Hard Drive Selection - Reliability, Performance, Cost

Folks - Can I know which one from below is Fastest or Latest ? I would prefer reliable/Signal Integrity if there is debate on that between the two below.

(1) one says SATA and (2) says SSHD

(1) :

(2) :

I would stay away from seagate…
Also I would try and go for an SSD if you can…

If you cant, Than try another brand cause Seagate pukes hdd like they have some sort of disease…
Hitachi or HGST, Maybe WD Black. The less platters the denser and the better.

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I see!. thanks for the tip! SSD would be expensive.

If I m going external storage, does the Seagate “no” recommendation still holds?

What, for music storage? That’s overkill and an unnecessary expense surely, unless you absolutely need silent operation?

Spinning drives sound better anyways. It’s an analog thing…you know I just like the tactile experience, that whirring sound when it boots up. (ducks) :stuck_out_tongue:

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Of the two drives you show, the FireCuda (ST2000LX001) appears to be the better choice.
“Flash-accelerated technology delivers up to 5x faster load times for nonstop performance, play and productivity compared to standard HDDs”.
It also has a 5 year warranty, the other drive is 2 years.
A 2TB Samsung SSD is $699.
I’ll use my $80 Seagate and backup my data…

For what ever reason I assume this was going to be for internal use. At any rate my music storage is SSD 1TB external for the reason of avoiding mechanical spinning disks and failures… That experience may vary from user to user, mine has been a bad one even for reads… A disk has to spinning no matter what…
And I can see from a mile away the argument of “Disk is so cheap now days blah blah blah…” I just like to set it and forget it… :hugging:

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Hybrid drives can be a pain!
Regarding price… Can’t argue with that :wink:

Indeed. The biggest issue has to do with the size of the cache and how the drive’s firmware loads it and writes through it. These drives were designed for the typical workload of a desktop computer and that’s usually high amounts of random I/O with very small transaction sizes. In this case the file blocks in use are small and it’s possible to load a large portion of the running system into the cache.

Music files are different as they tend to be larger and are almost always read sequentially. In this use case there’s rarely a benefit as with a read the file blocks need to be loaded from the platter and once they’re handed over to the system they are rarely accessed again in a given session. Furthermore, write performance can be generally abysmal as the drive is going to try to write the file to the cache, but in the case of copying over an album (or several albums) worth of high resolution files the cache is going to fill and the drive is either going to need to bypass it (which can result in slower performance than a traditional drive) or constantly be in a state of flushing the cache to disk which has similar performance implications.

I have a server with a RAID array fronted by an SSD cache (essentially the same as the SSHD hybrid disk drive). This works great for random file I/O but if I’m doing a large read / write transaction (say copying in a bunch of high res files) the performance drops to an abysmal level as soon as the SSD cache is filled. I’ve actually clocked better write performance in this scenario to an external USB3 drive.

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I second the avoid on Seagate. HGST, and Hitachi are the best IMO. I use WD once a while as well. Here are some failure articles. Seagate’s not so good in the testing.

http://www.popsci.com/these-are-hard-drives-most-likely-to-fail

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Don’t WD own HGST?

Yes they bought it from Hitachi… The quality is still there though!
The trick is HDD Platters, The less platters the denser they are and the less the motor has to work and less felirue rate… All of the HGST HDD (To my knowledge) are two platters where some of the cheaper ones are 4 and their failure rate is insane!

By the way this is my own theory :stuck_out_tongue:

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Yes they do. Can’t explain the manufacturing performance difference, but HGST sure holds up better.

My brother has 2x2tb HGST drives that have been running in a Qnap Nas for 11 years and are still going strong!

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:open_mouth::astonished:
Nice!!!

This is what my FreeNAS has as well. I been running them for about 4yrs now. No problems what so ever.
My Motherboard went out and is been replaced twice… the HDD still running like nothing is going on!

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these are nice

Those are old data. Seagate NAS in 2017 are order of magnitude more reliable now.

For price/performance/reliability, Seagate are the choice and that’s the reason why Backblaze ordered tons of them unless you are willing to pay more for HGST.

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Hu?

Seagate still the worst for home use!
They only use Seagate Enterprise because of price and still the failure rate is high!

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Thanks folks! When in doubt avoid?. So what’s left is Samsung? I don’t see Hitachi

WD also not fairing well.

Their SSD are excellent. I don’t know them for spinning drives…

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