Looking for storage drive for my Win7 HTPC/file server, running SSD for OS drive, need a larger HDD for AV storage (current 500GB WD Blue is full).

What's the current best 2TB drive? I guess the advantages of 7200RPM are not necessary for my build, but amongst the Green drives I am not sure which is the most reliable?!

There are THREE WD Green drives, EADS, EARS, EARX... which is recommended? Is the Advanced Format better or worse? Is the head park feature an issue in the long run for reliability? I do NOT have my HTPC connected to cable 24/7, I use it mostly for downloads, and then as media server to play movies/music, etc...

If not WD, then between Hitachi or Seagate which is recommended? The new Hitachi 5K3000 looks like a good compromise between speed and silence. But, I have never owned Hitachi drives and not sure about their reliability (while kinda wanna stay away from Seagate as their reliability is iffy IMO).

Thanks

PS. I got an AMD machine, with 6 gb/s SATA3 controller, in an Antec Fusion case, using the HDD standard mount provided by fusion

5400RPM is plenty for a storage drive imo. It's difficult to recommend brands.. I like WD and Samsung myself, also don't like Seagate very much. Advanced format is a good thing imo, unless you plan to go with older software. With Win7 you should be fine.
The head parks of the WD Greens shouldn't bother you much since you have the system on the SSD.

You can check out the StorageReview HDD reliability survey here.

It might give you a bit of an idea based on user submissions.

Looks like you have to register to see. Is there anyway to look at the results without having to register? Generally how did WD do?

I checked, but it's very hard to determine anything from that...

My BIGGEST worry is that Head Parking feature! This being storage device (not OS drive), do I have to worry as much?

I actually was very much interested in RE4 drives, looks like it's built at much better tolerance with way better reliability, AND also are much faster (RE4-GP is ~30% faster than WD Green), but it just costs too much!

I wish they made the same WD Blue in 2TB size... that looks like the PERFECT compromise drive.

The drive parks its heads after eight seconds of inactivity. When it does so it gives off a soft click. When the disk is accessed again later the head unparks with a soft click. Drawback is that that first seek will be slow. If that matters depends on application. Good thing with head parks are less powerdraw at idle.

I still cannot believe the fuss about this feature!


WD Blue for me is a reasonable fast OS disk + storage for cheap systems where SSD + 5400RPM storage drive is too expensive. 5400RPM is less noisy, cooler, cheaper.. Do you really need that extra reduction in seek time? Think of the children.

LOL. To me, the Blue is PERFECT as it doesn't have the Head parking feature (hence more reliable), performs well (faster), and not as loud as Black (fits the noise threshhold). Green would have been perfect if it didn't have the stupid head parking... I know there's some sort of a firmware to turn it off, BUT, from other threads some claimed it causes other issues if you turned it off!

Well, the Samsung F4 is popular. I have two WD GPs and two Samsung F4s in my file server.

You will be accessing the disk locally from the HTPC though. I don't do that, my HTPC remotely connects to my file server. So if the extra noise doesn't bother you I guess a WD Blue would be ok.

Hmm. Apparently some folks making HDDs don't pay attention to history...

Some years ago, a very popular 2.5" drive came out with firmware that parked the heads after 20 seconds of inactivity. Seemed like a good idea at the time. But: a widely used OS would update a log file every 30 seconds. Net result: 2 head parks per minute on an otherwise idle system.

What's the problem with that you ask. Well, glad you thought to ask! The landing area on those disks was made of a relatively soft material that was rated at 100,000 lands. Well at 2/minute, that's about a year. And guess what, after about a year the disks started getting data errors because the read/write heads were getting dirty.

Now we have new disks that want to park after 8 seconds, we still have a popular OS that likes to update logs, and we have people building HTPCs that are mostly idle...

No modern OS writes logs all over the place. But please let us not get into this again. There are a lot of threads about the head park feature/issue. The OP doesn't want a head parking disk, so you're beating a dead horse.

But they don't freaking make it in 2TB!

Well, I'm not 100% dead set against it. Just wanted to know how big of an issue it is/could be, for a 2nd drive on Win7? I know it has issues with Linux and probably for OS drives (more write cycles probably).

Well there is really no market for it.


I used a WD GP as a storage disk on WinXP and it was fine. I have no first hand experience with Win7 and a WD GP but since I haven't heard of any issues I think that also would be fine. I don't know of any Linux issues, at least Ubuntu Server since 10.04 and probably way back is fine.
I wouldn't normally run the OS from a WD GP (although I have once when I knew the disk would be accessed often anyway so..), or put swap space on it. But other than that it's an issue whether you would be annoyed by the faint click and small wait the first time you would access the disk after letting it rest for at least eight seconds.

I'd go for the Hitachi 5K3000 myself.
I might have been exceptionally lucky but I've yet to have a Hitachi HDD fail on me and I've used a fair few for builds over the years.

I don't know if that is still an issue or not. I just feel a lot better using the Black Caviar WD. I believe it is more reliable. It is fast... very fast. And WD has in my personal experience done a good job of standing behind their warranty and making returns easy to do.

Do you own one? If so, how's the noise/temp compare to WD Green? The reviews are only around performance which looks pretty promising.

I wouldn't choose a WD Green...it's just (bad) luck I guess, but 3 out of 4 have failed on me...I would go for the newer Seagate low rpm 2TB drive (I own one and I am perfectly happy with it so far).

Recently bought 4 Seagate 2TB drives ST2000DL003 via two orders and 2 out of 4 where DOA (one for each order).
Newegg users report way too many DOAs http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... llFullInfo

so I'm looking for a storage drive too..

Things are getting difficult if we consider poor reliability of large hard drives, lack of AAM (see viewtopic.php?f=7&t=62732), head parking issues and of course noise.

I know there are better drives, but I don't want the noise and the cost of a Seagate Constellation or a RE4 drive

Are newer Samsung drives considered reliable and quiet enough by SPCR members?
Otherwise I'll have to try a 2.5" 640-1000GB drive (suggestions are welcome).

There is RE4-GP, which is the Enterprise version of WD Green drive, 30% faster, *I think* without park head feature, and from most I've heard it'd be just as quiet as Green with possibly lower vibration. Problem is that the 2TB is like $200! If you go for 1TB, that's more economical.

How's the noise level of WD Black? The review of 1TB is terrible, but 2TB looks to be maybe tolerable.

I got an older 500AAKS (new Blue drive) and I basically don't hear it in my Antec Fusion, inside my Entertainment case. I assume Black would be slightly noisier.

As I said, the Blue is absolutely the perfect compromise drive. I just wish they made a 2TB version.

From experience with a moderate number of drives:

WD Green

EACS - OK, slow, head-park "feature" was annoying (until turned off)
EADS - OK, some flakey SATA driver behavior
EARS - 'Faster', Good so far (it seems to be the most reliable of the series).

I've seen/heard Samsung/Seagates drop dead first hand so I could not recommend those.

These days its stupidly easy/cheap to RAID a bunch of drives - for that one $200 Enterprise grade drive you could have a 3 drive mirror / parity array for better performance and reliability...

hard to tell, samsung never crashed on me, seagate did, but seagate is best i suppose according to reviews, wd is expensive and worse than the other 2 for features

Sorry for the late reply. Yes you can browse the results without logging in, just click on the orange button at the bottom of the screen marked 'Reliability Ratings and Results Browser'.

Ask again in 10 years. If my drive is still working, I'll be happy to sell it to you, as a proven reliable product.