard Drive out there right now around $100.
After a little research so far I have found the newer Seagate Barracuda Line that was introduced November 2011.
From what I've read, the speeds for this line are almost 200MB/s for sequential transfer speeds.
Is this true? Is there anything faster for the same price?
I have been looking specifically at the 2TB model. MPN:ST2000DM001
Can be found currently for $99 on eBay.
 
We just bought a Barracuda 1tb yesterday at best buy for $98. Only has a one year warranty but the guy at Best Buy said that they seem to be better for reliability over the WD drives. Then some chick that works there chimed in that the WD drives have a 5 year warranty and he kind of snickered and said "that's because they need that"
 
Everyone will give you a different answer. Personally, I like Hitachi best, then Seagate.
 
TwitchOSX said:
We just bought a Barracuda...Only has a one year warranty
Click to expand...

I didn't realize the Barracudas were down to a single year on their warranties now. I just had to RMA 4x 500GB drives that all died within a few months of each other. Purchased them back in 2008 (originally to fill my new Mac Pro 3,1), and thank goodness they still had the 5-year warranty on them from back then.

I personally had always stuck with Seagate because I had no qualms with their hardware and the substantial 5-year warranty. However, you pretty much have to go with enterprise-class drives anymore to get a warranty that long anymore. :(

YMMV, but typically, I hear relatively equal reviews (barring rare bad eggs in production) commending the quality of the Samsung, Western Digital, and Seagate consumer drives these days. I can't speak much to Hitachi, but I can't say I've seen any legitimate rants about their hard drives.

What is the day-to-day usage for this machine going to look like, and do you foresee any desire or need to upgrade these drives in the future (2-3 years down the road)? I usually let those dictate firstly what kind of drive I'm purchasing, and secondly how long of a warranty I would like to aim for.
 
TwitchOSX said:
Did you need anything special for that to work or did your Mac just recognize all 3TB right off the bat?
Click to expand...

I just formatted it's not like in Windows where you need to EFI boot and format in GUID to make drives over 2.2TB readable.
 

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Western Digital always. I have Greens and Blacks and Raptors. If you are using as boot disk no one beats their speed and I/O. I have had 3 failed Samsungs, 2 Failed Seagates, and 1 failed Hitachi. So far 0 failed WD's. External or Internal. I also run 2x500GB FW800 Passports and 750GB MyBook eSATA/FW800 AND an ancient 320GB media monster thing with USB card reader. Anyway even with all my "luck" it is hard to say anyone else would have the same experience.
 
Before submitting to brand-loyalty silliness, go on newegg.com and click "hard drives". Find ones with > 100 ratings and look at the good vs bad ratings numbers breakdown--that'll give you an idea of the failure rate on the individual models. Judge drives by MODEL, not brand. I used to say Seagate was the best out there, now I say it depends.

I recently bought a 3TB seagate over a 3tb WD because it was more reliable. WD makes great 1TB green/black drives. I have 5 green drives with only 1 failure --- the replacement WD sent me has worked great for over a year (so really I've owned 6 drives with 1 failure).

Also look at the warranties. The longer it is, obviously the better. These big drives DO fail, so consider doubling up with a RAID 1 or 10. I have exchanged drives with seagate and WD, both were easy but WD was a little easier (just gave them my CC number, waited for the replacement, printed the label, and dropped the box off at UPS).
 
All my drives are Western Digital - Caviar Blacks for performance, Caviar Green for the low-power, spin up once a day drive.

Anantech gave the Red a decent review, and I'll probably end up buying those if I ever move my storage onto an NAS/file server.
 
I started a thread on the Red, but had no proper feedback. So I rang
Western Digital, and their support staff just read its feature set ... and the person had no idea. I think he was based in New Delhi, or somewhere like that. Not in Sydney, or the USA either.

I have a new 2010 8 core and have for the boot an Intel 520 240 GB drive, and I put in a 2TB Green for Time machine backup. Its extremely quiet. Its seems quite fast too.

I'll see how the factory 1TB handles video.

Because the Green is just for backup, I suspect it will last a long time. And if it fails, its just a back up. As long as it fails without the other drives falling over, it doesn't matter, except for the cost of replacing the drive. And the Green 2TB cost $109 shipped (Australia to my home address), so I was mostly influenced by price. Although it had 6GB/S transfer capabilities, and was said to able to work on slower PCI/ bus as the Mac Pro comes standard with, I just went for $ / GB. 2TB blacks cost a lot more in Australia.

The green hit the sweet $/TB spot for me.
 
Some people have issues running greens in a NAS though, however I have a buddy that's had them running like that for years without issue.

I've got a could of Red's in my NAS just since a few weeks ago, but they've been working well (cool/quiet) and pretty happy with them.

As per what the general theme of this thread, I'm a WD guy also. Have used seagates but only at the enterprise level, though I always got the cheap feeling from them at a consumer level; I'm sure this is more marketing than anything else.

So yeah, WD black. If you don't have an ssd for the os, get one.
 
sngraphics said:
Great timing for this thread.
I was just about to start one like this.
My question would have been to find the fastest Hard Drive out there right now around $100.
After a little research so far I have found the newer Seagate Barracuda Line that was introduced November 2011.
From what I've read, the speeds for this line are almost 200MB/s for sequential transfer speeds.
Is this true? Is there anything faster for the same price?
I have been looking specifically at the 2TB model. MPN:ST2000DM001
Can be found currently for $99 on eBay.
Click to expand...

Those speeds sound a little high to me. That might be the burst speed from ram, but i'd be surprised if it was the continual speed
 
sngraphics said:
Great timing for this thread.
I was just about to start one like this.
My question would have been to find the fastest Hard Drive out there right now around $100.
After a little research so far I have found the newer Seagate Barracuda Line that was introduced November 2011.
From what I've read, the speeds for this line are almost 200MB/s for sequential transfer speeds.
Is this true? Is there anything faster for the same price?
I have been looking specifically at the 2TB model. MPN:ST2000DM001
Can be found currently for $99 on eBay.
Click to expand...

How often do you need or use sequential read? Like almost never except transfer to a drive that can also run at same speed or streams. Otherwise a worthless number. Seagate has always had crap response times and i/o operations. So much more to picking a HDD than it's advertised sequential read/ write speeds. What's it's random scores? Response time scores? Those are better for determining a boot disk. WD takes most of the prizes there. I'd get high sequential disks for RAID0 + stream use but not as boot. Impossible to say "This is the fastest HD".
 
Over the years, I've had far more Westernd Digitals fail on me than Seagates. This week, I had two 2TB WDs fail on me alone. Of course, your milage may vary.
 
brentsg said:
You can still find the 7200RPM 4TB Hitachi drives around and they're great.
Click to expand...

IIRC, these are the one that Digital Lloyd likes.


Over the years, I've probably used all of today's (surviving) brands. Used Seagate for a long time, until I got burned with the .11 revision Barracudas. Just did another RMA on one of these that died at its ~1.5 year point.

Switched to WD after the floods and went with Hitachi 2TBs on this last buy... probably the most important recent lesson was to be careful in buying from NewEgg because it seems that their packaging increases the rate of DOA's...OWC's packaging is clearly superior.


-hh
 
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