Best 2 TB Hard Disk ?

[Boo]

Hi,

I can no longer find Samsung hard drives in any of the usual places so am considering another brand for my upgrade. I liked the Samsung hard drives because they are quiet and reliable, can anyone tell me which our of Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital make the best 2TB hdd meeting those requirements ?

Thanks,

Boo

[bmblank]

I haven't had much luck with the WD drives i've bought. Seagate had done alright by me though. No experience in any of the others.

[newfiend]

I have two western digital caviar black drives.. One 2tb and one 1tb for over a year and a half (maybe two years now) w/o issue. I've never had a bad WD drive yet from the raptors I bought years ago..(still going strong) to the newest 2tb in my desktop PC.. The WD black drives also have longer warranties than most as well.

Sent from my WP7 using Board Express

[barnabas1969]

I have two 2TB Hitachi Deskstar drives. They are very quiet. I made them even quieter by installing some rubber dampers. You can buy them here. If your case is not designed for them, it requires a small modification to your case for them to work properly... and there are NO instructions included with them. But they work great when installed correctly.

[STC]

Seagate Barracuda Green here. 5900rpm, no issues, very cool and quiet. Handles four recordings, two playbacks and a commercial scan all at once without any glitches.

[richard1980]

I've got 2 WD drives, a Caviar Green 500 GB and an AV-GP 2TB. Both have been perfect. Honestly though, if you decide to go WD, don't waste your money on the AV-GP line. I can't tell any difference between AV-GP and Caviar Green, so IMO there is no benefit to paying more for the AV-GP.

[STC]

So there you have it
That appears to cover the gamut of major suppliers

[crawfish]

Hi,

I can no longer find Samsung hard drives in any of the usual places so am considering another brand for my upgrade. I liked the Samsung hard drives because they are quiet and reliable, can anyone tell me which our of Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital make the best 2TB hdd meeting those requirements ?

Thanks,

Boo

I've had 500 GB and 2 TB Samsung drives bought 3 years apart, and both exhibited bad vibration that was easily audible as a pulsing noise even in an Antec P182 using soft silicone grommets for mounting. I returned the 2 TB one. My six WD green drives have been great, and the two Hitachis I use for backups have also been great. The two WD drives in my P182 have no audible seek noise, and their idle noise is very, very low and unobjectionable. My impression of Seagate from reading reviews and forums on sites like silentpcreview.com is that they make the noisiest drives, and I haven't bought a Seagate in about six years.

[CyberSimian]

I liked the Samsung hard drives because they are quiet and reliable, can anyone tell me which our of Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital make the best 2TB hdd meeting those requirements ?

I have several of the Western Digital "My Book" 2TB external USB2 drives. To all intents and purposes, they are silent. They are also one of the few designs of external disk that actually have ventilation holes in the case (so less likely to overheat). The one demerit is that they stand vertically, so you have to be careful not to place them where they might get knocked over. The "My Book" range was upgraded to USB3 a few months ago. The disk within mine is (I think) the "EARS" disk (model "xxxx...xxxEARS"), but I think that the current production may use the upgraded "EARX" disk.

I also have a pair of Maxtor 1.5TB USB2 drives; they both sound like a Hoover (other vacuum cleaners are available).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[WarrenH]

WD Black - they're designed for reliability.
Regardless of what you chose, go for 7200 drives at least.

[crawfish]

Regardless of what you chose, go for 7200 drives at least.

All I can say is that 5400 RPM green drives have worked great for me since 2007 as dedicated Recorded TV drives recording up to 4 MPEG2 HD streams and playing another, which is as high as I've ever pushed them. OTOH, 7200 RPM drives as boot drives aren't even playing the same game as SSDs, and their small performance improvement over green drives in real world usage doesn't overcome their increased noise levels.

[barnabas1969]

My two Hitachi drives are both 7200, configured as a RAID-0. I wanted 4TB of space in one volume, and I figured that I would need the performance with so many tuners (I have 10 tuners) and so many extenders (4). Since then, I have found that my drives EASILY handle the task. They are also barely audible without the rubber mounting grommets... and completely silent with them.

An HD stream is approximately 20Mbps (that's bits, not bytes). Divide that by 8 bits, and you get 2.5MBps (capital "B" for bytes). Any 5400 RPM drive can easily handle 15+ simultaneous 2.5MBps streams.

[STC]

...go for 7200 drives at least.

I courteously beg to differ. I have not had one single problem due to RPM speed on my 2TB, and I hammer it hard.

[assassin]

There is no need for 7200RPM in HTPC.

In fact, I think they are absolutely contraindicated (if choosing over a 5400-5900 RPM drive). If you want speed then go with a SSD for the OS and programs. Modern green drives have no issues streaming multiple 1080p videos simultanously without breaking a sweat.

Here is an independent reviewer using one of my machines with a 5400RPM drive recording FOUR HD programs and playing back a FIFTH.

Green drives are quieter, cooler, cheaper and potentially last longer than their 7200RPM cousins.

I prefer Samsung, FWIW.

[guppy]

I have always leaned toward Western Digital, yet any name brand is probably fine. Here is a break down on what the western digital model number means. I would recommend the WD20EARX ($120 newegg). Note the WD20EURS is geared toward audio/video, not sure what that actually means as far as build.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/o ... 001028.pdf

[Mike88]

My two Hitachi drives are both 7200, configured as a RAID-0. I wanted 4TB of space in one volume, and I figured that I would need the performance with so many tuners (I have 10 tuners) and so many extenders (4). Since then, I have found that my drives EASILY handle the task. They are also barely audible without the rubber mounting grommets... and completely silent with them.

An HD stream is approximately 20Mbps (that's bits, not bytes). Divide that by 8 bits, and you get 2.5MBps (capital "B" for bytes). Any 5400 RPM drive can easily handle 15+ simultaneous 2.5MBps streams.

How does a HDD write multiple streams at the same time, along with playing one? I presume each data stream is stored in RAM & then written or read out as required. If so, is this housekeeping chore done by WMC, the tuner card, or something else? And does this mean that each program could be scattered among non-sequential sectors?

[barnabas1969]

How does a HDD write multiple streams at the same time, along with playing one? I presume each data stream is stored in RAM & then written or read out as required. If so, is this housekeeping chore done by WMC, the tuner card, or something else? And does this mean that each program could be scattered among non-sequential sectors?

Obviously, when reading/writing multiple streams, the files will become somewhat fragmented (in pretty large chunks), and the drive will need to seek between the various files while reading and writing. The seek time of the drive becomes its biggest limiting factor, especially when the drive becomes very fragmented. Fortunately, recording TV doesn't cause the drive to become excessively fragmented.

A 7200RPM drive can sustain a sequential read or write speed of about 80MBps (that's Bytes... so would be approximately 640 mega-bits per second, or more than 32 HD video streams). But... that's if you're only reading or writing ONE stream of data.

So... as you can probably see... reading/writing 10-15 streams is not too difficult for the drive. It can multi-task, and read/write enough data to stay a little ahead of your needs.

To answer your question about how multiple streams are read or written at once... the simple answer is that a computer really cannot do more than one thing at a time (except multiple mathematical calculations in the case of multi-core CPU's). But, the computer "time slices" each task. It does a little bit of A, and then a little bit of B, etc... and to a human, because it happens so fast, it appears that multiple things are happening all at the same time.

The operating system (in this case, Windows) handles this. The application (Media Center in this case) is completely unaware of this. The application sends the request to the OS. Then, the OS sends the request to the hardware. When the OS needs to read and/or write multiple files at the same time, it queues up those read/write requests if the HDD is not ready and cannot service the requests immediately. And, yes, some of the data is stored in RAM, while waiting for the disk controller to accept the request. The disk controller can also push data to the drive faster than the disk can write it to physical media... and this is why disk drives have a buffer. Basically, this buffer is RAM inside the HDD. But, when the buffer fills up, the disk controller can no longer write more data to the drive, until the data in the buffer is written to the physical media (the disks, or "platters"). When the drive can't accept any more requests, the OS queues the requests in RAM.

But, this happens much faster than you probably need. So, a 5400RPM drive will probably handle your recording needs with ease.

Hope that all made sense. Jack D. and I are becoming re-acquainted tonight.

[adam1991]

Jim Beam White Stag--Black Cherry or Honey Tea, over store-bought ice to take the edge off.

Smooooooooth.

[Mike88]

barnabas1969,

Thanks for the explanation, I really appreciate it.

This is drifting OT, but what happens when I pause the playback of a previously recorded program? Before I built the HTPC one of my thoughts was that since the video is paused perhaps the HDD does not have to spin & read because the data can just be repeatedly read out of RAM. IOW no HHD activity going on.

But I do see my HDD LED still flicker once in a while which means it's still at work. This means the head is still reading data off the platter. I realize the head floats on a thin layer of air & supposedly never touches the platter. But since HDDs do fail, is there any reason for concern if left in the pause mode for any length of time?

[Danno100]

I have about ten 2 GB drives and none have failed (Seagate, WD, Hitachi) since purchase (some over 2 years old). However, I recently purchased a NAS, and my Seagate "..L003" and the WD "...EARS" drives are not recommended and problematic for many. I purchased some Hitachi's and they have worked fine for months.