Over the last ten years I've probably installed around 120 drives between my own desktops and servers, and a few systems built for friends.  About 30% of all WD's I installed (200, 300, 500GB) were dead within three years.  Not too impressive for any drive, let alone one with a one year warrantly.  Over that same period of time I've had *maybe* TEN Seagate drives fail.  Total.  A couple of those were D.O.A or within a few days.  All were within the generous five year warranty (now three in some cases).

--Bill

 

Comparing %'s to absolute numbers is a bit of a misnomer.. You say you've had 30% of all WD's fail then maybe 10 seagates fail. You need to list how many of each you have used if u want the comparison to be viable. If we make the assumption that you used 60 WD's and 60 seagates, 30% of those 60 are 18 drives.. 10 drives represents 16%. Not really a massive difference but still a pretty high failure rate on the seagate side.

 

All brands have failures.. I still have 30gb and 40gb IBM Deathstars functioning in family computers and they have a 100% failure rate if you believe everything you've read.. Its luck of the draw and I dont really believe in brand loyalty for hard drives. You just drew the short straw on your WD's. Ive drawn the short straw on seagates and samsungs with many dead drives over my 20 odd year PC building career. I've only ever had one WD drive fail and that was one of the 200gb models that they had known troubles with. The nature of the medium is that it is reasonably fragile.

 

I still purchase drives from all brands. I purchase based on whoever is making the drive with the best performance/price/size/drive temp ratio of the time so my brand purchased rotates pretty regularly in recent times.

Comparing %'s to absolute numbers is a bit of a misnomer.. You say you've had 30% of all WD's fail then maybe 10 seagates fail. You need to list how many of each you have used if u want the comparison to be viable. If we make the assumption that you used 60 WD's and 60 seagates, 30% of those 60 are 18 drives.. 10 drives represents 16%. Not really a massive difference but still a pretty high failure rate on the seagate side.

 

Of course you are correct.  I wasn't trying to be exact, it was a generalization of what I've experienced.  Suffice it to say there were 3x+ as many WD's dead and out of warranty than Seagates in that period of time.

 

All brands have failures.. I still have 30gb and 40gb IBM Deathstars functioning in family computers and they have a 100% failure rate if you believe everything you've read.. Its luck of the draw and I dont really believe in brand loyalty for hard drives. You just drew the short straw on your WD's. Ive drawn the short straw on seagates and samsungs with many dead drives over my 20 odd year PC building career. I've only ever had one WD drive fail and that was one of the 200gb models that they had known troubles with. The nature of the medium is that it is reasonably fragile.

 

Of the 12 or so IBM's I've used, only one is now still running.

 

I still purchase drives from all brands. I purchase based on whoever is making the drive with the best performance/price/size/drive temp ratio of the time so my brand purchased rotates pretty regularly in recent times.

 

I used to do that, but got burned far too many times.  I know it's a fragile medium, but some brands have a history of longer life and stability than others.  I realized it on Seagates several years ago long before it became generally known.  As far as I know, no other drive manufacturer has specs or performance that are so superior to the Seagates that it warrants my gambling.  The price is right for Samsung drives though, and I tried two a few months back.  Both were D.O.A.

 

--Bill

 

I thought I would post a bit of a follow-up to my own question.

 

I ended up getting 2 new drives, one 1.5TB Seagate and one 1.5TB Western Digital (WD)

 

I am running "pre-clear" on both of the simultaneously.  A few observations ( I will leave interpretation to each of you ):

 

During the reading stages, the Seagate out performs the WD ( as one would expect with the 7200RPM vs. 5400RPM drive ).

Seagate averages around 108 MB/s and the WD 84 MB/s

 

During the writing stages, the WD out performs the Seagate ( not what I expected )

Seagate averages 74 MB/s and WD at 91.3 MB/s

 

The drive temperatures have remained pretty steady throughout the process.

Seagate = 31C

WD = 27C

 

The total time to complete one cycle  ( still to be determined as I am on Stage 10 ), but so far, after 14:17 minutes:

Seagate is at 41%

WD is at 29%

 

What can we conclude from this:  Not sure   I know that UnRaid needs to read and write to both the parity drive and data drive.  If the reads and writes are equal, then maybe the WD Green is only slightly slower than the Seagate as it makes up in the writing step of every task.

 

What can we conclude from this:  Not sure Smiley  I know that UnRaid needs to read and write to both the parity drive and data drive.  If the reads and writes are equal, then maybe the WD Green is only slightly slower than the Seagate as it makes up in the writing step of every task.

 

I think it depends on what your server is doing.

 

When I had a 5400RPM parity drive certain operations just seemed to lag on writes.

When I was doing big torrents the system would seem to drag at times.

When I upgraded the Parity from 1tb green to a 1.5tb Seagate, everything interactive dealing with small files was so much better

During some tests today, even moving files to the green drives with rsync went from 8-10mb/s up to 13-20mb/s for my backups.

 

For movies the slower rpm drives are fine.

If you happen to be using part of the unRAID server for storing small files and interactively, the higher RPM drives are are welcomed upgrade.

Related to the original topic -- How do people feel about the Samsung 1.5TB drives? They're 5400rpm, and cheap at Newegg (standard price is $99/each if you buy at least 2).

 

I have a 1TB 5400rpm Samsung in my TiVo and it's been running nice and cool like a champ for over a year now. Samsung is a bit of a newcomer in the desktop market, but I've had my fair share of issues with nearly every established manufacturer as well.

Since I'm deep into the process of specifying a new system, and have been jumping kinda back and forth between Seagate and WD, I am 'up to date' on aqll the different models (have the spec sheets right in front of me).

 

First off, both Seagate and WD have 'green' type drives in every model range (WD is 'green' and 'black', Seagate is 'LP' and newest 'XP'), and both have brand new 2TB 7200rpm/64MB cache as well as 'green' types with much lower rpm/cache.  All reminds me of 'overchoice' ala 'Future Shock'.

 

I actually bought a WD 1TB 'green' drive to put in a pc (X2 AMD CPU), and it's indeed VERY slow, but usable for the task given it.  The 1.5TB Seagate (Barracuda 7200.11) is so much faster it spins ones head. 

 

Best SATA drive in existence right this moment:  Seagate Barracuda XT. 

How can you say the Seagate Barracuda XT is better than the Western Digital 'black'? Do you have experience with the WD 2TB?

I went with the WD Green drives because of...

- price; $20/each makes a difference and could pay for another part.

- reliability; I've had seagate fail on me more often

- performance; My older WD's (7200) and the WD black 1TB (7200) both run cooler & much quieter

 

If your drive is "clicking"...backup that MoFo ASAP!!!

 

I probally should have gone with a faster drive for the parity (just started to put this together last weekend)

 

I'm going to have a total of 6 x WD500GB (7200), 1 x WD1TB Black (7200), 1 x WD1.5TB Green (5400) for parity. I will probably add a smaller cache drive at one point.