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Good HDD for home computer (with long warranty..)
Hi
I'm looking for a 3.5 HDD for a home computer, to store some data. Was thinking whatever has the cheapest price per TB and does more than 2TB.
In the past, WD had 5 years warranty, and that was very good as I've had to send back a few HDD. Seems like right now the warranty is only two years, too short in my opinion.
Is there good HDD brand with 5 year warranty nowadays? If not, what is the best brand for drives that will last long?
Thanks
Comments
WD Black RE4
Nice, those still have the 5yr warranty and seem to be good quality. Thx
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/
Basically Hitachi/HGST or Toshiba (i.e. Hitachi under a different name). The rest are crap.
You have had hard drives break after 4 years? They usually break much earlier for me, if they do.
Thanks, some of those are quite cheap. Are all models good in these two brands?
Not sure about after 4 years but after 3 years yes, definitely.
Interesting, wanted to be sarcastic here, but after my last usb ended dead on arrival, it's sad to hear that.
My luck with drives is that they survive long for me at least.
My recent usb sandisk micro sd card for my raspberry pi may not live for long. I've seen terrible IO waits for deluge usage. wtf is that.
Pro-tip: don't buy counterfeit devices.
I like WD & HGST, am happy with Toshiba so far and absolutely hate Seagate.
Buy for performance, buy with someone who has a good return policy (store policy, like Amazon, not warranty), and try to get an idea of model reliability with reviews online.
I'd ignore the manufacturer warranty. If a drive dies then I replace it. In 4-5 years we'll have cheap 2TB+ SSDs, why bother with getting a junky refurbished spinning drive through warranty?
You're probably right on the fact than in two years there might be some cheap SSDs but WD warranty works great and fast, and have been useful to me a couple of times (probably not a very good thing as I'd rather have liked to keep the disk alive)
Because from the way things are heading now, those SSDs will be about as durable and long term usable as toilet paper.
Even today you should not expect to download torrents to an SSD and have it survive for a reasonably long time. And with time the SSD technology gets process shrinks which make it cheaper but each time also much less reliable.
Aside from some breakthrough getting an entirely different memory type to the market, flash based SSDs aren't going to completely replace HDDs -- ever.
Unfortunately I cannot recommend you any hard drive but I can recommend Samsung as a manufacturer.
I have a Samsung IDE from 2005 which is still alive and doing well. It survived several years of 24x7 file sharing, gaming and all the other use I put to it.
Right now I also have a Samsung 1 TB HDD and a Samsung SSD and both work great. The HDD is about to get 5 years old. Works totally fine and has a great speed.
Never had problem with Samsung HDDs/SSDs.
Yeah that's a big problem; many SSD fail quite early... Seems like there is a trend of cheap SSD that don't last... Server grade intel stuff might be good for real use, and probably other brands/models but not most of the production, for sure.
Thanks
The Samsung HDD-making operation is since a long time ago a subdivision of Seagate. 'Nuff said?
I honestly have no idea but my current Samsung HDD seems a lot more reliable than some Seagate HDDs a few friends had (which failed them in a few months or with luck two years).
Seagate has the biggest failure rate AFAIK (or recall) but the Samsung one I have will be 5 years old in Jan 2016. Works totally fine and has a great speed for a single disk.
Personally I never been really fond of WD either.
Yours is most likely from before that.
And yeah old Samsung drives seemed to work okay, aside from the pervasive high-vibration problem. Current ones, no idea, but I don't trust Seagate to not ruin things.
Nice graph, @Hidden_Refuge thanks.
Seems like it's better to avoid current seagate/samsung.
the seagate 4TB ones are quite reliable, but in my home servers i only use Toshiba md04aca500 drives now.
HGST having been bought by WD, is it the same quality as before? (I had many issues with WD - they had great warranty service though)
Did they keep the same factories etc? Anyone know where they produce the HDD?
Thanks
No problem. You're welcome
.
I really don't know how the latest Samsungs are, sorry.
I can also recommend Toshiba. Although I only have two external (portable HDDs) ones with USB 3.0 in 2.5" format. They are really great and I get over 110 MB/s (got 2x 1 TB). Cannot tell how good their internal are but I guess they use the same as in the externals (just 3.5"). So they should be also good.
I've not come to open the cases of them so I can't really tell what is inside them (maybe Hitachi as rm_ said before).
Judging from the Backblaze graph above (quite fresh, from Q2 2015), looks like yes.
Fair enough. I should've also added that in 4-5 years we'll have SATA 12 or 24, or whatever the next iteration is there, better HDD tech, much larger HDD capacity, etc. So a 4-5 year warranty on a 2TB drive is going to get you a junk refurb 2TB drive, when new 4, 8, 10+ TB drives will likely be cheap and better quality.
HDD warranties are pretty useless IMO. Especially if OP is only planning on buying 1 drive, going to end up purchasing another while your dead drive is taking over a month to be replaced.
What do you expect to be storing on a 10TB drive? Just today I was checking out some 4K BD movie rip (64GB MKV), and it's really nothing to write home about. A whole lot of pixel-perfect grain, apparently requing an 80 Mbit bitrate. Wouldn't say it's markedly better than a well-made 8-16GB 1080p rip.
The first 1TB drive appeared in Q1 2007 http://www.pcworld.com/article/128400/article.html
and today, almost 8 years later, 1TB is still more than a decent size for an HDD and enough for most people's uses (not speaking of us NAS builders and obsessive collectors of "educational videos").
4-5 years is a short time, do not expect today's 2TB drives to become irrelevant that fast.
From my experience with WD, and you can ask them to ship the drive BEFORE you send the broken one, and it's pretty fast. But I've had a big failure rate (mostly during warranty so that's kinda OK) - I'd rather try something else to see if it goes better for me..
SATA12 or 24 means upgrading motherboard, etc - I don't plan to do so before a while, so I'll probably be ok with a "junk refurb 2TB drive"
No, but I definitely paid >$120 for a 1TB drive 4-5 years back, and now they're better quality and $49 on Amazon. Whole point is that specifically picking a model with a long warranty isn't the best bet, I would just pick something with a decent track record of performing at a low price.. and if it dies in 3 years, outside of the 2 yr warranty or whatever, you won't be paying much to replace it with a better new one.
You have to factor in whether paying extra (in most cases) for a well warrantied drive is worth more than the replacement cost on new drives in the future.
You're right, thanks for your input!
Debatable if the cheap shit you get today is better than back when it was a premium product.
With e.g. CD burners, some still have their $200 ones from 2003 work (from back when they had actual metal parts in the mechanism and real glass lenses instead of plastic crap which opaques quickly), and many have the $18 shoddy mass produced ones you buy today fail in 6 months.
Be careful who you buy drives from, especially if you buy a bare drive and not a retail package. If the drives are not properly packaged, regardless of brand, they will not last long.
NewEgg is pretty terrible at packaging - especially with hard drives. Sometimes they just throw drives in a shipping box and let them bang around in there. With retail boxed drives, the drive is in a properly packaged box already, so as long as the shipping box they put the retail box in isn't huge, it is usually ok. But with bare drives, it is pretty rare they are properly packaged.
Found cheap new toshiba, probably the best durability for the buck. Warranty would be better with WD but if the drive is cheaper + more reliable...
Thanks again everyone.
100% agree. I also never buy from NewEgg anymore after getting a DOA drive and going through support hell to get it replaced. I just pay the premium to buy from Amazon, their support won't even question your request and just swap it out for new.
Nice pick, hope it works out for you. OVH supplied me with a new 2TB Toshiba in my Kimsufi last year and it has run great. @MarkTurner also recommended the bigger 4+TB Toshiba drives with 128MB cache when I was looking for some decent storage for my colo box.
So you're saying SSDs break almost as soon as you write to them...