WD HDD recommendations?

#1

So recently my HDD died, it was a Seagate 3TB drive. I’m opting to go WD this time around and I’m thinking of getting 2x2TB western digital drives instead. I can’t afford the WD blacks drives, I have about maybe £120-£150 able to spend on the drives. I will be rendering to these drives and saving scenes onto them in Maya.

I’ve looked around quickly and I have heard bad things about the WD green or are they okay? I was think maybe the Red drives would be good but they are designed for NAS, would that be a problem? The main thing I want is reliability and able to handle rendering to them, any other are suggestions welcome, thanks.

#2

The drives designed for NAS use have TLER/CCTL/ERC which makes them give up trying to read bad sectors after seven seconds. This is because the data is presumed to be redundant either by a mirror or parity RAID, so the drive gives up relatively quickly and lets the RAID controller or software RAID recover the data from the other disks.

This is good when you’re actually using them in a redundant array of some sort because it doesn’t cause the system to halt when there’s an issue. If you plan to use the disks directly without any redundancy then you may run into situations where the disks gives up trying to read data in bad sectors that you really, really, really need and there’s no other copy.

Desktop hard drives without TLER/CCTL/ERC will try to read a bad sector forever (and sometimes it works and you get your data) because the data is presumed to not have any other mirror or parity redundancy. This is why desktop drives get kicked out of some RAID arrays, because after ten seconds most controllers consider the disk dead and boot it out even though it’s just trying to read a bad sector. Both are either a good or a bad thing depending on how the disks will be used.

#3

I’m just planning to use them both for storage and rendering in Maya with Mental ray to them, using them directly.

So from what you’re saying, the red drives could fail and not be able to recover the data. However, I am concerned about the quality of the green drives, even though I can get 2 of them but people have said they fail easily within a year, unless you’ve heard otherwise? I need the amount of storage because of the data I’ve backed up from the dead drive, is around 1.6 or 1.7 TB. Ideally I would get the black drives but they are over budget and I can’t afford them any time soon, plus I need my computer back asap to do work on it.

I have heard there are the Purple drives but I haven’t found anything on how they perform with rendering to them. They are designed to keep surveillance footage from security cameras.

So what would you recommend?

#4

They are not more or less likely to fail. It means a higher likelihood that a file will be corrupted and be unreadable when part of the file lies in a bad sector. If you do get a “NAS” branded drive for use in a desktop without RAID I’d look into disabling TLER/CCTL/ERC which is a firmware option on some drives (but not all allow the user to control it).

If I were to buy a cheaper hard drive right now this is probably what I’d get. They have a good track record in terms of reliability and they perform pretty good. Also good capacity for the buck.

http://www.newegg.com/global/nz/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149396

#5

People say that because they generally don’t understand how drives work.
On top of what Olson already explained, which is good reason to know whether to pick a desktop drive or a managed storage centric drive, there is also the fact that WD admitted to having tweaked the firmware for early and enthusiastic error response, which means those drives test with errors a lot more frequently than others.
This doesn’t mean they break more, or error more, it means that incompetent users and vanilla OS storage management doesn’t cope all too well with how they respond.

If you plan to simply use them as storage without a raid set up then buy desktop drives.
I have no experience with Toshiba, but have no reason to doubt Olson’s word for it.

More or less any desktop drive that isn’t a hybrid or of the absolute highest density on the market (and recent 2TB drives certainly aren’t) will be more or less within the same safety parameters.
The use you have in mind is some of the lightest use you can make of it anyway.

#6

I bought a WD Green 4TB Drive, and it works pretty darn fine. I only use it for storage though.

#7

WD Greens should suit your needs fine. They are great for storage and they’re energy efficient; however, if you need access the drive a lot, they may not be the best due to their “lack of speed”.

Is there any specific reason you have to get a WD drive? Don’t like Seagate, Hitachi, etc.?

#8

Personally I would point people at hitachi. Their drives tend to top the reliability tests quite consistently.

#9

+1
Absolute quality, but I am not so shore, is Hitatchi HDD department bought by some other, like WD or Seagate?

#10

Sorry guys for not replying sooner, been sorting this all out. It looks like I will be just getting one 2TB WD black drive for the main 3D work storage and rendering to. While getting an additional smaller drive maybe 1TB for non work related stuff on it, which should be enough to transfer all the data that was on the 3TB drive that failed.

I sent my computer along with the failed drive to the local computer engineer and they were able to recover the data but I don’t know what they recovered yet.

I didn’t want to go with Seagate again because the 3TB drive was a Seagate that only failed after one and a half years since I got it. Also the 3TB was the replacement for a 2TB Seagate prior, which had a SMART error. So from my experience, Seagate hasn’t been the best of experiences and I don’t really want to go with it again a 3rd time.

I haven’t had any experience with Hitachi, nor have I researched them because Seagate and WD were the market leaders. There’s a lot of good reviews for the WD black drives, so hopefully things will work out. Thanks again for all your replies.

#11

AFAIK, and this is off the top of my head so you might want to fact check the fine details:
Hitachi hasn’t produced exclusive components for their drives for a couple years now.

Their HDD division is mostly Western Digital with some assets divested to Toshiba (Hitachi owns a good part of WD in exchange). All their 2.5 and SSD are WD, and their 3.5" are largely Toshiba… which happens to have WD make them for them anyway (while Toshiba still does its own 2.5 and has for quite a while, as they entered that market from the laptop end of things).
Pretty F-ed up actually.

Their control electronics used to be re-branded Matsushita (don’t know if it’s still the case as that was due for dismissal or renewal Q4 2013 I believe), and their manufacturing has moved to WD.

WD and Seagate have almost a duopoly on magnetosensitive parts, with Toshiba having entered actual magnetic printing only a year or two ago and not covering their entire stock.
Electronics are a bit wider, but still largely coming from one of three manufacturers

Basically the only reason you might want to buy Hitachi is to pay a smidge less for a Western Digital but have a much less safe warranty and a higher chance or non-replacement, whereas WD is known to be very customer friendly with straight replacements.

There isn’t a real point to buying Hitachi over WD or Toshiba, really, any of their drives will be using either set of parts.

#12

Backblaze updated their blog post about drive failure rates which might be of interest.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

The 3 TB models from Seagate and Western Digital didn’t do so good. According to their numbers the 4 TB Seagate (ST4000DM000) drives are doing good. I can say the same, there are 72 of them in use on the file servers here and so far there hasn’t been a single problem and they’ve been up for a a year now.

Looks like the Hitachi drives are still the most reliable at least in their data center. Unfortunately they are more expensive at the 4 TB capacity.

#13

Thanks Olson, I see the 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 that I had, had an annual failure of 15.7% out of 3846 drives and second highest drive failure of all the drives.

I guess I lost confidence in Seagate for a reason and best not go with them in the future. However they have some good recovery software though, but not very comforting if your drive fails.