2 TB drive recommendations, Green?

[davephan]

Does anyone have any recommendations for 2 TB SATA drives?

I tried using the Hitachi 2 TB drives. I ordered 7 of the drives. I tested 4 drives, all DOA. I did not bother testing the rest of them and RMA'ed them back.

I looked at the Western Digital Green 2 TB drive, but the RPM is 5900 - 7200. Some reviews claim it never seems to spin faster than 5900. Other 2 TB drives I've seen only spin at 5900 RPM. I'm not concerned with saving power, since the Green drives don't save much power. I'd rather have better drive performance.

I currently use 4 - 1.5 TB 7200 RPM Seagate drives, which have worked fine for me, although others reported problems with those drives. I plan to create RAID 1 drive pairs and move my files off of the 4 Segate drives. I plan to end up with three 2 TB RAID 1 drive sets and two 1.5 TB RAID 1 drive sets.

Does anyone have experience with Western Digital 2 TB Green drives? Or, can recommend other 2 TB drives?

Dave

[thomaszoo]

I have been using the WD Green drives for the last couple of years without any problems. On Cyber Monday (the Monday after Black Friday) I bought a 2 TB WD Green drive from Newegg. It worked fine for about a month and then suddenly started coming up with errors. I RMA'd it and am waiting for the replacement from WD.

The drive speed has never been a problem for me. It is not unusual for me to record 3 high-def streams, view one and comskip two more simultaneously. I don't remember what the actual numbers are but it is pretty easy for any drive to do this so long as the drive is fomatted to 64K blocks and is not heavily fragmented. Then the problem is the seek time for the heads, not the rotational rate of the platters. If you really need the speed you can buy the WD 2 TB Black drive.

[HelenWeathers]

Originally Posted by davephan

I looked at the Western Digital Green 2 TB drive, but the RPM is 5900 - 7200. Some reviews claim it never seems to spin faster than 5900. Other 2 TB drives I've seen only spin at 5900 RPM. I'm not concerned with saving power, since the Green drives don't save much power. I'd rather have better drive performance. Dave

I have 5 of the Western Digital 2 TB Green drives in my SageTV server for over 6 months now. My content is all HD (OTA, HD PVR & BD Movies). With three extenders in use and 4 or 5 recordings under way, I've not had any issues with these drives slowing down my system.

I did receive one of the early ones that was DOA but Newegg replaced it right away.

[brainbone]

The lower RPM of the drive only affects seek time, not transfer speed. Unless you get into bad fragmentation, seek time shouldn't matter much for a PVR.

Reliability seems to be random between the different drives. Other than Seagate's firmware issue with the 1 and 1.5TB drives, and some of the other various issues of the first revision on others (WD), I think it all comes down to how well it's been packaged/shipped. Judging by the condition of some of my last orders, I think newegg may not be paying their shipping department as well as they have in the past.

[davephan]

Thanks for the responses!

I had a bad experience with Hitachi 2 TB 7200 RPM drives. I purchased 7 drives. The first four drives were DOA. I stopped opening the drive boxes after the first four drives and RMA'ed all of them back to Newegg. The packing was pretty marginal, so that might have contributed to the problem. However, I suspect the problem is a design and/or quality control problem with the Hitachi 2 TB 7200 RPM drives.

I will purchase the Western Digital 2 TB Green drives from Micro Center, which I can pickup locally. They may also have an extended warranty available at an extra cost at the time of purchase, where I can immediately exchange the bad drives at the store for years after purchase. I think the extended warranty might be worth it for drives.

Dave

[Teddyboy]

Originally Posted by davephan

Thanks for the responses!

I will purchase the Western Digital 2 TB Green drives from Micro Center, which I can pickup locally. They may also have an extended warranty available at an extra cost at the time of purchase, where I can immediately exchange the bad drives at the store for years after purchase. I think the extended warranty might be worth it for drives.

Dave

I have 8 1TB Green drives in my WHS server. The 2TBs were way to expensive at the time that I bought the 1TB drives. The 2TB drives have a power comsumption of 6 watts when reading or writing. They run a lot cooler and are very quite. I think you'll like them a lot.