Which 3 TB drive should I buy?


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ok maybe its time I bought a lottery ticket, my bad luck must end sometime. 

 

2x3tb green dead in under 3 months rma'd

1x3tb greens doa, rma'd

1x3tb red doa returned to store pissedoff

1x3tb red clicking bad and now smart errors after 4 preclears and under a week as parity.

 

Is it the change of their 3tb tech not up to spec, or platters still shitty made? if i switch to a 2tb will my experience change?

 

Hitachi is now WD, samsung gone, options anyone? only reason I purchase wd is factory is 30mins from my house so rma is easy.  BUT that doesnt make me a satisified user when I get refurb in return.

 

thanks

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2x3tb green dead in under 3 months rma'd

1x3tb greens doa, rma'd

1x3tb red doa returned to store pissedoff

1x3tb red clicking bad and now smart errors after 4 preclears and under a week as parity.

 

Indeed it seems you do not have much luck with WD drives. Perhaps it is something to do with the way they are handled in your area? A lot of users on this forum have them and AFAIK the general consensus is the drives work quite well (in general). Just finished building a new unRAID box for my mate about a week ago and he has a mix of drives, including a 3TB WD Red as parity. Speeds are fantastic so I guess only time will tell if the drives don't last.

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I'm curious. What's the consensus of the unRAiD community on the WD Green 3TB drives in this case the WDBAAY0030HNC-NRSN models. I ask because I had originally planned to start buying the WD Red 3TB drives for my setup, but finding any place that has any instock lately has been almost impossible. Add to that the price jumping from $189 to $219, at least at Amazon and Newegg, I thought of giving the Green version a shot. 3TB Green seems to be reasonably (???) at about $165. Personally I'm on the fence with WD drives since at my last job we seemed to be replacing a lot of bad WD drives constantly. Now there really is only WD and Seagate making HDDs and WD is the only one of the two that is continuing their Green specced drives which means I'm stuck with WD if I want to stay green. Any opinions would be helpful. Thanks.

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I'm curious. What's the consensus of the unRAiD community on the WD Green 3TB drives in this case the WDBAAY0030HNC-NRSN models. I ask because I had originally planned to start buying the WD Red 3TB drives for my setup, but finding any place that has any instock lately has been almost impossible. Add to that the price jumping from $189 to $219, at least at Amazon and Newegg, I thought of giving the Green version a shot. 3TB Green seems to be reasonably (???) at about $165. Personally I'm on the fence with WD drives since at my last job we seemed to be replacing a lot of bad WD drives constantly. Now there really is only WD and Seagate making HDDs and WD is the only one of the two that is continuing their Green specced drives which means I'm stuck with WD if I want to stay green. Any opinions would be helpful. Thanks.

Not trying to switch you from Western Digital but the Samsung drives that Seagate is producing are still green.  So if you want green you could still get a Seagate green drive if you want.  I prefer Western Digital drives for the most part but I get the best value that I can and don't worry about maker.  With Seagate warranties being less than Western Digital that usually means them.
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I recently bought a WD30EFRX drive for my unRAID server. Should I disable the automatic spin down for this drive? I think these drives are designed to run 24/7, and it might be not good to send these drives to sleep mode so often.

 

How did you guys configure your WD reds withh respect to "spin down"?

 

Cheers, Chris

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I recently bought a WD30EFRX drive for my unRAID server. Should I disable the automatic spin down for this drive? I think these drives are designed to run 24/7, and it might be not good to send these drives to sleep mode so often.

 

How did you guys configure your WD reds withh respect to "spin down"?

 

Cheers, Chris

No.  The Red drives don't have the head parking problem that the Green drives often do.
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I don't use the WD Reds (yet). But the head park/landing timer is disabled. This might indicate, as you said, the drives are expected to remain spinning 24x(7 or longer). It also might indicate the drives are not expected to be mobile (external). It certainly improves performance, by not having to relaunch the head on first access.

 

Disabling spin down removes a key feature of unRAID, low power and low noise.

 

I have not seen a power cycle or idle cycle rating for the drives. If those are lower on Red vs Green, that would be a good indicator for spin down disable.

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NO.  I have done NOTHING to the drives but preclear them and put them in the array.  The LCC count is below 10 on each with several hundred power on hours now.  Spin down on all drives is set at an hour in unRAID configuration.

 

I have Green drives that have 10's of thousands of LCC's (still nothing to worry about) but many orders of magnitude greater count.  So Greens you may need to run WDIDLE on but the RED's are not necessary.

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So the reds are the best to buy then?

 

I'm just about to order some.

I buy whatever I can that is cheapest/on sale normally.  However I've had terrible luck recently with WD Green drives so I've desided to buy RED for now.  I still prefer WD over Seagate drives but I have quite a few of them (Seagate) drives on other systems primarily and a small number on an unRAID server.
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So the reds are the best to buy then?

 

I'm just about to order some.

I buy whatever I can that is cheapest/on sale normally.  However I've had terrible luck recently with WD Green drives so I've desided to buy RED for now.  I still prefer WD over Seagate drives but I have quite a few of them (Seagate) drives on other systems primarily and a small number on an unRAID server.

 

+1 cheapest $/TB with consideration of warranty length.

 

This gives Red a + since they have longer warranty.

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I picked up 9 of the Toshiba DT01ACA300 7200rpm 3tb drives recently. These have a 3 year warranty here in Australia. My first 3 completed pre-clear last night. Two of the drives took 24.5 hours and the other took 26 hours. Not sure why the 3rd drive took longer but they all passed with 0 errors. Drive temps maxed at 37 deg C. It's quite warm in Australia atm tho.

 

Started pre clear on the next three straight after.

 

With the 3 year warranty and with them being faster and $50 per drive cheaper than the WD reds its sort of a no brainer.

 

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

 

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I currently have all WD Green drives in my array. Looking for a 7200RPM drive. What should I get? I want to stray away from WD for the next few drives.

 

Can I ask why? What happened to your drive that makes you want to leave WD? Personally, WD seems to be the only company that doesn't fail for me, but, I guess each to their own.

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[quote author=:) link=topic=10388.msg229488#msg229488 date=1362072442]

I currently have all WD Green drives in my array. Looking for a 7200RPM drive. What should I get? I want to stray away from WD for the next few drives.

 

Can I ask why? What happened to your drive that makes you want to leave WD? Personally, WD seems to be the only company that doesn't fail for me, but, I guess each to their own.

 

No reason really. WD has always treated me well. I just want to try something other than WD for the sake of change.

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I just had a ST3000DM001 fail, it no longer spins up. Looks like this might be a general problem with these drives as others have also reported this.

 

I could not for the longest time figure out what was wrong, I was getting a ton of errors from my array when playing videos. This was ongoing for a month and was driving me crazy. There were no SMART errors and parity checks strangely enough were ok. Then all of a sudden one day I had like 500,000 errors and a few hours later it refused to spin up. Replaced the drive and all the problems have gone away.

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  • 3 months later...

I never have problem with GREEN, since many friends recommended RED. I got 2 RED yesterday.

preclear on one of RED really slow, speed often below 15MB/sec

I canceled the preclear and ran smart = lot of pending error. I guess RMA tomorrow.

 

Is seagate for CCTV = RED ?

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NO.  I have done NOTHING to the drives but preclear them and put them in the array.  The LCC count is below 10 on each with several hundred power on hours now.  Spin down on all drives is set at an hour in unRAID configuration.

 

I have Green drives that have 10's of thousands of LCC's (still nothing to worry about) but many orders of magnitude greater count.  So Greens you may need to run WDIDLE on but the RED's are not necessary.

 

Same, I have several 3 TB REDs in my array. Just gave them 3 runs of preclear and they are ready to go.

 

Never had a problem with WD or their RMA procedure.Currently they are the only one offering advance replacement in the Netherlands.

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Certainly agree with WD Reds.  I've had zero failures (knock on wood) with the Reds, but have seen something like a 20% "infant mortality" with the Greens.    HOWEVER, the Greens have been virtually perfect IF they pass their initial testing (I am very rigorous with that -- two complete cycles of both short and extended tests with Data Lifeguard, with a full write zeroes pass in-between;  followed by 2 pre-clear cycles (whether or not they're going to be used in UnRAID).  In other words, I have to return about 1 in 5 or so, but haven't had a failure in years of a WD Green that passed those tests.

 

I also like the new Seagate NAS units -- they're very good -- but I'll probably continue to favor WD just for the Advance Replacement option when a drive does fail ==> in my view that's a major benefit.

 

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I never have problem with GREEN, since many friends recommended RED. I got 2 RED yesterday.

preclear on one of RED really slow, speed often below 15MB/sec

I canceled the preclear and ran smart = lot of pending error. I guess RMA tomorrow.

 

Is seagate for CCTV = RED ?

 

To answer your question, no. Seagate for CCTV is not the Seagate for NAS drive (WD Red). The Seagate NAS drive is VN series, while the CCTV series is the SV series.

 

In a medium sample (18,000 drives) failure rate on WD green vs red are not significantly different.

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