Best 3TB 7200rpm bare drives?

[Tom Lowe]

I might be building a new 5-drive RAID 5 array inside a PC box, and I am wondering if any of you have an opinion on which drives are the most reliable/affordable right now?

They MUST BE 3TB in capacity, and MUST be 7200rpm.

I am looking at Hitachi Ultrastar 3TB, but they are crazy expensive. Someone on twitter recommended the Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 3TB 7200 RPM, which is much cheaper.

Any thoughts?

[Bruce Allen]

Tom, I have around 20 Desktar 3TBs (the consumer-grade ones) and none have died yet :)

I think Seagate "consumer-grade" ones will work great too.

All of those "pro enterprise grade" hard drives like Ultrastar etc are twice the price... perhaps if you run 16 of them together the vibrations, seek error recovery time etc will be bad. But for 5 drives, I think it's not going to be a problem.

What would you rather have?

1. 5 "enterprise grade" drives in a RAID
or
2. 5 "consumer grade" drives in a RAID... being backed up periodically to another 5 "consumer drive" RAID.

Personally I prefer option #2 every time...

Well actually I have 2 backup sets, so in your case it would be:
5 consumer drive drives in a RAID, being backed up to two 5-drive RAID sets (one stored offsite, one at the same spot) which I swap every few weeks.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

[Brandon J.F.]

I'm going to be buying quite a few of those Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 drives in the very near future for my RAID array.

[Tony Lorentzen]

There's a reason why industry leaders in storage arrays like CalDigit are using Hitachi drives. They are the best ones around for the price.

[Tony Lorentzen]

Btw - the reason why the Hitachi are crazy expensive right now is because of the flood in Thailand a few months back. I see prices dropping slowly now so they may be on their way back on full production soon.

[Matt Gottshalk]

Hitachi 3tb ENTERPRISE (5 year warranty):

HITACHI ULTRASTAR A7K3000 HUA723030ALA640 3TB INTERNAL HARD DRIVE SATA/600

[Tom.Wong]

stay away from seagates in RAIDs. they tend to dropout pretty frequently in a raid setup, so you'll see some long hangups (transfers just stopping out of nowhere and starting up again) best drives I've seen are the black caviars, but they only make up to 2 tb right not now, second to that are the hitachi's. all internal drives now are still over inflated in price so be prepared to pay a premium. but the deskstars will perform just fine.

the enterprise grade ones will cost you even more.

[M.Halsell]

There's a reason why industry leaders in storage arrays like CalDigit are using Hitachi drives. They are the best ones around for the price.

+1 What Mr. Lorentzen said. Hitachi has been the most reliable for me. Although Seagates tend to run cooler.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

If you're using these in a RAID, the best choice right now for 3TB are the Hitachi Ultrastars. They're expensive because they're the best and only real option for such capacity and use at this time -- and they know it. The Thailand flooding did have a small impact on some HDD manufacturing and models, but it wasn't broad-sweeping like a lot of people seem to think. Prices are correcting, although much slower than most would like... ;(

The Hitachi DeskStar series do work, but they are not made for RAIDs. They are tuned differently and have much longer transaction time-out periods, so you don't get near the level of performance you might want. You could go that route, as many have, but I have personally never been satisfied with them in a RAID configuration.

Seagates are like every other hard drive option out there. Some of their offerings are good, some are not. The worst luck I have ever had with failed drives were with the Seagate 1.5TB drives. Seagate 500GB drives are one series where I installed probably close to 200 of them in various RAIDs and client systems and never lost a single one. So you never know for sure.... I don't have any experience with the Seagate 3TB units, other than one that I have in a USB3 enclosure. It works fine, but I'm not about to order a dozen of them for RAID use.

My current favorite drive to use in RAIDs is the WD Black RE4 2TB 6Gbps 64MB cache model. They're expensive too, but they are an all-around good drive and tuned for RAID performance.

I'm not sure if I would bother with 3TB drives for RAIDs right now, given that there's only one real option and they haven't been on the market long enough to prove themselves. WD has yet to release their 3TB Black-series drives, let alone any RE4 or RAID tuned models.

[Tom Lowe]

I need the 3TB for simple capacity reasons of needing to mirror another array.

I also lost a couple of Seagate 1.5TB drives, so I am also skeptical of Seagate, at the moment.

Thanks for the advice, guys. It looks like 3TB Ultrastars will be the best bet.

[Alan Skinner]

If you're using these in a RAID, the best choice right now for 3TB are the Hitachi Ultrastars. They're expensive because they're the best and only real option for such capacity and use at this time -- and they know it. The Thailand flooding did have a small impact on some HDD manufacturing and models, but it wasn't broad-sweeping like a lot of people seem to think. Prices are correcting, although much slower than most would like... ;(

The Hitachi DeskStar series do work, but they are not made for RAIDs. They are tuned differently and have much longer transaction time-out periods, so you don't get near the level of performance you might want. You could go that route, as many have, but I have personally never been satisfied with them in a RAID configuration.

Seagates are like every other hard drive option out there. Some of their offerings are good, some are not. The worst luck I have ever had with failed drives were with the Seagate 1.5TB drives. Seagate 500GB drives are one series where I installed probably close to 200 of them in various RAIDs and client systems and never lost a single one. So you never know for sure.... I don't have any experience with the Seagate 3TB units, other than one that I have in a USB3 enclosure. It works fine, but I'm not about to order a dozen of them for RAID use.

My current favorite drive to use in RAIDs is the WD Black RE4 2TB 6Gbps 64MB cache model. They're expensive too, but they are an all-around good drive and tuned for RAID performance.

I'm not sure if I would bother with 3TB drives for RAIDs right now, given that there's only one real option and they haven't been on the market long enough to prove themselves. WD has yet to release their 3TB Black-series drives, let alone any RE4 or RAID tuned models.

Hi Jeff,

I have followed your posts on hard drives for years now and I have to tell everyone out there that I believe Jeff is the "go to" guy on RAID setups and the like. Thanks for your very interesting and informative posts!

I also had issues with 1.5 Seagates but have always had pretty good luck other than that bad group of disks that we all know about. Otherwise, I used to use IBM DeskStars until I installed about 100 of them and they started dropping like flies. This was about the time they were getting ready to sell to Hitachi and I think the QC just went out the window.

Never been a big WD fan but the WD Black drives do look to be a good way to go.

[Tom Lowe]

I have had nothing but success with 2TB Black Caviar drives. Just waiting for 3TB now. :)

[PatrickFaith]

It looks like "G-Technology 12TB G-SPEED Q External Hard Drive Array" is using the new Hitachi drives "Hitachi Enterprise-class 7200rpm, 3.5" 3Gbps SATA drives", this looks like something simple for me to have 10 Terabyte chunks (assuming raid 5). Does this look ok for low budget feature work ( I will probably need two or three)?

[Phil Holland]

Like you Tom I had a Hitachi drive bite the dust this year, but that didn't stop me from purchasing 3TB and 2TB Ultrastars recently. Double redundancy at a minimum and if the drive dies under warranty you'll get a brand spanking new one. In 13 years I haven't had more than 3 drives fail me. Still have a few 60GB from ages ago that still work.

I agree that prices are a little "meh" at the moment though.

[Phil Holland]

Oh yeah, and.....

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-07/western-digital-to-buy-hitachi-unit-for-4-3-billion-in-cash-stock-deal.html

For future knowledge for those that didn't see the buyout.

[Paul Ellington]

Just finished a film where I decided on Maxx Digitals with Raid 1 auto backup 6 terabyte is marked as 3 but it's making a copy right away. Amazing stuff tell Ron Amborn or John West I recommended them if you do give them a go it would make me happy so they knew I was pleased.