I have 2 external HDD enclosures that I want to outfit with 2TB drives. The drives connect to my PC via eSATA, but also have USB 2.0. The purpose of one drive is to store all my media that I will access via my apple tv through my network to play movies on various TV's and the other drive is for backup. I have been looking at the Seagate Barracuda, but it only has a 2 year warranty which is making me a bit wary. My older 500GB Barracuda drives came with at 5 year warranty and are rock stars. The Hitachi drives are considerably more expensive but come with 3 and 5 year warranties. Which drives are best in reliability and what is recommended for what I am using them for?
Which 2TB Hard Drive?
- Thread starter dpriest
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ModernWarfare
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- Jan 26, 2014
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i would go for a western digital but if you only have those two choices the hitachi is the better choice as seagate has a high failure rate.
I have two Seagate drives( 500GB and 2TB) and have had no problems. However, if you want longer warranties and also HDDs suitable for your purpose, could I suggest the new Western Digital Red HDDs. These are built for NAS boxes etc, and seem to be very reliable, if somewhat more expensive.
The warranty is generally a good indicator of failure rates in the short term, since the manufacturers aren't going to set aside more than what they expect for warranty replacement.
That being said, the difference in reliability won't make up the cost of replacement on average in most cases.
The difference may be 2-3% annually, which means a 20-30% cost difference is what you should consider the break-even point.
Of course you'll still need to make robust backups because all drives can fail.
I never considered the WD Black even though it comes with a 5 year warranty. In terms of Western digital, I heard never to go with the red or green from other threads in Tom's Hardware forums. I am very good about backing up data, as I add media to one drive, I copy it to the other drive right away. Still not sure what to do.
There is no objective experimental data on the real world failure rates of consumer hard drives in consumer environments.
Nobody can give you anything but anecdotal evidence of what they experienced.
What I can tell you for certain is that manufacturers won't lose money beyond what they allocate to warranty replacement, so the warranty period is by far the best indicator of reliability.
From my personal experience Seagate drives are marginally less reliable overall, while WD drives are middle of the road.
It may be that people on Tom's were advising against the WD Red in terms of performance as a main HDD because of the 'slow' rotational speed (5400) as opposed to the WD black, which is much quicker.(Help out here folks if I've got this wrong) However for what you need, the Red may be ideal as it is designed for long term and constant use. See here:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/red-wd20efrx-wd30efrx-nas,review-32490-9.html
The Warranty period makes sense to me too. The days of the seagate Barracuda 5 year warranty are long over. The WD 5 year warranty is sexy, I must admit, but it is also a $80 price difference. There is not too much talk these days about the Hitachi drives. Any thoughts on these?
ModernWarfare
Splendid
- Jan 26, 2014
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Hard to say with Hitachi. I've seen fewer of them in for recovery, but they are also a smaller part of the market and are most often inside of Laptops/Servers which have other issues that can skew reliability numbers.
My impression is that they are marginally more reliable than WD.
On a separate note, I also wanted to be able to mirror the data on these external drives. Can I setup a software RAID configuration, or is there other means to do this? I wasn't sure what forum to post this question in, so I am just putting this out here. Again, both drives are connected via eSATA, and the drives are in an OWC (Other World Computing) external enclosure. I am running Windows 7 64 bit.
you should be able to create a software RAID1 Volume without issues in drive manager. It's hard to say how the the eSATA enclosure is going to impact performance, though.
I would expect some drop in performance over a single drive but not significant enough to effect video playback.
I am going to go with the WD Black drives. What is a RAID1 and how do I set it up with the drives? I am very much a newbie to the whole RAID/data mirroring topic. These external enclosures have USB 2.0 as well as eSATA, but no USB 3.0 because they are older. I wanted to save $$ and use these enclosures instead of buying newer ones and figured eSATA would suffice Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.
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