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Quietest, Good Performance HDs for Mac Pro?

WardC

WardC

macrumors 68030
Original poster
Oct 17, 2007
2,727
215
Fort Worth, TX
I am thinking about adding two new Hard Drives to my Mac Pro, probably 2TB drives. I am looking for quiet performing drives with low failure rate and good performance. I have two Seagates, which have been very quiet and good performing drives, but one has just failed, after about 2 years. I did see some users comment on this board that the Seagate drives are prone to quick failures, but it took this happening for me to realize this.

I am thinking about Western Digital, but I might go with Hitachi if they make a quiet drive. The factory drive in my hex-core is a Hitachi and it is NOT quiet, it is very loud.

Any recommendations or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!
 
WardC said:
I am thinking about adding two new Hard Drives to my Mac Pro, probably 2TB drives. I am looking for quiet performing drives with low failure rate and good performance. I have two Seagates, which have been very quiet and good performing drives, but one has just failed, after about 2 years. I did see some users comment on this board that the Seagate drives are prone to quick failures, but it took this happening for me to realize this.

I am thinking about Western Digital, but I might go with Hitachi if they make a quiet drive. The factory drive in my hex-core is a Hitachi and it is NOT quiet, it is very loud.

Any recommendations or advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Click to expand...

You got Hitachi? I thought all 2010's got WD Caviar Blacks?
WD are best for boot. Samsung best for streams and high bandwidth operations. With high performance generally comes noise as well. imo WD make the best HDD's. My 2TB Green is super silent but it is also very slow on response times. 120MB/s r/w though once it get's going. I am not a fan of Hitachi 3.5" drives. Just kind of medium all around. I am sure others will have their own opinions.
 
I have 4x3tb 7200 RPM Hitachi's (the original 1TB WD was eventually replace for a drive with more space) in the Mac Pro I use at work and I'm pretty happy with them. I can't hear anything over the fans and everything seems as fast as advertised.
 
My 2010 Mac Pro came with a Hitachi 2TB BTO. I have since added 2+3+4TB Seagate Barracuda XT 7,200 RPM 64MB Cache. They are very nice and quiet as well.
 
My WD Caviar black has developed bad sectors after 3 months...but that was the 1TB version and possibly a bad batch. Apparently the 2TB version has 9% failure rate.
 
I have 3 x Hitachi 7200 rpm 1TB's and when they fire up they are like hoovers in the room!, but they are reliable, and never miss a beat.

I recently put in a 2TB WD Green, for my Time Machine Back Up drive, and yeah at 5400rpm its perfect for TM, but its so so quiet, its a pleasure.

WD appear to make very very good drives. See if they make a 10000rpm one, if your budget or capacity dictate a spinning platter, you will benefit with a higher rpm.

However, do not be afraid to go ssd. They are not going to drop price anytime soon, but they don't make a sound, they are always mounted and ready to go. Or better still go for a pci ssd card.
 
Noisy Drives

I just bought a new CTO MP server with 3 2TB Hitachi drives. I hate them. They are the noisiest drives I have heard in years. When reading and writing they make my Mac sound like a Tin Lizzie. :eek:

I want my old Seagates back. They were very quiet....
 
I've had a couple of the Hitachi 2 TB drives (HDS723020BLA642) in my Mac Pro, for a couple of years. They've been quiet and reliable.

Recently I moved them to my NAS and replaced them with the Seagate 3 TB drives (ST3000DM001) which have also been good drives, but I've only been using them for a couple of months.

I'm with miles01110 -- I've had (a few) failures with several manufacturers, so I don't think one is better than any other. I do think that certain models from certain manufacturers can be problematical. The 1.5 TB Seagates of a few years ago comes to mind, and I'm sure there are others.
 
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Thanks so much everyone for your responses...

I am leaning towards getting a couple of the 3TB Seagates at the moment. I have been impressed with my Seagate drives and their ultra-low noise level. The stock Hitachi 1TB on my Mac Pro is extremely noisy, and I often unmount the drive to keep if from spinning up, because I can't stand the noise. I am thinking about keeping my remaining working 1TB Seagate, getting two of the 3TB Seagate drives as a RAID-0 configuration, and keeping my 120GB Mercury Pro Extreme SSD as my boot/apps disk.

I even considered getting a couple Intel 320 Series 600GB SSDs and setting up a RAID with those. If I did that, I would buy the drives at auction OEM on eBay for the best deal...probably could get them around $550 a piece. But, I'm not sure if I want to shell out $1000+ for just a little over 1TB of space. The hard drive RAID is still a fast setup, much more space, but....has moving parts and more prone to failure.

If my Mac Pro had Thunderbolt, I would just get one of those LaCie 2Big 6TB disks to use as an external....it could hook to my iMac and to MacBooks as well....but I still like having internal storage on the Mac Pro, and lots of it. I'll probably end up going with the hard disks over SSD due to price/GB.

The other drive I considered was the 3TB WD Caviar Green. Does anybody know the comparison between the Seagate 3TB and the Caviar Green 3TB? They both look like good drives at about the same price. I have heard the noise from a Caviar Black before and I didn't like it, I like the quiet sound of my Seagates purring better. I don't like the cluck-cluck-cluck sound...purring is always better.:)
 
Remember to factor in rotational speed -- whatever's appropriate for your use.

The Seagates I referred to are 7200 rpm drives, and I don't think the Caviar Green's "IntelliPower" is.

I have a couple of the Seagate 5900 rpm drives and use them as TM drives. But I wouldn't want to use a drive in that rpm range as a data drive.
 
I've loved all the Seagates and Hitachies I have owned. They have all been fast, cool and quiet nor have they failed. WDs have been mediocre at best. All Samsungs and Toshibas have had run very hot (too hot to touch), are noisy and have failed.
 
These Seagates have been great drives...I had them in RAID-0 for the most time...Really operated well and were very quiet and not hot at all. Handled high data transfers read/write very well. I had moved my Mac Pro to my office downtown for a few months and left the drives idle most of the time, and was starting up/shutting down my machine more often at the beginning/end of workdays... I looked in Disk Utility to reformat the drives and noticed it said one of the Seagates was "Failing" in Red Font. So after I wiped the disk, I pulled it from the machine. I've got one Seagate in here now which I am still using, but I guess the drive's "Failing" status might be expected because it's been about 2 years. Again, it had not failed or acted up in any way....Disk Utility just reported the disk status as "Failing" so I took them out of RAID, reformatted them, and pulled the failing drive. I don't know if the drive is fine, or if it might have bad blocks. I am guessing that is the case, possibly some bad blocks.

Anyways, I am probably going to get the disks next week, unless I decide to go the SSD route. Still haven't decided yet. Leaning towards HD because of the space, and I already have an SSD as my boot disk. I still think Seagates are great drives, had them in my last two Mac Pros as well without issues or drive failures....very quiet and fast drives. I just needed a little advice on the current state of the hard disk market. Thanks!
 
Well, I decided on the 3TB Seagates, I went ahead and ordered two of them from OWC today. I have been very pleased with my other Seagate disks; both the performance and the acoustics (sound) are very good on their drives. These are the 7200rpm Barracuda drives I ordered with the 64MB cache. OWC is running a special on these drives for $173.99 which I thought was a good deal. I'm not sure if I am going to RAID the drives together as a stripe, or just use them separately in my Mac Pro as JBOD config...they are good performing drives just by themselves. If I were to use as a boot volume I would probably want to RAID them for performance.

Thanks everyone for your help and recommendations. Everything posted here was very helpful to me in making my decision on my drive purchase. I am sure there are other good drives, but these will suit my needs fine.

Also, I decided against external because I think I would get far better performance out of Internal HDs than an external FW800 drive. If the Mac Pro had Thunderbolt on-board, that might be different. In the future, external solutions will be as good or maybe faster than internal ones, once Mac Pro gets Thunderbolt. 6-disk RAID solutions are just one of these examples....there will be expensive SSD RAID Thunderbolt options in the future as well.

6 Terabytes is more than enough for me, but it will future-proof my Mac Pro for the time being. Next upgrade = more RAM!
 
Seagate drives arrived today -- stoked and about to install them!! Let's hope they are 100% OK and work. I will update later after I install.
 
WardC said:
These Seagates have been great drives...I had them in RAID-0 for the most time...Really operated well and were very quiet and not hot at all. Handled high data transfers read/write very well. I had moved my Mac Pro to my office downtown for a few months and left the drives idle most of the time, and was starting up/shutting down my machine more often at the beginning/end of workdays... I looked in Disk Utility to reformat the drives and noticed it said one of the Seagates was "Failing" in Red Font. So after I wiped the disk, I pulled it from the machine. I've got one Seagate in here now which I am still using, but I guess the drive's "Failing" status might be expected because it's been about 2 years. Again, it had not failed or acted up in any way....Disk Utility just reported the disk status as "Failing" so I took them out of RAID, reformatted them, and pulled the failing drive. I don't know if the drive is fine, or if it might have bad blocks. I am guessing that is the case, possibly some bad blocks.!
Click to expand...

I have a similar set up and wanted to ask this: how often should a striped raid set up be changed? My 2 x 1.5gb raid's been going for two years now in my FCP editing set up. I've just had a WD Green caviar go down (first drive ever to fail on me!) in another bay so am re-checking my set up. Apparently the Caviar drive's pcb went and I'm quoted a $1000 to replace it to get the data off.
 
AfterglowMP said:
I have a similar set up and wanted to ask this: how often should a striped raid set up be changed? My 2 x 1.5gb raid's been going for two years now in my FCP editing set up. I've just had a WD Green caviar go down (first drive ever to fail on me!) in another bay so am re-checking my set up. Apparently the Caviar drive's pcb went and I'm quoted a $1000 to replace it to get the data off.
Click to expand...

I'll probably sound like a broken record here, but data that's important to you should always be backed up somewhere.

Regarding your striped RAID setup: I'd suggest periodic manual backups to a different drive at the very least or perhaps run a large drive as a Time Machine disk. Striped RAID offers no redundancy and one failed drive will destroy the data on the set.
 
I'm with Chunky on this one, my GF's son lost his entire iTunes collection because he was too lazy to back up his external storage. When questioned he said the back up drive I had provided was too noisy and he didn't have a spare port on his MBP. The port excuse was BS as he could have daisy chained the drives using the FireWire ports or gone out and bought a USB 2.0 hub. Taking the noise excuse on board I prefer SSD or Seagate drives, my ultimate fave mechanical HDD was Maxstor but Seagate ate them.
The first rule of computing is: Backup, backup, backup.
Note how many times...
 
miles01110 said:
No platter-based hard drive is any more or less reliable than any other. Buy the one with the best warranty for your budget and capacity requirements.
Click to expand...

Good advice. If warranties matters to you, compare them before you make a decision.

I've been researching which drives to use in either a RAID 0 or RAID 6 setup and my drive of choice was a Seagate Constellation ES for certain options because of the price point for 1TB capacity, max sustained mb/s, and the fact that the ES has a 5-year warranty.

But, their Constellation ES.2 line has only a 3-year warranty depending on the ship date, as shown in the warranty disclaimer on their ES.2 spec sheet:

"Nearline products shipped on or after December 31, 2011, have a 3-year limited warranty. Nearline products shipped before December 31, 2011, have a 5-year limited warranty."

The ES spec sheet has no such disclaimer. So even though it is the predecessor to the ES.2, it seems the warranty for the ES is better than the ES.2 depending on when the ES.2 was shipped (or maybe they REALLY mean "where it was manufactured" :)).

Also, the Seagate spec sheets for the ES and ES.2, and the Western Digital RE4 spec sheet, use the term "Limited Warranty", whereas the spec sheets for the Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000, 7K3000 and 7K4000 use the term "Warranty".

I wonder if that's just semantics, or if there is something intentional in the use of the different wording (i.e. is it just understood that Warranty means limited and therefore it didn't matter to Hitachi to *say* "Limited", or is it that Hitachi has a more comprehensive warranty than Seagate and Western Digital?).

Hmmm...
 
Re back up, the Green Caviar drive mentioned above that went down was an intermediary drive and everything - or almost everything except for a few bits and pieces - were backed up. I was curious to check on the bits and pieces, however, hence the $1000 quote (to replace the PCB and make it mountable).

Same with my Raid set up, originals on back up drives on shelves.

So, I repeat, does anyone have any pointers on changing or reformatting the Raid drive after 2 years of hard labour? It's probably had 5-6 times the amount of data go and off it (ie 12-18tb of media have moved through the 3tb of space).

Wondering about replacing the drives with the supposedly harder-working Seagate XT drives.
 
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