The largest drives in my system are currently 750 gig but I've been thinking about picking up two 1 TB drives.

 

I've read a bunch of reviews at Newegg and the 1TB drives are getting much worse reviews then 750gig or 500 gig drives. Lots of people are reporting failures within a month or two and many are reporting a lot of DOA's.

 

I'm almost scared to make the 1TB jump now and it almost sounds better to stay at the 750 Gig size because the drives seem to get better reviews.

 

What do you guys think? Are there any good Seagate or WD (or another brand for that matter... I've just always stuck with these 2) 1TB drives out there that are reliable and fast?

I've been happy with the WD 1TB green drives. I've not had issues and I have 4 of them installed.

They happen to be faster then my Maxtor 500GB's.

I have not compared them to my 750 Seagates because they are in a raid 5 array.

 

Recently I purchased 2 1TB seagates w/32MB cache and they seem good too.

 

There are plenty of people here purchasing the 1TB drives and I've seen very few (if any) negative reviews.

my buying policy now is "whatever is cheapest". Since unRAID offers parity protection unless a drive is truely awful and fails quickly the brand/speed/cache etc is meanigless to me in the array.

I am with the guy above.

 

 

If you search newegg for drives you will see that, even from the same manufacturer, there are drives of the same capacity at different price points.  The more expensive ones are rated for enterprise use (whatever than means).  I think most people here are looking at the least expensive line of drives for each manufacturer. 

 

I know I probably don't speak for everyone, but here is a summary of my interpretation of people's thoughts ...

1 - Cheaper drives always work better than expensive ones

2 - The Seagate 1T drives are likely the "best" drives if you want best performance (7200 RPM) and longest warranty (5 years).  I have yet to read a single reported failure of a Seagate drive here.

3 - The WD 1T GP drives are likely the "best" drives if you want low power consumption (1/2 that of Seagate), lower heat, and if slower performance (5400 RPM) is acceptable (note that due to the network bottleneck, practically speaking, 5400 vs 7200 performance only affects parity builds/checks and internal - on the unRAID box using mc for example - operations).  WD drives have a 3 year warranty.  There have been some comments about WD drives failing here (although maybe not the 1T ones).

 

I (personally) would buy the Seagates all day long at near the same price point!  For these reasons:

1.  If ever I wanted to re-purpose the drive for local use, I'd want the higher performance.

2.  Incredible reliability

3.  I think it is outstanding that they back their product with a 5 yr warranty.  I want to encourage that with my dollars.

 

I use a 32MB 7200RPM Seagate drive for my Parity Drive because I want parity operations to be as seemless as possible. (I've found that it helps with my usage pattern, albeit minimal, yet helps).

I use the 5400 RPM Green WD drives for my data drives because I want the lowest power and heat possible for the data drives.

 

When 32MB 7200RPM drives hit the same price point as the WD Green drives I may use them instead.

 

I purchase approx 1 drive a month as I'm starting to swap them all out

In the meantime I wait until I see them around the same price point them make a decision.

 

For the record, upping my memory to 8GB and enabling PAE helped (me) a great deal with my usage patterns.

I'm able to rip, read, autogk convert videos without forcing a drive spinup on my other drives until I actually do a file read or write.

slocate down the whole tree runs in 3 seconds

 

I went with the Seagate 7200rpm 32MB cache drives because they were on sale at Fry's for $200 each when I built my array.  These are the retail kit versions (same 340AS drives, though).  Had they not been on sale, I probably would have gone with the WDs EACS.  About two weeks later, I purchased another two Seagates from NewEgg and they both came defective.  I think this had more to do with the way they were shipped.  It seemed as though the OEM drives were just tossed in a box with some shipping paper, and bounced around a lot.  I am awaiting the results of my RMA...

newegg, really needs to fix the way they ship drives these days.

 

days of yesteryear they were well packed. Sometimes I would get them in the styrofoam holders.

 

I was appalled at my last pair of drives (remember I buy them in pairs LOL)  they were so skimpy on bubble wrap and peanuts that the drives made it to the bottom of the box and surely were bouncing around.

 

Lucky for me they survived.

 

I've found frys.com to be a good vendor for hard drives.  They ship retail editions of drives.  The prices are frequently the same or lower than newegg.  They package them well, and since they are in retail packaging, always arrive secure.  Having the SATA cable and molex converter comes in handy.  All those OEM drives from newegg have depleted my supply!