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Forum Discussion
4TB drive recommendations
I currently have 2 x ReadyNAS Pro Business edition units each with 6 x 2TB Hitachi drives and they have been rock solid for several years. One of them however started off life with Western Digital 2TB drives which were awful for reliability. I have also seen a similar pattern for general desktop use of hard disks where Hitachi have proven more reliable than both WD and Seagate. Now this may just have been my own experience rather than an endemic situation but I am now looking at buying a bunch of 4TB drives and I am looking for real world experiences to help me chose a make and model.
NetGears official list is very short of 4TB entries, at least in conjunction with their current ReadyNAS model range and in fact lists just three entries
Western Digital RE WD4000FYYZ 4
Western Digital WD Se WD4000F9YZ
Toshiba MG03ACAxxx MG03ACA400
None of which are Hitachi even though NetGear have listed Hitachi 4TB drives against older ReadyNAS models.
Apart from the fact NetGear will only provide support to you if you use officially listed drives, and apart from the fact that the warranty for the above is five years and it seems Hitachi only offer three years, and apart from the fact Hitachi apparently does not have rotational vibration safeguard, does any one have any feedback on 4TB drives they could offer. Even taking these possible advantages in to effect it seems Hitachi are also slightly more expensive. You would think if it was inferior due to a shorter warranty etc. it would be cheaper. I had been presuming this reflected a real world quality premium as per my own good experiences.
As I would be looking to get 12 x 4TB drives (for a new ReadyNAS 3220) I want to get ones that will last as well as my current Hitachi ones have.
I presume it is still too early to look at 5TB or 6TB drives?
NetGears official list is very short of 4TB entries, at least in conjunction with their current ReadyNAS model range and in fact lists just three entries
Western Digital RE WD4000FYYZ 4
Western Digital WD Se WD4000F9YZ
Toshiba MG03ACAxxx MG03ACA400
None of which are Hitachi even though NetGear have listed Hitachi 4TB drives against older ReadyNAS models.
Apart from the fact NetGear will only provide support to you if you use officially listed drives, and apart from the fact that the warranty for the above is five years and it seems Hitachi only offer three years, and apart from the fact Hitachi apparently does not have rotational vibration safeguard, does any one have any feedback on 4TB drives they could offer. Even taking these possible advantages in to effect it seems Hitachi are also slightly more expensive. You would think if it was inferior due to a shorter warranty etc. it would be cheaper. I had been presuming this reflected a real world quality premium as per my own good experiences.
As I would be looking to get 12 x 4TB drives (for a new ReadyNAS 3220) I want to get ones that will last as well as my current Hitachi ones have.
I presume it is still too early to look at 5TB or 6TB drives?
13 Replies
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They find that 25% of their Seagate purchases failed within three years, but only about 5% of the Hitachi or WDC drives fail over the same time period.tony359 wrote: Hi,
Check this out
They do not have any WD 4TB but as your experience tells us, Hitachi are great followed by WDC.
Assuming you have backup protection, that suggests to me that it is worth paying a 20% premium to get a more reliable drive. The numbers for Hitachi and WDC are very close, so I don't think I'd pay any premium to get a Hitachi over a WDC.
Keep in mind that these numbers might not accurately reflect reliability of currently shipping drives, and that specific models or production runs with high failure rates can skew the overall picture.- I've got experience with servers using Seagate and I am not surprised by the results highlighted by the blackblaze guys. I personally like WDC.
+1 - I ran into a bunch of Seagate failures some years ago, and stopped buying them.tony359 wrote: I've got experience with servers using Seagate and I am not surprised by the results highlighted by the blackblaze guys. I personally like WDC.
Though you will find posters here who had exactly the opposite experience, and switched from WDC to Seagate.I ran into a bunch of Seagate failures some years ago, and stopped buying them.
so did the server manufacturers I am dealing with now. They currently all use WDC Enterprise. (I was talking about Enterprise drives BTW)- I'm running 6 4TB ST4000DM000-1F2168 drives with no problems in my Pro 6.
Gets a daily beating with crashplan, time machine backups from multiple computers (around 10) and constant file transfers (lots of little files that end up getting compressed into one rar file to make it easier to backup to crashplan.)
I bought all of my drives for under $120... I just picked up new external hard drives, ripped them out of their external enclosure and now I have a bunch of adapters as well. Much cheaper than the bare-bone 4TB drives as well (why I do not know?) StephenB wrote: +1 - I ran into a bunch of Seagate failures some years ago, and stopped buying them.
Though you will find posters here who had exactly the opposite experience, and switched from WDC to Seagate.
That's why some people use both, one NAS with WD, the other with seagate.
ST4000DM000 are desktop classe models I think, ST4000VN000 are more suited for the job (but the VN are recent disks and may not have been in the HCL when you bought yours), the price difference is made up for by the power consumption and 1 year additional warranty. Not to mention a lower failure rate (less vibrations + less heat = less failures in theory) and less noise. I own 4 of those ST4000VN000 that ran 24/7 for more than a year, no problem so far.
That said each user has its preferences. I believe that both manufacturers do great job, as long as you pick a model adapted to the use you plan to make of it, you should be fine. If you can buy a spare drive, you will feel safer knowing that you can replace a doubtful disk easily and do all the testing while your NAS still have redundancy. Still you will need a backup system anyway.- I know the ST4000DM000 is a desktop drive (economy class drive) but after spending $800 on a 6 bay pro and upgrading it to 8GB's of memory a Q6600 processor I didn't have enough left over to put in enterprise or nas drives...
The good news is most of the drives (actually all but 1) have over 6 months usage on them and they are still all functioning perfectly. They run pretty cool as well. I can get right at 100MBps via FTP or via AFP/SMB.
They are powerful drives and they are mighty fast enough to do what I request of them day in and day out (constantly doing something 24/7.)
I backup everything to crashplan and am going to be getting another readynas pro 6 and install it at either my inlaws house or my parents house and replicate the hell out of it!
I'm glad they are working out well for you. But the ST4000VN000 costs only $20 more in the US, and is a better choice for NAS. It also has a 3 year warranty.ifixidevices wrote: I know the ST4000DM000 is a desktop drive (economy class drive) but after spending $800 on a 6 bay pro and upgrading it to 8GB's of memory a Q6600 processor I didn't have enough left over to put in enterprise or nas drives...
The good news is most of the drives (actually all but 1) have over 6 months usage on them and they are still all functioning perfectly. They run pretty cool as well. I can get right at 100MBps via FTP or via AFP/SMB.
They are powerful drives and they are mighty fast enough to do what I request of them day in and day out (constantly doing something 24/7.)
Always good to have more than one backup. You could co-locate the two NAS though, since crashplan provides disaster recovery.ifixidevices wrote: I backup everything to crashplan and am going to be getting another readynas pro 6 and install it at either my inlaws house or my parents house and replicate the hell out of it!
If the pro-6 is just for backup, then you could also use crashplan's "friend backup" feature - which is free, and includes the same deduplication that crashplan central uses, and is encrypted. The data at the destination is encrypted, not just the link. So if the pro-6 were stolen your data would not be compromised. Just a thought.- with 6 of them in the NAS I believe you already paid the difference in the energy bill. That said anyone has its reasons for buying or not buying the stuff. Just saying that given the price difference of 15€ (145 vs 160) here (which is not the same as the constellation drives that would double it), I personally think (and seagate too) that ST4000VN000 are superior when it comes to NAS. How far superior is another thing, but given 1year warranty and a reduced power consumption, I believe that those two factors just justify to buy them instead of the DM000. SATA tweaking, vibration stuff and things like that I don't actually know what it is worth in real life.
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