Any Decent 2TB Drives Out There?

[jdmba]

I have been trying to buy a 2TB hard drive for quite some time. My system is basically an installed hard drive with 3 Kingwin pull-out chassis for data drives (such as media/photos/mp3s, emulators, backups, etc). My goal is to retire some of the data drives with higher capacity drives (keeping the old drives as a sort of snapshot in time backup; since you can't really backup 1TB of data economically).

BUT ... there are no 2TB drives on NewEgg which don't predominanatly say "CONS: Drive was DOA in 2 weeks; ran very hot". Certainly the WD2TB drives all suffer from this, and the Samsung isn't doing much better.

Anyone have any insight on a 2TB drive that isn't suffering from severe quality control but isn't 5200RPM?

Thanks!

 

[sminlal]

> since you can't really backup 1TB of data economically
With large drives selling for well under $50/TB I'd disagree with this statement.

I'm very happy with my 2TB WD Green drives, but it sounds like they don't meet your criteria...

 

[nforce4max]

AVOID green edition drives and similarly priced Seagate drives of the same capacity. Samsung has some decent drives. I bought Hatichi this time around after buying two WD blues. For WD it is either Blue or Black or it is nothing. RE edition drives are ok but far from perfect. Always read through the reviews as you have done but personally Green edition drives are crap.

 

[jdmba]

Unfortunately, I am reading the reviews. There are, by my reading, NO acceptable 1.5TB or 2TB drives. I am aware of Green, but even THOSE have awful reviews. Almost every 2TB WD Black review on Newegg is about DOA. While I do realize that people with DOA are more likely to post than those without problems, the state of mechanical HD's is dire; and I can't for the life of me make the purchase. As we all know, its not the $69, its the resulting data loss.

I suspect I must continue to not buy; which stinks.

 

[nforce4max]

Well I have had a great deal of luck with 320gb class drives. Two sata and one 1de. One of them has about 16k hours of use and no problems thus far. 640gb blues are solid as I got over 7k hours on mine.

 

[xomoc]

I have a WD Elements 2 TB, got it from Newegg, and I have no problems with it. I had a WD Elements 1 TB before it and it's on the way out after years of use.

But I would HIGHLY recommend the WD Elements 2 TB. No useless software, just plug it in and fill'er up

 

[sminlal]

Green edition drives are crap.

Care to elaborate on why you have that opinion? They are slower, but in a lot of applications (bulk storage, backup, PVRs etc) they work just fine. They're quieter, run a lot cooler, and cost less. If it's not because of performance then I'm really at a loss as to why you'd think they're "crap"...

 

[nforce4max]

Care to elaborate on why you have that opinion? They are slower, but in a lot of applications (bulk storage, backup, PVRs etc) they work just fine. They're quieter, run a lot cooler, and cost less. If it's not because of performance then I'm really at a loss as to why you'd think they're "crap"...

Head pre amp failure, poor quality media vs other drives from WD. Short life span vs other drives and high doa rate. A drive isn't of much use to me if it doesn't last long enough to be upgraded.

 

[sminlal]

Head pre amp failure, poor quality media vs other drives from WD. Short life span vs other drives and high doa rate.

Where does this info come from?

 

[nforce4max]

Where does this info come from?

Any basic knowledge of drives and reading reviews online will tell you that -_-

 

[sminlal]

Ah, so anecdotal evidence then. Since people with failures are far more motivated to report issues than people without them, that's essentially useless as a basis for buying decisions, IMHO.

Much more useful are surveys that show failure rates of ALL drives in some population. These are notoriously hard to come by, but here's one that I found:

http://www.thinq.co.uk/2010/12/9/pc-component-failure-rates-documented/

This shows the WD Blacks as having the highest failure rate of all 2TB drives, and the WD Greens as having the lowest.

Unless you can come up with something a little more convincing, I'll continue to recommend the Green drives, which I've been very pleased with.

 

[warezme]

buy any drive you can afford, just as long as it isn't a Seagate brand that's my advice

 

[OldAndInTheWay]

I purchased 8 WD20EVDS drives (2TB) in Nov 2010, and they've been in a Promise M310p device since then, and have seen light use as a disk based backup unit.

So far, three have failed--two in the last week.

Luckily it was in RAID 5 configuration--7 drives in the array plus a spare.

This morning I received the replacement for the second drive failure, and found that while waiting for that RMA to return, another one had gone, so I was without the spare, and one drive in the array was now
dead, so any more failures and my array would be history.

I made the replacement a global spare, and immediately began a rebuild. During the rebuild it ran into 5 bad sectors on yet another drive, but has continued. This atheist is praying the rebuild finishes without any more
events. (I have already created an RMA and requested advance replacement.)

WD drives have been much better than Seagates for me in the last few years, but this is a horrific failure rate--three out of ten, and one having some bad sector problems. I wonder how many more of these will fail?

Given that it's almost two years since the initial batch, perhaps the replacement drives will be improved somehow.