Which 2 TB drive should I buy?


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Good to see that your preclear took less time.  I figured mine would be a little slower as I was doing 4 at once on a system that had 2GB of RAM in it.

 

Next time I get another one of these drives in a system I will run a single preclear on it by itself and see what kind of numbers I get.

 

And I agree about these drives being impressive so far.  They are faster than the WD drives of the same size and the temps that were reported to me were nearly identical.  I will probably start recommending these drives for client builds if they are not concerned with 7200RPM drives.

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I can corroborate the Hitachi speeds.  Same tests, mounted in the array with parity protection on an empty precleared 5K3000 2TB.  And a 3 cycle preclear took 21.7 hours per cycle.  These drives are impressing me.

 

 

 

Thanks to Aiden and prostuff1 for posting these results. These Hitachi 5K3000 drives seem worth waiting for.

 

A few of the bits started to arrive for my project unRAID build.  ;D 

Some are still MIA. Thus, like it or not, I do have some time to finish shopping. Already got 3 Hitachi 7K2000 in hand. Missing 5 drives for my projected build. Now thanks to these results, I've opted to email Hitachi and my preferred resellers to seek an estimated ETA for these Green drives in Australia.

Since I cannot finish the build without the rest of my bits anyway, I'll hold buying more drives for as long as possible. If the 5K3000 are not here soon enough, we always have the WD EARS.

 

Thanks again for posting these results. These drives are impressive, speed and temperature look great!

 

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Good to see that your preclear took less time.  I figured mine would be a little slower as I was doing 4 at once on a system that had 2GB of RAM in it.

 

Next time I get another one of these drives in a system I will run a single preclear on it by itself and see what kind of numbers I get.

FWIW, I precleared a Samsung 203W 2TB and it took 36 hours per cycle on the same system.  Not all green drives are the same.  :)

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Today heard back from Hitachi about availability of 5K3000 2TB in Australia.

CS Rep says global shipping started in December 2010, and Australia should receive its first batches soon, to contact their local reps. With this in hand just bought first 5K3000 I found in the US, and asked seller to get me a few more.

I've decided to put together my unRAID as soon as these bits arrive, and fully populate my case later on with Hitachis, if available, or the WD EARS.

 

Nothing like a project!

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FWIW, I precleared a Samsung 203W 2TB and it took 36 hours per cycle on the same system.  Not all green drives are the same.  :)

 

I wonder if an aligned F4 would be quicker.

I doubt it, but it is possible when reading the random blocks of data on the disk.  Since preclear reads and writes in large blocks, far larger than single 4k sectors, it may have no effect at all.  Preclear has no concept of partitioning or alignment.  It also does it sequentially, so if the read-ahead cache and write cache on the drive is effective, a larger memory buffer on the disk would be the major effect.

 

Alignment affects tiny files, not large sequential access, and even then, mostly only in tests.  If you had to read a specific sector from the disk, and it has to rotate once to get it, vs. twice would you notice?  Yes, a testing program would, but would you?  Do you have a stop watch to know the difference in time for 1 revolution vs. 2 at even 5400 RPM.  .011 seconds vs. .022 seconds?

 

Joe L.

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Today heard back from Hitachi about availability of 5K3000 2TB in Australia.

CS Rep says global shipping started in December 2010, and Australia should receive its first batches soon, to contact their local reps. With this in hand just bought first 5K3000 I found in the US, and asked seller to get me a few more.

I've decided to put together my unRAID as soon as these bits arrive, and fully populate my case later on with Hitachis, if available, or the WD EARS.

 

Nothing like a project!

 

What about trying the newer Hitachi 2TB drives? The 7K300.

 

 

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first 5K3000 I found in the US, and asked seller to get me a few more.

I've decided to put together my unRAID as soon as these bits arrive, and fully populate my case later on with Hitachis, if available, or the WD EARS.

 

Nothing like a project!

 

What about trying the newer Hitachi 2TB drives? The 7K300.

 

 

 

Hi OpenToe,

 

Good point. Thanks!

The 7K3000 are excellent drives, similar to the 7K2000 I already own. Three of these 7K2000 are going into the rig, with one of them as Parity. I'm trying to go Greener, quieter. Thus the Obsession push for the 5K3000 (I prefer Hitachis), or the WD EARS.

Cheers,

 

 

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I have just ordered 8x Hitachi Deskstar 2TB drives - not sure about the model designation but they are 7200 with 32Mb cache. I am not sure if the power saving of green drives is worth the issues they create - too may posts about EARS drives.

Given that my use of the unRAID box is ONLY for movie viewing so the drives are spun down for all but 2-3 hours a day, I am not sure how significant the power saving would be... The price was not bad either: UK £60 (~ 93 USD)

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I have just ordered 8x Hitachi Deskstar 2TB drives - not sure about the model designation but they are 7200 with 32Mb cache. I am not sure if the power saving of green drives is worth the issues they create - too may posts about EARS drives.

Given that my use of the unRAID box is ONLY for movie viewing so the drives are spun down for all but 2-3 hours a day, I am not sure how significant the power saving would be... The price was not bad either: UK £60 (~ 93 USD)

 

Let's hope your drives don't come from a bad batch, because if they do you can count on several drives failing out of the lot. I always buy drives from different vendors or different brands/modes altogether.

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What about trying the newer Hitachi 2TB drives? The 7K300.

The 7K3000 is a 7200 rpm non-green drive.  The 5K3000 is a 5490 rpm green drive.  The 5K3000 and the 7K3000 are the same generation, so there is no "newer" model between the two.

 

The 7K3000 is the new 7200 rpm version of the 7K2000 Desktop drives (the 7K designation refers to 7200RPM drives). So yes, the 3000 designation is newer, and the 5K are the Green drives (Hitachi SilentSpin ones, better known as 5K3000 Green drives). According to Hitachi, these 5K series were released to market on December 2010.

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The 5K3000 and 7K3000 are still not available in Central Europe. None of my dealers has a clue when the'll be available.

 

Grrrrr  >:(.

 

furymaster, I share your frustration. I got my hands on a 5K3000 by getting it shipped from America. I'm hoping it gets here in good shape, and that Warranty will not be a problem if I have to RMA it. That's why I bought only one for now, can't take the chance of having problems with a number of drives. Hopefully by the time I need to expand, (tomorrow?? :) ) these 5K drives will be available here in Australia. The WD EARS still seem a good choice, though. We'll see.

 

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I have just ordered 8x Hitachi Deskstar 2TB drives - not sure about the model designation but they are 7200 with 32Mb cache.

The 32MB cache means it's the older, tried-and-true gen 7K2000 models that a lot of us have.

 

Let's hope your drives don't come from a bad batch, because if they do you can count on several drives failing out of the lot. I always buy drives from different vendors or different brands/modes altogether.

I agree this is a best practice, but I've seen way too many people on here order all their drives at once.  I'd like to think it's force of habit, from too many normal RAID deployments, but who knows.

 

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I am getting a little worried about my "batch order" :-[

 

I hope I don't live to regret it - looks like got a lot of preclear ahead of me >:(

Will post results...

Has anyone seen / had experience with these WD drives:

Model numbers: WD20EURS WD20EVDS - Are they newer models of EARS range?

The EURS supports AF but EVDS does not!!

Here is the link to their spec.:

 

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701250.pdf

 

They are available for fairly good prices here in the UK.

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AF is not a requirement, or even a benefit, really.  It's just the "new kid" as far as sector mapping goes.  I wouldn't worry too much about that.  As far as the batch ordering goes, I've found the best use of my time and money comes when I buy only what I need plus one more to cover the gap between running out of space and adding a new precleared drive.  That has worked well now for me for over a year.

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I don't trust them after all, so 3 cycles of preclearing are minimum for me now!

I preclear with 3 cycles on every new drive, and 2 cycles when reconstituting a used drive.  It's probably the single most important tool in the bag.

 

Thanks Aiden, This is excellent advice for me, since I'm about to start building.  I was still confused on "safe" protocol to do preclears with my mix of drives. I already have 3 'used' Hitachi 7K2000 (a couple of months in the NAS I'm phasing out, or just here in case of a drive failure), one reclaimed WD EARS from one of my systems, that was never really used, and one new Hitachi 5K3000 that is still on its way, all 2TB.

 

Though my PSU was a no-show, Most of my shopping list has arrived- Lexar Firefly drives, Supermicro Card and Cables, MB, CPU, RAM, OCZ Vertex 2 LE SSD for cache, and Fractal XL black case all arrived yesterday.  ;D

 

Will post pictures, and ask more and more questions after this weekend, when I can finally have the time to open the boxes, and tinker.

 

 

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