2 TB hard drive advice wanted

Posted by: tanstaafl.

2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 01:05

I have a pair of Western Digital Caviar Black 1-TB drives (one for data, one for backup) that at present usage rate are going to be full in another 6--8 weeks.

I plan to replace these drives with a pair of 2-TB units. (The 1-TB drives will be "recycled" as replacements for two 300 GB drives. I don't know what I'll do with the left over 300s.)

I've been looking at this drive, but am not wedded to it. The use to which these drives will be put is primarily data archiving. There will be no operating system or executables on them. One of them (the backup) will be used as an eSATA external drive. They will not be used in any kind of RAID setup. Speed is not important, long service life and reliability is.

Of tangential relevance is that the drives will NOT be purchased from Amazon even if they're cheaper. There are literally hundreds of horror stories of how Amazon ships hard drives, rattling around loose in oversized boxes and the DOA rate from Amazon is truly staggering. From Newegg the horror stories are about drives shipped by Newegg's default carrier, UPS, many reviewers say to spend the extra $10 and have them delivered by FedEx.

Is this a good choice of drive for my purposes?

tanstaafl.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 01:15

I'm rather keen on the 64MB cache drives from WD right now, but not the older 32MB cache drives.

And with the caveat that one must run the wdidle3 program (once) on them to fix the stupid 8-second head park default.

The DOA rate from newegg is way too high for me to consider purchasing from them.. some of that does go down to shipping, but other stuff I've purchased from newegg has arrived with zero padding in a huge box. Not so harmful for a video card, perhaps, but a hard drive..???

Fedex vs. UPS wouldn't matter much there: equally bad when the product isn't packaged correctly.

Buy locally at a slight premium, if possible.

Cheers
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 01:39

Originally Posted By: mlord
I'm rather keen on the 64MB cache drives from WD right now, but not the older 32MB cache drives.

And with the caveat that one must run the wdidle3 program (once) on them to fix the stupid 8-second head park default.

Is there an advantage to the 64MB cache drives other than read/write speed? These drives will be used but seldom, and when they are it will be for a continuous data write of about 5 GB, and continuous data reads of about 1.5 GB. In other words, pretty much streaming contiguous data both writing and reading. With that in mind, would the 8-second head park default be a problem worth fixing?

And somewhere I have gotten it in mind that the 64MB cache drives are primarily set up for RAID operation, and not suitable for non-RAID applications because the error correcting routine on the RAID systems is not as robust, but is biased towards swapping out questionable drives even though the errors detected are correctable. Or am I misunderstanding this entirely?

tanstaafl.
Posted by: andy

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 05:51

Odd, Amazon's packing approach in the US must be very different to their UK operation. I have never received anything from Amazon that wasn't very well packed. Even books are shrink wrapped to a piece of cardboard that is then glued to the bottom of the box.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 05:57

Every once in a while I get a package from Amazon that wasn't packed well, but that's certainly the exception and not the rule.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 12:29

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Is there an advantage to the 64MB cache drives other than read/write speed?

They're a half generation newer than the older 32MB/cache drives, with bugs fixed and theoretical reliability improved. Apparently they are variable spin-speed, too.

Quote:
pretty much streaming contiguous data both writing and reading. With that in mind, would the 8-second head park default be a problem worth fixing?

I use my 2nd-gen 1.5TB drive exclusively for streaming (MythTV recording / playback), and bumping the 8-second park time up to 30 seconds was very worthwhile for it. I suppose it may depend upon the I/O pattern of the specific software being used, but an 8-second default seems almost brain-dead to me.

Quote:
somewhere I have gotten it in mind that the 64MB cache drives are primarily set up for RAID operation

Nope. There are special firmware drives just for RAID, with something like "RE" in the name.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 12:32

Oh, and don't forget to align the first partition on an even 8-sector multiple (8 * 512 = 4096 bytes) to match the internal sector size of 4096 bytes.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 12:39

Originally Posted By: mlord
Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Is there an advantage to the 64MB cache drives other than read/write speed?

They're a half generation newer than the older 32MB/cache drives, with bugs fixed and theoretical reliability improved. Apparently they are variable spin-speed, too.

Oh.. the main difference is that they have 500GB platters inside, instead of 333GB platters. Scuttlebutt has it that they're actually the same 333GB platters as the older generation, and the higher capacity comes from using the 4096-byte native sector size, rather than the traditional 512-byte native sector size.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 12:42

Would you recommend buying one of those WD Advanced Format 4K drives Mark? (I'm guessing yes, since AFAIK, all the 64MB versions are 4K drives) Are there any negatives to expect in the short term?
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 13:01

The 64MB-cache WD "Green" drives are my current best recommendation for 3.5" mechanical drives, with the caveat that the 8-second default head park time has to be fixed (change it to 15 or 30 seconds).

These are quiet, low-power (despite the "green" name, they really do consume less power than the drives of old), and give very high performance. Yes, high-performance, despite the 5400rpm spin speed. These are nearly as fast as the current WD Black (7200rpm) drives for most stuff.

Edit: I have a single 1.5TB model in the MythTV box, and it is darned near silent in operation, yet can keep up with multiple simultaneous recordings and playback streams without dropping a frame (I've tried 8 streams with it).

And thus far, they do seem reliable enough. Much better than recent Seagate drives, for example.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 13:10

One more note: the 1TB Black and 1.5TB Green drives that I have here, are the first 3.5" drives that I have actually paid for since the 1990s. Normally I use vendor freebies for everything.

So I'm voting with my wallet on these ones. smile

I do purchase 2.5" drives as well, though. There, my current preference is also WD, and for the same reasons: quiet, very low power usage, and very, very fast.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 13:13

Thanks Mark.
I think those 64MB drivers are sweet also, the only downside is the come at a hefty price premium. I can buy a 32MB 2TB WD drive for about 100 euro here. The 64MB version costs 180 euro. I'm not sure those extra 32MB's and half a new generation software update are worth it.

Also, what is your stance on Samsung HD's? They are usually a bit cheaper than WD, a bit faster and run cooler. (is there a catch?)
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 13:17

Originally Posted By: Archeon
I think those 64MB drivers are sweet also, the only downside is the come at a hefty price premium. I can buy a 32MB 2TB WD drive for about 100 euro here. The 64MB version costs 180 euro.

Mmm.. that's odd. Here in Canada, they are pretty much the same price, never more than a 5% difference.

Quote:
Also, what is your stance on Samsung HD's? They are usually a bit cheaper than WD, a bit faster and run cooler. (is there a catch?)

Samsung was at the top of my shopping list when I went out to get a 1.5TB drive. I like the specs, and people who have them seem to like them a lot.

But none of our local retailers stock them, and I didn't want to online/mail order a drive due to the high failure rates of shipped single/retail drives. So I ended up with the WD Black and Green drives instead.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 13:21

Current pricing (CDN$) from a shop near to us here:
$120 Western Digital Caviar Green (WD20EARS) 2000GB (2TB) SATA 3 Gb/s 64MB (OEM)
$200 Western Digital Caviar Black (WD2001FASS) 2000GB (2TB) SATAII 7200RPM 64MB Cache (OEM)

They no longer even list the older 32MB-cache Green drives.
There are some smaller 1TB drives in stock with 32MB caches, though:

$65 Western Digital Caviar Green (WD10EARS) 1000GB (1TB) SATA 3 Gb/s 64MB (OEM)
$73 Western Digital Caviar Blue (WD10EALS) 1000GB (1TB) SATAII 7200RPM 32MB (OEM)
$90 Western Digital Caviar Black (WD1001FALS) 1000GB (1TB) SATAII 7200RPM 32MB Cache (OEM)
$100 Western Digital Caviar Black (WD1002FAEX) 1000GB (1TB) SATA3 7200RPM 64MB Cache (OEM)
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 13:59

I stand corrected. I've now also found the WD20EARS model for 114 euro The 180 euro model is the WD2001FASS. There also seems to be a RE4 GP WD2002FYPS which costs 240 euro and a RE4 WD2003FYYS model which costs 280 euro! All for the same 2TB! Ok, so those last two models are RAID editions, but if the only difference is still that TLER option, then that's really expensive. smile

Thanks for the list Mark, but I'm only interested in the 2TB models. In fact, if larger models than that would exist I'd probably go for one of those. I've heard rumours about Seagate releasing a 3TB and 4TB model by the end of this year and I really hope the other manufacturers will follow soon. (because I won't ever buy Seagate again - a couple of bad experiences in the past... sick).
But I hear there's a problem with drives bigger than 2TB, it seems these are too large for the Bios'es and so it's impossible to boot from them. EFI should fix this though. I wonder if that is the reason why we've been stuck at that 2TB barrier for this long. Could you provide some info on that Mark? Is the info I currently have correct? And if it is, would it possible to use eg. a 3TB drive in an 'older', non-efi system as a simple storage drive?

(sorry for hijacking your thread Tanstaafl!)
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 14:34

A 2TB drive could present as many as (2 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 / 512) logical 512-byte sectors to the host. If you're keeping track, that's 2^32, or the maximum that can be represented by a 32-bit sector number.

The standard MS-DOS partition table layout, used by most PCs, has a 32-bit field for starting LBA (sector number). Similarly, a second 32-bit field is used for the sector-count for a partition.

Any drive with more than 2^32 sectors (2TB) might be unable to boot from sectors beyond the first 2TB, because the standard MS-DOS partition table has no way to encode higher capacity values in a way that the BIOS understands.

There are lots of ways to work around that. Eg. boot from a partition within the first 2TB, and then let the operating system use a different scheme to identify where the rest of the disk partitions are located.

But disk drive makers, like most computer hardware companies, are reluctant to build things that require any kind of special handling for the typical Windows machine.

So, we've been "stuck" at 2TB for (only) the past year because of that limitation.

Cheers
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 14:43

Originally Posted By: Archeon
(sorry for hijacking your thread Tanstaafl!)

Please! Hijack all you want. You've opened up all kinds of new information.

Can you or Mark address the TLER thing in more detail? I'm confused bout that, it's where I got the (apparently) mistaken idea bout RAID-specific drives not being suitable for regular desktop use.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 14:47

Originally Posted By: andy
I have never received anything from Amazon that wasn't very well packed.

Nor have I. But apparently hard drives are the exception. Read the Amazon customer reviews on any of their larger hard drives, and the great majority of the bad reviews (1-star and 2-star) express amazement at how badly packaged the drive was and many are not surprised to find their drives DOA. Even the good reviews express gratitude that the drive arrived in working condition despite the packaging.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 14:55

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Can you or Mark address the TLER thing in more detail?

Time Limited Error Recovery is a drive feature. When enabled, the drive is supposed to not try very hard to self-correct media errors, so that it is guaranteed to always either succeed or fail within a known, short, time interval. This is useful for RAID1 arrays, where data is replicated (mirrored) in other places (and also for other mirroring RAID types).

But it's a bad feature when the drive is the only drive with the data --> for this, one normally wants the drive to try really hard to recover the data, even if it takes 10-20 seconds to do so.

For some peculiar reason, WD is treating this as a permanently enabled/disabled feature, dependent upon different firmware versions. Rather than just having the feature present in all firmware, disabled until the operating system sends a command to enable it.

Weird, but that's how they do it.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 15:05

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Originally Posted By: Archeon
(sorry for hijacking your thread Tanstaafl!)

Please! Hijack all you want. You've opened up all kinds of new information.

Thanks! smile

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.

Can you or Mark address the TLER thing in more detail? I'm confused bout that, it's where I got the (apparently) mistaken idea bout RAID-specific drives not being suitable for regular desktop use.

It's got something to do with conflict as to whether error handling should be undertaken by the hard drive or by the RAID controller. WD had added a 7 second delay on RE disks so the RAID controller would have the time to pick up and act upon them. WD claims this is necessary, and sells these RE drives at a considerable price premium. The stupid part is that there is a small application floating around on the web which can also set this TLER switch on non RE disks, effectively making them RE disks at considerably lower cost. Of course WD also claims there are other difference to the RE series like use of better materials etc, but afaik that has never been proven. It is a fact though that, by taking this step, WD has made building a RAID array considerably more expensive for users - if they choose to actually by the real RE drives that is.
There is a wiki entry for this.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 15:11

Note that for most of us, the non-TLER firmware is probably best, even for RAID applications -- the non-TLER firmware will give the most reliable error-protection for our data.

[EDIT]
There should be no real performance difference between TLER and non-TLER except when handling media errors (but see my subsequent post below).
[/EDIT]

The folks who need TLER are companies like VISA, who don't appreciate it when their entire transaction processing system comes to a halt for for 10-20 seconds just because one drive in the array has a bad sector.. wink
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 15:21

There may also exist other forms of Raid-Enhanced (RE) firmware for drives, with or without the TLER feature tagged on.

These drives differ from desktop drives in that they often have a much smaller sector Read-Ahead value/algorithm than usual, so that they perform better for server-style applications that jump all around on the disks.

The theory there is that they are often at the end of a much slower (than the drive) network connection, shared by many clients, so they'll not normally be doing large/long sequential reads.

On a desktop drive, long sequential reads (eg. application loading, or reading/writing media files) are much more common and well worth optimizing for.

Many people firmly believe that "Enterprise" and "RE" drives also have different hardware internals -- longer lasting bearings and better vibration dampening etc. This is undoubtedly true for some models, but I find it difficult to believe when comparing two otherwise identical spin-rate drives from the same manufacturer.

Cheers
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 15:25

Originally Posted By: Archeon
There is a wiki entry for this.

The article states "RE disks are only suitable for RAID arrays and Caviar are only suitable for non-RAID use."

So I am assuming that Mark's recommendation of the WD20EARS would be a suitable drive for my purposes. Is that correct? That is, the WD20EARS is NOT TLER, and for non-raid applications I don't want TLER.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 15:27

Originally Posted By: Archeon
WD had added a 7 second delay on RE disks

Not a delay, but rather a time-limit: The idea is that no read/write operation will ever take more than 7 seconds to succeed or fail on those drives.

In the absence of media errors, all operations will normally take only a few milli-seconds on these drives or on regular drives.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 15:30

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
The article states "RE disks are only suitable for RAID arrays and Caviar are only suitable for non-RAID use."

That's only half correct. RE/TLER disks are indeed only suitable for RAID (mirroring) uses. But regular "Caviar" drives can also be used in RAID arrays without trouble, as they have been for decades now. The main difference is how long each type takes to report (or recover from) a bad-sector.

Quote:
So I am assuming that Mark's recommendation of the WD20EARS would be a suitable drive for my purposes. Is that correct?

I think so. smile
And practically NOBODY really wants TLER (outside of big enterprise applications), even if they think they do (see post above).
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 20:24

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
So I am assuming that Mark's recommendation of the WD20EARS would be a suitable drive for my purposes. Is that correct?

Originally Posted By: mlord
I think so. smile


My concerns now are a little bit of uncertainty about the Advanced Format but from what I've read (thanks, Archeon, for the Wikipedia link) it looks like that will be transparent to Vista; and a concern about the number of Newegg reviewers who were not enchanted with the WD20EARS. (See picture) About 25% of them experienced DOAs or failures within the first week or so, and the percentage is actually higher because a fair portion of the reviews reported multiple failures in the same review. Balancing that is the thought that the a pissed-off person whose drive arrives DOA or fails after a week with loss of data is much more likely to write a review than is someone who buys the disk, pops it into his computer and it works with no problems. (Both of my WD1001FALS Caviar Black 1-TB disks fell into that latter category, and I didn't write a review.)

So, as a result of this thread, I have learned a lot about large capacity drives, TLER, RAID, Desktop, Advance Format, maximum addressable space, sector size, etc. Mark, any time you want me to explain disk drives to you, let me know. (J u u s s t kidding!) smile

So now the decision. Do I want to go with the WD20EARS "Green" drives, or the WD2001FASS "Black" drives. The Blacks are 50% more expensive but have a 66% longer warranty and are higher performance, 7200 RPM with 64MB cache. With present systems, there seems to be no advantage to the 4096K sectoring, and in random writes a significant disadvantage. Additionally, the Blacks are not bleeding-edge technology with Advanced Format, variable speed, and automatic head parking every 8 seconds as are the Greens. The Blacks are considered to be the very top of the WD desktop lineup. Yet, the Greens run quieter and cooler, use less power, and cost less. With the Advance Format sectoring, the Greens get by with three platters, the Blacks take (I think) four. Less complexity is a good thing.

So is it worth it to spend the extra $120 for two Blacks? Gaaah! Look at me, dithering over this as if it were really important and would make a big difference in my life a year from now. I just have to keep in mind the way SWMBO and I keep things running smoothly: I make all the important decisions, she makes the small ones. So she'll decide things like should we retire and move to Mexico, what house will we buy, things like that. I decide things like what should be our policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, how will we fix the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, things like that. Works out well.

So, Mark, tell me: EARS or FASS? The money isn't that big a factor...

tanstaafl.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 21:54

I know you're using a drive for backup, but I'd also recommend using an online backup service like Mozy or Carbonite. Even with a backup drive you're still prone to damage and theft. I recently upgraded to Mozy Unlimited from the free account I've been using for a couple years (to back up important documents and financial stuff). I can't tell you how much of a relief it is to know that my wedding videos and photos are also outside my home (encrypted before they left).

I've gone through the restore process for one of my clients with Mozy. I had recommended it to him, and he was extremely happy he had it when a pipe burst and drenched/destroyed the laptop sitting underneath it (including the hard drive).

On a separate note, I recently jumped on a Newegg deal for a 2TB Samsung external drive (getting rid of stock, I assume). I love having all the space, but I wouldn't keep any important data on it or I'd add it to my Mozy backup. I use it exclusively as a media drive. I do love having the space, though! Price was the only factor for me, as I didn't care how fast or even how reliable the drive was, so I definitely grabbed the $99 2TB drive.

*edit*
However, I'm transferring about 23GB of files to that drive, and getting an average of about 37MBps, so it's not too slow.
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 23:35

Originally Posted By: Dignan
I know you're using a drive for backup, but I'd also recommend using an online backup service like Mozy or Carbonite.

The fly in the ointment there is "online". Perhaps I don't understand how it works, so if I'm wrong here, please tell me.

Let's say I have 1.5 TB of data to back up. That comes to 12 Tb (Tera-bits) of data: 1,649,267,441,664 of data that I would have to upload at a rate of 1.84 Mb/sec (see attached photo), or to make the math a bit less confusing, at 1,929,380 bits per second (1024 bits/kilobit, 1024 kilobits/megabit). That would take 854,817 seconds, or 237 hours, or roughly 10 days of continuous uploading. Assuming my upload speed remains constant (I have seen it as high as 1.98 Mb/sec, as low as .37) and assuming my internet connection even remains connected for 10 straight days which in my experience (this is Mexico!) would be unprecedented. I suppose the trick would be to do it piecemeal, a couple of hours a day, in which case the backup would take about four months to complete.

My 6 Mb/sec download speed is the envy of all my friends and neighbors here, and is the fastest and most expensive internet connection available in this part of Mexico. (I think it costs me about $50 USD/month, but that includes cable television which I don't watch. Ever.) It is not, however, reliable. At the provider's request I am now keeping a log of the status of my cable modem at the time of the outages.

And to digress even further... There must be something fundamental about RAID arrays that escapes me. If I understand correctly (and I probably don't) if a hard drive in a RAID fails, you just replace the bad drive and the RAID controller rebuilds the data... unless a second drive fails before the rebuild is completed, at which point all the data in the array is lost. That seems pretty scary to me. I feel much safer having my data duplicated on a separate external hard drive. Even if my computer catches on fire I will still have my backup. Another thing I don't care for with RAID is if I do something stupid and mistakenly change a file (I did that on a very important, very large Excel file - left a column out of a sort and then saved the file) that file is changed in your RAID and there's no going back. My backup may be a few days out of date, but at least I still have the original file.

Probably I'm blowing smoke here, because a lot of people who know a whole lot more about computers than I ever will know swear by RAID systems,. I probably just don't understand them.

Your point about losing the data through theft, though, gives me pause. Crimes against persons where I live are very rare. Crimes against property is another matter. OK, you've convinced me. I won't do the on-line backup, but I am going to start putting my external backup drive in a hidden storage place where I keep my valuable papers (passport, FM3 visa, etc.)

Thank you for bringing that thought to my attention.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 23:44

I need to toss a 2TB drive into my ReadyNAS as I'm just about out of space on the 4 1.5TB drives I have in there now. Reading the reviews on the various 2TB models has got me a little worried though. Lots of failures from every brand.

t doesn't help either that the ReadyNAS drive compatibility list isn't kept as up to date as one would hope. Drive manufacturers EOL some models rather quickly. As Mark pointed out, I can't get any of the 32MB cache WD models locally either.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/07/2010 23:48

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
And to digress even further... There must be something fundamental about RAID arrays that escapes me. If I understand correctly (and I probably don't) if a hard drive in a RAID fails, you just replace the bad drive and the RAID controller rebuilds the data... unless a second drive fails before the rebuild is completed, at which point all the data in the array is lost.


You can have dual redundancy in a RAID setup as well, so you can have up to two drives fail. But... The fundamental part is that RAID is not a backup solution. It's for live data. I keep my notebook backed up and really important files like photos I further keep duplicate live copy on the RAID and a second backup on my web server. I don't however have the bulk of my RAID array backed up. Though I should.
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 00:36

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
The fundamental part is that RAID is not a backup solution. It's for live data.

Ah! That makes sense now. RAID is for when you can't afford downtime with your computer, and data safety is taken care of another way, i.e., backups. Thank you.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 00:42

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Reading the reviews on the various 2TB models has got me a little worried though. Lots of failures from every brand.

The only salvation there is if you look at the pattern of the failures. Most failures are DOAs, and of the remainder most of those fail within the first couple of weeks. It looks like if you make it through the first couple of months you're home free.

Some of the bad reviews are also related to misunderstanding, such as confusion over which drives are TLER, and apparently some of the Western Digital drives (the Advance Format drives?) are not happy in a non-Windows environment. Especially you want Vista or 7 with Advance Format.

If you do enough research, things don't look quite as grim as they seem at first glance.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 02:08

You are correct, it will take an incredible amount of time to perform the initial backup. Upload speeds really are pretty terrible all over North America, so you kind of get screwed there.

It took me about a week to back up all my data, and that was with 5Mbps up. But the whole idea is that after that, it's only a little each time you add/change files.

Also - and I don't know how/if Carbonite does this - but with Mozy you can set/schedule upload speeds and set upload times. And if the upload is ever interrupted, the program will just pick up where it left off. It's really set-it and forget-it.

But I do understand that you don't have the biggest outbound pipe, so that would be a concern.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 10:36

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Reading the reviews on the various 2TB models has got me a little worried though. Lots of failures from every brand.

The only salvation there is if you look at the pattern of the failures. Most failures are DOAs, and of the remainder most of those fail within the first couple of weeks.

Yes, those write-ups had me concerned at first. But eventually I figured out that these were probably all due to having UPS deliver a poorly packed and highly fragile mechanical marvell over long distances.

All brands seemed to have the same DOA complaints, as did most large online vendors.

The local shops sell tons of the same drives, and claim nary a single return on them (do I believe them?).

So, I decided to get the big drives, paying my own cash for the first time in over a decade, but made sure to buy them locally. Bulk shipments to shops generally come much better packed than single drive shipments to consumers, so one would expect the DOA rate to be near zero there.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 10:41

Quote:
So is it worth it to spend the extra $120 for two Blacks?

No. Your application, "backup drive", is exactly one scenario that the Greens were designed for. These are the same drives that WD puts into their various external USB/eSATA enclosures now, which are what most folk buy for backup drives.

Despite the Green being touted as "not high performance" everywhere, the one I have here is the fastest drive in the rather extensive collection of mechanical drives here. I think it's even faster than the 1TB Black drive here. At least for the uses I put it to.

Faster than the 750GB Seagate and Hitachi "performance" drives, too. Speaking of which, I plan to never pay my own money for 3.5" drives from either of those two makers.

Cheers
Posted by: Tim

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 10:42

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Originally Posted By: andy
I have never received anything from Amazon that wasn't very well packed.

Nor have I. But apparently hard drives are the exception. Read the Amazon customer reviews on any of their larger hard drives, and the great majority of the bad reviews (1-star and 2-star) express amazement at how badly packaged the drive was and many are not surprised to find their drives DOA. Even the good reviews express gratitude that the drive arrived in working condition despite the packaging.

That surprises me. The last couple HDDs I got from Amazon were packaged in between two plastic pieces that kept the drive suspended and then so many packing peanuts that I couldn't even dig around with a couple fingers without the damn things going everywhere.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 10:52

Originally Posted By: mlord
made sure to buy them locally.

For Bruno:

Specifically, I got them from a local walk-in shop of canadacomputers. If you visit the link, click on "Contact us (at the top) to get a list of shops with google maps. There are several locations not far from you.

Cheers
Posted by: DWallach

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 11:57

Originally Posted By: Dignan
You are correct, it will take an incredible amount of time to perform the initial backup. Upload speeds really are pretty terrible all over North America, so you kind of get screwed there.

My solution: I keep a Firewire RAID box (made by LaCie) at work that's big enough to hold all my home backups. When the image I want to push is too large, I simply carry it home, run the rsync locally, and then carry it back to work. Smaller incremental rsync ops run faster.

Even if you don't have a work office where you can get away with that, you could certainly leverage a friend's house for the same sort of thing.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 12:09

That's definitely another good solution. My basic suggestion was: get your backup out of your house! Having a backup drive right next to your computer only protects from hard disk failure, and even then just against single disk failure. You'd better hope your backup drive is healthy too, if you ever want to restore.

So yes, use a friend's or relative's house smile
Posted by: peter

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 12:13

Originally Posted By: DWallach
When the image I want to push is too large, I simply carry it home, run the rsync locally, and then carry it back to work. Smaller incremental rsync ops run faster.

If you have an Ipod or suchlike, you could look into "rsync --only-write-batch" which is for solving exactly that problem. (And which was added to rsync following a suggestion made on their mailing-list by, uh, me.)

Peter
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 12:23

Mark, I buy all my drives from Canadacomputers. I have for about 12 years actually. smile

When I worked in Thornhill I was first visiting their Pacific Mall location in Markham. Then I started going to their Richmond Hill location as I also conveniently moved near there. A while after moving to Vaughan they opened a location there as well. Now living in Milton I drive to the Misissauga location. I've heard a rumor that they're supposed to open a location here in town, but I haven't seen anything announced yet.

The past four drives were actually the exception, I bought them from NCIX, and knock on wood, I didn't have any issues with shipping (well packed and delivered by Purolator).
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 12:33

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
The Blacks are … 66% longer
The Blacks are considered to be the very top
So is it worth it to spend the extra $120 for two Blacks?

Damn, Doug. I didn't know you thought that way. At least you admit that
Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
the Blacks are not … technology
wink
Posted by: Roger

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 13:28

Originally Posted By: DWallach
My solution: I keep a Firewire RAID box (made by LaCie) at work that's big enough to hold all my home backups.


I have a pair of USB external disks, one of which is at home, the other in my desk drawer at work. About twice a month, I use rdiff-backup to push a backup to the disk at home, then I take it to work and swap it for the one there.

I only have about 500GB that needs to be backed up, so I'm not that fussed about space (yet), and the twice a month incremental rarely takes more than an hour.

At some point, I'll see if I can persuade the in-laws to let me put a server and external disk on the end of their broadband, but it's not that urgent.
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 13:59

Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
The Blacks are … 66% longer
The Blacks are considered to be the very top
So is it worth it to spend the extra $120 for two Blacks?

Damn, Doug. I didn't know you thought that way. At least you admit that


Yeah, but what I really want to know is how did all these people who send me emails every day find out that my penis was too small? D'ya think they're Blacks? smirk

tanstaafl.
Posted by: RobotCaleb

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 17:04

This is all great info. My NAS is running out of room (46 gig free of 3.5TB) and I'm looking into 2TB drives as well. I've learned a lot reading this thread and I thank you all for that. I've currently got 5 WD10EADS drives and was looking at the WD20EADS as replacements. However, I think I'll go with the WD20EARS based on this thread.

How do I figure out how much my usable space will increase by swapping one of my 1TB drives out for a 2TB? Basically, I'd like to calculate how large of a timespan I can spread my 5 drive upgrade over. I think it's a RAID 5 configuration.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 17:29

If I'm not mistaken, your RAID volume size will stay the same as it is now if you upgrade only one of the 1TB drives with a 2TB drive. That's because the system still needs to protect against the failure of the largest drive, your new 2TB. You'll need to put in 2 of them before seeing more space.
Posted by: peter

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 17:44

Unless the NAS in question does something very clever (like the Drobo ones do, for instance), your usable capacity doesn't increase until you've replaced all five drives in the RAID5 set.

Peter
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 18:21

Or ReadyNAS, but I suppose only with their modified XRAID2. I thought QNAP and Synology also had something similar, so I guess I take it for granted that everyone is running this type of setup. wink

So, with a hybrid setup two drives need to be replaced and with a standard RAID5 setup, all disks need to be replaced. However, with standard RAID 5, don't you also have to create a new volume within the new space? In other words, you can't expand the original volume without rebuilding everything (which would require a backup and reformat).

Even with ReadyNAS XRAID2 (latest version) there are still caveats - the replacement drives need to be larger than the largest drives already in the system for expansion. Not so with Drobo. Then again, Drobo is like a time-bomb... wink
Posted by: peter

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 18:38

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
So, with a hybrid setup two drives need to be replaced and with a standard RAID5 setup, all disks need to be replaced. However, with standard RAID 5, don't you also have to create a new volume within the new space? In other words, you can't expand the original volume without rebuilding everything (which would require a backup and reformat).

Again the answer probably varies with the cleverness of the NAS. If it includes tools of the Partition Magic or resize2fs variety, to expand whatever filesystem it uses in-place, then it needn't require the creation of a new volume. But yes, most NAS devices' firmware probably doesn't incorporate such tools.

Peter
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 18:42

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Originally Posted By: hybrid8
The fundamental part is that RAID is not a backup solution. It's for live data.

Ah! That makes sense now. RAID is for when you can't afford downtime with your computer, and data safety is taken care of another way, i.e., backups. Thank you.

That's correct Doug. What you actually need is not a RAID setup. Windows Home Server is perfect for your needs. I think it's one of the best products Microsoft has released in the last decade. It's VERY to work with, and does exactly what it promises to do: backup your data. But in a smart way, not just a simple backup.
It automatically takes daily backups of all your windows computers (XP, Vista or 7) and stores the data on its own drives. But the data actually are snapshots, meaning you can go back several days into your backup. Say you've changed a file by mistake, but only notice this after three days, when the data has already been backed up. With WHS, it's a cinch to the backup of three days ago, and recover the unchanged file.
WHS also uses a completely new file system, based on NTFS of course, but -for now?- only used in WHS. In WHS, there are now drive letters anymore, only storage. If the system has one HD of 2TB, you have 2TB of storage (obviously). BUT... if you add a two new 2TB's, then the system immediately adds these to the storage pool and you have 6 TB of storage! This is the difference with RAID. With RAID, three 2TB drives would only give you 4 TB of usuable space, AND adding these two drive would take a lot of time since the entire RAID array would have to be rebuilt. With WHS, it only takes seconds.
Yes, I hear you say, but it doesn't offer any redundancy like RAID does. If one of the HD's fails, you lose the data. Not really. WHS offers the possibility to duplicate folders or files that are very important to you. Say your 'photos' folder is extremely important to you. Then you can set it like so in WHS that is will backup this particularly folder TWICE, on two separate drives. If one drive should fail, the data is still there on the secondary drive.

WHS is also an excellent media server, so there's that on top of the normal server and backup facilities.

It's smart in other ways too, like it can backup up to ten different PC's, but will only backup the same data once, even if it's on different PC's. This saves a lot of disk space.

You can build your own WHS (basically it's just like building any other PC, but you run WHS as an OS, but there are also pre-build models. The one HP sells is particularly nice
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 18:46

Originally Posted By: mlord
Quote:
So is it worth it to spend the extra $120 for two Blacks?

No. Your application, "backup drive", is exactly one scenario that the Greens were designed for. These are the same drives that WD puts into their various external USB/eSATA enclosures now, which are what most folk buy for backup drives.

Mark, that's exactly the reason why I'm interesed in these drives as well. But I'm wondering: could I use one of those '4k' drives in a RAID array, while the other disks are not 4k drives? Or is this a recipe for disaster? (also, the same question goes for my Windows Home Server, which is not actually RAID, but uses a 'storage pool')
Posted by: RobotCaleb

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 18:50

Looks like this is the procedure I'll follow, then.

http://www.qnap.com/pro_features_RLM.asp#ap01

Good to know that I'd need to replace all 5 drives. Guess I should start looking for a buyer for the old 5. smile
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 20:04

Originally Posted By: mlord
I'm rather keen on the 64MB cache drives from WD right now, but not the older 32MB cache drives.

And with the caveat that one must run the wdidle3 program (once) on them to fix the stupid 8-second head park default.


Mark, can you expand a bit on the wdidle3 program?

Since the two WD20EARS drives I have ordered will not be boot drives, does that mean all I have to do (once they are set up and running) is get to a C:> prompt and type in wdidle3 /D ? (This assumes that I have the wdidle3.exe program located somewhere that the system can find it).

An explanation of the LCC problem and why wdidle3 is necessary would be a good thing, too.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 22:22

Originally Posted By: Archeon
I'm wondering: could I use one of those '4k' drives in a RAID array, while the other disks are not 4k drives?

I don't see why that would be an issue, but then I don't use MS Windows here.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/07/2010 22:29

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
Originally Posted By: mlord
... with the caveat that one must run the wdidle3 program (once) on them to fix the stupid 8-second head park default.


Mark, can you expand a bit on the wdidle3 program?

All I can say on this, is that WD likes to "unload the heads" after 8-seconds of inactivity, and then place the drives into a lower power state. They call this the "Idle 3" state.

If you are just using these for backups, then no worries with the factory setting.

The problem, is that drives are usually rated for a finite number of load/unload cycles -- somewhere on the order of 100,000 - 500,000.

When one of these drives is used as a general purpose system drive, the load/unload counts can very quickly rise into the tens of thousands over the course of a couple of weeks.

So, WD used to make available a utility, WDIDLE3.EXE, to change that value. Of course this is all vendor-proprietary nonsense, instead of simply using the existing standard SATA power management commands.

WD now make it harder to obtain their WDIDLE3 utility, but web pages from them still suggest it is available upon request.

I googled for it here, and found wdidle3-1.03.zip for my 1.5TB drive. I used this to reset the "idle 3" timeout from 8-seconds to 30-seconds on my own drive, at my own risk.

WDIDLE3 /S30

There's a help file in the .zip archive explaining the various command options.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 03:25

Originally Posted By: mlord
Originally Posted By: Archeon
I'm wondering: could I use one of those '4k' drives in a RAID array, while the other disks are not 4k drives?

I don't see why that would be an issue, but then I don't use MS Windows here.

smile
Didn't expect you to. smile But I also have a QNAP NAS, which essentially runs Linux RAID (I think?). I was wondering if this will automatically align the new 4K drive correctly and make it play happily with the other 512b drives?

Edit: partial answer found here. It seems Windows from Vista and up is ok (most of the time whistle), but XP can be troublesome. Windows Home Server, which is based on Windows 2003 server, the XP stack essentially, has problems. This will probably be fixed with the new Windows Home Server "Vail" which is due by the end of this year since that version is based on Windows 2008 server.

It seems the only system that flawlessly recognises these new drives and automatically aligns the partitions correctly is Linux. So no surprises there. smile
Posted by: drakino

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 05:11

Looks like the concept of offsite backup is well talked about, but did want to add my additional thoughts in that it is very critical for anything important. I saw a number of disasters wipe businesses out when I was working at HP in the storage team. Some customers just sadly didn't see the importance, until after a major problem like a flooded datacenter. You have to get data far off site for it to be safe. I remember one story from a customer who had their business in the WTC towers, and their setup had their main datacenter in tower one and the backup in tower two. After the attacks, many businesses were moving the backups at least off the island. For home users, Carbonite and Mozy (among other solutions) provide that offsite backup without much setup or complexity. My personal solution is a Time Capsule at my grandparents house in Colorado. Every night, my old PowerPC Mini powers up, opens the Time Machine backup from the Mac Pro stored on my ReadyNAS, and uses rsync to send up the very important data of mine like all my photos. The initial backup did take a bit, but now that it's there, it's always completing the changes backup overnight.

As far as 4k drives and NASes, still check with your vendor. ReadyNAS Intel based systems added support for them officially with proper alignment in the recently released 4.2.12. Not sure if support for the 4k drives with proper alignment will make it into the Sparc (NV+ and a few others) based ReadyNAS units, but I do know there is at least one more firmware version planned for them.

Also wanted to chime in and say I've been pleased with the Samsung 2TB EcoGreen series. I have 3 of them running in my ReadyNAS Ultra 4, and have put them through quite a bit of testing during the beta period. They make a very weird spinup sound though. Performance seems to be around ~65 ish MB/s when attached via SATA. Not the speediest drives, but they weren't meant to be. I need to do some speed tests on them in the Ultra after a factory default, but from my earlier testing, I was getting native speed from them over the network too.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 11:55

Originally Posted By: Archeon
It seems the only system that flawlessly recognises these new drives and automatically aligns the partitions correctly is Linux. So no surprises there. smile

Well, Win7 and Vista both apparently Do The Right Thing by default, or so they say.

Many Linux distros still do the wrong alignment by default -- putting partition 1 at sector 63 rather than sector number 64 (65th sector). I don't know what your QNAP does, but probably the same.

Blame WD for some of that -- there's a standard way for the drive to inform the O/S of correct alignment, and the beta versions of these drives did that correctly, but somehow it got lost when they went to production.

There's a jumper on the drive to have it internally offset everything by 512 bytes, for use with appliances like QNAP.

Oh.. and scratch the variable spin speed thought -- these drives are actually fixed at 5400rpm, despite WD's marketing lingo. wink
Posted by: Roger

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 11:57

Originally Posted By: Archeon
This will probably be fixed with the new Windows Home Server "Vail" which is due by the end of this year since that version is based on Windows 2008 server.


It's based on Windows 2008 R2, so it's x64 only. I had a play with the preview release a few months ago, and it looked pretty good. It was even usable on the Intel Atom I threw at it. I'm not using it right now, though, because I didn't want to become dependent on a pre-release. When it's out, I'll probably pick it up again.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 12:12

Originally Posted By: Roger
It was even usable on the Intel Atom I threw at it.

How is that possible? I thought the Atom was a 32 bit CPU? As you say Vail is x64 only?

edit: your Atom must be Diamondville or Pineview core then?
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 12:20

I've just reverted my ReadyNAS firmware back to a version that doesn't properly deal with 4k sectors, so I'm likely going to pick up a Seagate 2TB drive instead of the WD. That will be tomorrow at the earliest, so I suppose I still have a day to change my mind, depending on how my ReadyNAS testing goes...
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 12:41

Ugh. After a massive slew of drive failures here and with a buddy last year, I now specifically recommend AGAINST any Seagate drive purchases. For an outdated NAS, just install the compatibility jumper onto the back of a WD EARS drive. Or get a Samsung.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 13:13

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
I've just reverted my ReadyNAS firmware back to a version that doesn't properly deal with 4k sectors, so I'm likely going to pick up a Seagate 2TB drive instead of the WD. That will be tomorrow at the earliest, so I suppose I still have a day to change my mind, depending on how my ReadyNAS testing goes...

Fully agreeing with Mark here Bruno: please, save yourself the agony and DON'T buy Seagate! If you want to stay away from 4K drives completely, there's also still the WD20EADS drive series which isn't 4K, but also only has 32MB of cache...
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 13:29

EADS drives aren't available locally - they haven't been for a long time as I also looked a few months ago. The EARS is not on the ReadyNAS compatibility list.

I have 4 Seagate 1.5TB drives in the NAS right now, all with updated firmware. The one with the most reallocated sectors is up to 18 - it started at 0 on December 8th of 2009.

I also have 4 Seagate drives in my PVR which have been doing well. 2x 500GB, a 300GB and a 250GB.

The problem reports on the Seagate drives (in general) do worry me and that's why I was looking at something else. I'd jump on the Samsung if I could buy it locally. Perhaps I will take the chance with the WD and apply the patch to change the parking time-out to 30 seconds as well as the jumper to operate in legacy mode.
Posted by: Roger

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 14:00

Originally Posted By: Archeon
Originally Posted By: Roger
It was even usable on the Intel Atom I threw at it.

How is that possible? I thought the Atom was a 32 bit CPU? As you say Vail is x64 only?

edit: your Atom must be Diamondville or Pineview core then?


I ran it on an Acer Aspire R3610, which uses an Intel Atom 330, which is a Diamondville, so yes: it supports x64.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 14:09

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Perhaps I will take the chance with the WD and apply the patch to change the parking time-out to 30 seconds as well as the jumper to operate in legacy mode.

If you can't find a Samsung drive anywhere, I'd take the WD option -with or without jumper hack- any day of the week over Seagate.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 15:55

Heh, I love how around every 1 to 2 years this board has a hard drive debate. In all the previous threads it seems like there's been one person who, for example, swears by Western Digital because they had 10 Seagate drives fail on them in two years, and then it seems like there's someone with the exact opposite experience. I want to say that Rob R hated Western Digital or something...

I understand why they didn't, but I wish Google had released the results of their hard drive failure analysis. I think they indicated a fairly clear winner.

Anyway, these days I find myself going almost completely by price, as long as it isn't my main drive. Anything valuable is backed up, and anything that isn't is just a minor annoyance when/if it's lost. However, given a choice I'd probably go with Western Digital. They make good products, and their external drives are incredible. I have two 500GB USB drives that are silent from about 1ft.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 16:07

I've never personally owned any WD drives. I've only ever used them when I worked at ATI where I saw an inordinate number of them go tits up in various Macs.

For personal use I've primarily used Seagate since the early 90's (all SCSI in the 90's) with a bunch of Maxtor (PATA) spread in there as well. All my SATA drives have been Seagate except for a single Maxtor. I've had 2 Maxtors and 2 Seagate drives die. One of them (can't remember which) was my fault for connecting a power plug from an external case upside down.
Posted by: tman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 16:16

Eh. Everybody has different opinions about the various drive manufacturers. I know people that swear by Seagate. Others that are WD only etc...

I personally won't touch a Maxtor drive because I've had so many fail but I've been okay with Seagate. Maxtor was bought out or merged with Seagate so no idea whether I'll trust them now.

IBM/Hitachi were okay and I did even have a few of the Deathstar drives but I've not bought any of their drives recently.

If I had to buy a drive right now then I'd probably get a WD.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 17:07

My first hard drives were Connor hard drives. They gave me a lot of grief since two of three drives died after some time of use. Then Seagate bought Connor and I figured, let's give them a try. Bad idea. Another dead drive, but to be honest, a couple of good drives as well (medalist series). So then I tried Maxtor. Worst idea yet. EVERY Maxtor drive I've ever owned failed on me. Then Seagate bought Maxtor. And I started having problems with Seagate (there must be some red line here). Back then, WD was always a bit more expensive than the other brands and I was a poor student, so I still thought with my wallet. But then I thought, more expensive or not, I'll buy a few of those Caviar drives. Best choice yet. I've never had ANY WD drive fail on me. Even though they were a bit more expensive than their competitors (and usually still are, of only a couple of euro!), I thought they and my data were well worth it.

I've stayed loyal to the brand up until Samsung started making hard drives and with the F1 drive created a harddisk that was hard to ignore: it was faster, ran cooler and was cheaper than any competing brand. AND they turned out to be excellent drives! I now own 6 of them and none have failed me yet, even though they gave me some problems at first (but that turned out to be the fault of some crappy external enclosure chipset). So since then I've bought Samsung, mainly because they offer so much value for money. But I still love WD too and for this reason I've bought a Velociraptor drive to use as my primary HD last year.

That's my story... I'm sure others have different experiences, but many of my friends have the same. Maxtor is the absolute worst. Then Seagate. I've never touched Hitachi since their drives already had problems in the days they were still called IBM. (mainly heat issues and that irrirating creeping sound every so many minutes when the hard drives parked their heads - it seems they never got their act together from what I've read)

I'm not saying WD drives or Samsung cannot fail. Of course they can, they are mechanical objects. I AM saying though that with these brands, you'll have the best chance of actually getting your money's worth with drives which will serve you great until YOU decide to replace them with a newer model.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 17:54

I think it's reasonably obvious that a large portion of this is anecdotal (though not necessarily irrelevant) data. There are, though, a number of noted widespread failures, like the Deathstars and the recent WD Green head-parking issue.

The thing that I've noticed, though, is that no one manufacturer is always the best. I suspect that there's enough cutting-edge engineering going on that it's always a crapshoot when a new model comes out. Part of the problem is that new models seem to be more and more frequent, so that bugs tend not to get worked out over time, and there's not a long enough in-market time for there to be any significant feedback. That is, by the time that the drives die, they're already well into a new model.

At this point, I have absolutely no idea what to get. I've had nasty failures from each of the notable manufacturers, and the couple of new manufacturers scare me. (I can't seem to find references now, but I could swear I saw some boxes not too long ago with brand names I'd never heard of.)

I think the best bet is to run RAID and have, if at all possible, different drives as members, in order to try and prevent coincident failures.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 18:18

Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Part of the problem is that new models seem to be more and more frequent, so that bugs tend not to get worked out over time, and there's not a long enough in-market time for there to be any significant feedback. That is, by the time that the drives die, they're already well into a new model.

I don't entirely agree with that. Hard drives development seems to have stagnated in the last couple of years. Up until a few years, drive sizes were rapidly increasing. It seemed like every so many months, the capacity doubled. That came to a halt once the 1TB barrier was reached. Then everything slowed down considerably. It took a lot of time before the 1.5 TB drives were released, and now 2TB has been the maximum size for quite some time (2 years?). So what are HD manufacturers doing with that 'extra time'? Most of them don't spend it on SSD development, that's for sure. Of all the classical hard drive manufacturers, only Western Digital has now got an SSD (which is not particularly good). Samsung has them too, but that's to be expected from a company which also produces the flash ram chips needed to create such an SSD.
I also can't believe the're now spending MORE time on ironing out bugs, because, as you say yourself, there tend to be more bugs plaguing released hardware these days than fewer. So what are they directing their efforts at?
Posted by: peter

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 18:32

Data density is still increasing -- look at 2.5in drives, which have carried on getting bigger -- but the manufacturers have for some reason been using that headroom to build drives the same capacity with fewer platters, rather than larger capacity. Presumably part of the reason is the thing with traditional partition tables only dealing with drives up to 2TB, but that can't be the whole story (people have had RAID arrays >2TB usable for a while), and you'd still think there'd be a market for capacious (if slow) drives for media servers and so on.

Peter
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 18:56

Originally Posted By: peter
... and you'd still think there'd be a market for capacious (if slow) drives for media servers and so on.

Indeed. Maybe Quantum did have a good point with their Bigfoot series then. Just kidding. smile
Posted by: peter

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 19:39

Originally Posted By: Archeon
Indeed. Maybe Quantum did have a good point with their Bigfoot series then. Just kidding. smile

You know, I almost mentioned those but decided against it. They got a lot of ridicule for being slow, which they unarguably were, but they had more capacity than anything else on the market. A Bigfoot made in today's technology would be 10-20TB.

Peter
Posted by: tman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 20:15

Originally Posted By: Archeon
Hard drives development seems to have stagnated in the last couple of years. Up until a few years, drive sizes were rapidly increasing. It seemed like every so many months, the capacity doubled. That came to a halt once the 1TB barrier was reached. Then everything slowed down considerably. It took a lot of time before the 1.5 TB drives were released, and now 2TB has been the maximum size for quite some time (2 years?). So what are HD manufacturers doing with that 'extra time'?

You're assuming that they can just scale their existing technology forever. The HD manufacturers aren't just going oh well people have enough storage we'll just sit here and wait.

The jumps in areal density are because they're introducing new technology to boost the number of bits you can pack onto a platter. The last big jump in storage capacity was because of Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) being added which significantly reduced the size of each bit. They're getting close to the limits of this technology for HDs and the next generation technology just isn't ready yet. Read this article.
Posted by: tman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/07/2010 20:22

Originally Posted By: peter
but the manufacturers have for some reason been using that headroom to build drives the same capacity with fewer platters, rather than larger capacity.

Heat dissipation and power consumption is getting to be a big thing these days. The storage appliance people are having trouble with packing in large numbers of drives into enclosures now because of this. As areal density gets higher, the effects of vibration are also getting to be pretty significant. There is video of somebody at Sun with monitoring software running on a SAN that could actually detect somebody making a loud noise nearby from the increase in access time due to vibration.

Originally Posted By: peter
Presumably part of the reason is the thing with traditional partition tables only dealing with drives up to 2TB, but that can't be the whole story (people have had RAID arrays >2TB usable for a while)

If PC manufacturers ever move away from the ye olde PC BIOS and on to something like EFI with GPT support then 2TB+ drives wouldn't be a problem.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/07/2010 04:40

Originally Posted By: peter
...They got a lot of ridicule for being slow, which they unarguably were, but they had more capacity than anything else on the market. A Bigfoot made in today's technology would be 10-20TB.

I'm sure there's still a market for such drives. Their access times were indeed horrible, but that wouldn't matter too much if they would be used for storage/backup of large amounts of data. They would be ideal in video/backup servers. I'm pretty sure I would be interested in buying one of those.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/07/2010 05:18

Originally Posted By: tman
They're getting close to the limits of this technology for HDs and the next generation technology just isn't ready yet. Read this article.

Interesting article! Not very encouraging though... I'm hoping the new technologies will be available soon!
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/07/2010 13:34

Originally Posted By: Archeon
I'm hoping the new technologies will be available soon!

In my fantasies I visualize data storage in a piece of crystal the size of a sugar cube, containing petabytes* of data, addressed/accessed by three tiny lasers at mutual right angles. Data transfer speed limited by speed of light considerations.

tanstaafl.

*Megabyte = 2^20 bytes
*Gigabyte = 2^30 bytes
*Terabyte = 2^40 bytes
*Petabyte = 2^50 bytes
*Exabyte. = 2^60 bytes
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/07/2010 14:54

Originally Posted By: tanstaafl.
data storage in a piece of crystal

Holographic data storage
Posted by: Dignan

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/07/2010 20:10

Whatever happened to "Pixie Dust?" I've been trying to Google it but all I find are articles about the future of it (mostly dated 2001-2003), and nothing about what happened. It doesn't appear to be even mentioned on Wikipedia (aside from Tinker Bell).
Posted by: tman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/07/2010 20:21

Originally Posted By: Dignan
Whatever happened to "Pixie Dust?" I've been trying to Google it but all I find are articles about the future of it (mostly dated 2001-2003), and nothing about what happened. It doesn't appear to be even mentioned on Wikipedia (aside from Tinker Bell).

"Pixie dust" = Antiferromagnetically-Coupled media

It has already been implemented.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 15/07/2010 19:00

Ok, I picked up the WD20EARS and now I'm making a book CD to be able to run wdidle3 (I have version 1.5 - hopefully it's suitable)

Mark, for use in a RAID (ReadyNAS' modified 5/6), do you recommend 30 seconds, some other value (in multiples of 30 seconds only) or completely disabling the idle timer?
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 16/07/2010 22:59

I think anything from 20-30 seconds should be good enough.

I use 30 seconds in the MythTV box.
Posted by: LittleBlueThing

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 18/07/2010 11:31

Originally Posted By: Dignan
Heh, I love how around every 1 to 2 years this board has a hard drive debate.

Anyway, these days I find myself going almost completely by price, as long as it isn't my main drive. Anything valuable is backed up, and anything that isn't is just a minor annoyance when/if it's lost.


Here in the UK I go by "who offers an advance-replacement warranty". Currently only Samsung AFAIK.

I figure that most of the errors are a few bad blocks and usually part of a RAID - I want the replacement drive around before I pull the failing disk and do a ddrescue on it.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/07/2010 20:23

Now I'm wrestling with abysmal performance on my ReadyNAS. I'm talking about writes of less than 10MB/s (often between 1 and 4 MB/s) and reads from 6 to 30MB/s depending on what's being read...
Posted by: RobotCaleb

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/07/2010 23:46

Dell has the WD20EARS for 100 today only. Sorry for late notice.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/produ...5-404255-148326
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 20/07/2010 00:14

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Now I'm wrestling with abysmal performance on my ReadyNAS. I'm talking about writes of less than 10MB/s (often between 1 and 4 MB/s) and reads from 6 to 30MB/s depending on what's being read...

Are you sure you actually got the head parking issue resolved? Have you checked your LCC (Load Cycle Count) to see if it is a reasonable number and the WIDLE3 program did what it was supposed to do?

tanstaafl.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 20/07/2010 00:21

I used the wdidle3 program to report back the idle time after setting it. I set it to 30 seconds, then read it back, then set it to 2 minutes and it reports that back as well. I was just going to disable it completely, but thought 2 mins was a good cmpromise between that and 30 seconds. Even if it were set to 8 seconds, the drive would never be idle that long on the copy tests I've been doing - 73GB copy is going to spin all the disks for a long while.

I'm pretty confident this is some issue with the latest ReadyNAS firmware which is the first one to support 4k sector drives.

As a point of reference, the same 73GB copy between internal SATA drives averaged out to 56MB/s. I would expect time to the NAS of at least 50-60MB/s, with the internal drives and PC being the bottle neck.

If this issue gets resolved then I can team the two network ports on the PC and the two ports on the NAS to see how much more speed I can squeeze out. BUt first things first. Other people are getting unteamed speeds upwards of 80MB/s writing to the same NAS.
Posted by: tman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 20/07/2010 02:11

Depending on your setup, using NIC teaming aka 802.3ad may not provide any benefits to you.

The maximum that a single network connection can transfer is whatever a single link can do. You won't be able to do a Samba transfer of a file that goes at greater than 1 Gigabit for example.

This limitation is due to how 802.3ad was designed and the load balancing algorithm that is used. It will force all packets from a single connection down 1 link to prevent issues with out of order packets. It won't spread them out between all the links you've got.

The algorithm uses the MAC address and source + destination IP addresses to calculate a hash value which determines which link to use. There are nonstandard implementations which also include the port numbers in the hash calculation.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 20/07/2010 12:04

I did some internal benchmarking (using Bonnie++) on the drives in the NAS and have posted it to the ReadyNAS forums. I'm also about to update a previous support ticket.

Here's the most glaring part of the benchmark output:

Code:
-----------------------DD Results-----------------------------------------------
4090848+0 records in
4090848+0 records out
2094514176 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 151.814 seconds, 13.8 MB/s


That rate is well over 100MB/s on boxes that are working properly.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 20/07/2010 21:23

I've removed the WD drive from the NAS, set its jumpers to operate with 512byte sectors and installed it in my XP system. I'm backing up the NAS onto the WD and two additional 1.5TB USB drives.

Then I'm going to start with the NAS from scratch. I'll feel much better about figure out performance issues once I have everything backed up. Once that's all settled (fingers crossed) I'll put everything back onto the NAS.

The only thing making the copying anything close to sane, is Teracopy, which Matt had recommended and mentioned a number of times last year.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 11/08/2010 19:22

Originally Posted By: mlord

All I can say on this, is that WD likes to "unload the heads" after 8-seconds of inactivity, and then place the drives into a lower power state. They call this the "Idle 3" state.
(...)
I googled for it here, and found wdidle3-1.03.zip for my 1.5TB drive. I used this to reset the "idle 3" timeout from 8-seconds to 30-seconds on my own drive, at my own risk.

WDIDLE3 /S30

There's a help file in the .zip archive explaining the various command options.

Cheers

Mark,

I've now also bought one of those WD20EARS drives, as per you recommendation. I now need to change this idle head park default. I've found the wdidle3 program (a newer version than the one you're mentioning even, the wdidle3-1_05.zip, new since last month).

Now, I've noticed this utility also give you the option to disable the timer completely. Would you recommend this? Or would you still prefer having it changed to 30 seconds instead? What are the benefits of using this timer? Less risk of disk damage when an idle pc is bumped into? Less power consumption? Or something else?
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 03:27

Hi,

I bought a WD 2TB drive last weekend too. It is the Green version (we'll see how that works out), and I bought it locally from Best Buy. It had a marked price of $164.95 but they agreed to sell it to me for the on-line price of $139.95, I called about the previous day. I didn't want to fight shipping damage, I thought it was a reasonable price.

I loaded 1.4TB of music database (majority of my CD collection I ripped with EAC that was on 2 each 1TB drives) on it that night and it seems to work fine. I have used it to play .wav music selections and it doesn't seem to unload the heads or spin down during activity. I guess with .MP3's it may do that. If I get annoyed, I might use the wdidle3 software.

So far, so good.

Ross
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 11:27

You should use the WDidle3 program anyway as your load count is going to rise much more quickly than it would otherwise and WD only warranty the drive up to a certain count (300k?)

I permanently retired the WD from my NAS. Just not worth the headaches - it made my NAS performance go to crap when mixed with the other drives I had in there. I bought a Seagate 2TB for the NAS and it has been performing flawlessly. The WD is permanently installed in my Windows PVR which I've also just migrated to WIndows 7 x64 from Windows XP.

I'm still running the WD with the compatibility jumper set, which I know I don't have to do for Windows 7. Mark, do you expect there to be a performance benefit if I were to run with the drive in its factory un-jumpered (4k) mode? I'd probably have to back everything up and first reformat the drive, right?
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 11:36

I also like to ask: is there an easy way to see if the partitions of the drive are aligned or not? Maybe a small utility which can show the start sector or something?
Posted by: Dignan

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 11:56

Sorry to go off topic (slightly), but is there a way to adjust spin-down time for an external drive? I have an external USB drive that seems to spin down after around two minutes of non-activity, which seems like way too little to me.
Posted by: maczrool

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 12:52

Good luck with your WD Green drive. I've had a couple of their 1.5 TB models. The reliability of them sucked. One had a SMART error come up after a month of use and it's replacement had piss poor performance. I never bothered to do a proper throughput test, but it got a 2.1 Windows 7 Experience score and froze up the PC for minutes at a time along with contributing to 30 minute boot times. I've since replaced it with a 2 TB Seagate Barracuda and so far things are working well again in my HTPC.

Stu
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 13:32

Any decent partitioning utility should show you that. Notably, that excludes Windows' builtin "Disk Management".
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 15:22

Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Any decent partitioning utility should show you that. Notably, that excludes Windows' builtin "Disk Management".

laugh I thought as much! Do you know of any such (preferably free & windows) utility?
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 16:01

The only decent, free, non-sketchy, Windows utility I can find is TestDisk.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 16:14

On a separate note,

Originally Posted By: wfaulk
non-sketchy

Is there, like, one lone guy in the former Soviet Union that does all the web design for every probably-malware piece of software coming out of there? All of those web sites look exactly the same. Which is too bad, because at least some of them are bound to be legit.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 16:39

I've used this program in the past, and the site doesn't look like a Soviet spyware trap wink
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/08/2010 20:24

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Mark, do you expect there to be a performance benefit if I were to run with the drive in its factory un-jumpered (4k) mode?

I cannot imagine where any benefit might come from, so, no.

Cheers
Posted by: Roger

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 04:43

Originally Posted By: wfaulk
Any decent partitioning utility should show you that. Notably, that excludes Windows' builtin "Disk Management".


On the other hand, Windows' built-in DISKPART will show you this information.

You'll need to:

Code:
C:\> DISKPART
DISKPART> sel disk 0
DISKPART> list part
DISKPART> sel part 1
DISKPART> detail part
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 09:20

Ah, I didn't know DiskPart would do that. Thanks Roger. I've used DiskPart to create some extended and logical partitions on the HD because as far as I can seen, the windows disk management software now only allows for the creation of "simple volumes"? (what the heck are those?) This new WD 2 TB drive is my data drive. I've bought an Intel SSD to use as my primary "OS" drive... works wonderfully with Windows7.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 10:48

I just wanted to let everyone know that Newegg is having a 10% off sale on Seagate drives. Well, it's up to $10, but that's still something.

Personally, I'm a WD guy as I've had the opposite experiences of several people in this thread.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 11:06

Not even if they would give them for free, thanks. smile
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 11:54

I do get Seagate drives for free -- there's a whole shelf load of them sitting in front of me.

And not a single one is actively holding data in any of our systems here.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 11:58

Originally Posted By: mlord

And not a single one is actively holding data in any of our systems here.
Cheers

Smart move if you value your data!

Also, can I ask you Mark, with regards to that timer/head park issue of the WD20EARS... I've noticed you can also completely disable this timer with the wdidle3 program. Would you recommend this? Or does disabling this timer cause considerable risks? (more power consumption? disk more prone to crashes? something else?) Thanks!
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 12:02

For a system drive in a desktop, I would probably disable the timer completely.

But on my own 1.5TB drive, used for MythTV recordings, I set it to 30 seconds. Either seems fine to me. It supposedly helps reduce power consumption when idle.

But one user reported that leaving the timer enabled, seems to prevent the NORMAL ATA spindown timer from working, so the drive never spins down for him during long idle spells. Unconfirmed.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 13:11

Hmm... even though it's not a system drive for me, I do find it annoying that it takes a couple of seconds to respond when it's gone idle. I think I will disable the timer completely. Even if this means it will consume more power, how much more can that be anyway? It only consumes 6 watts when reading/writing and supposedly 3.7 Watts when idle. If this means the drive will consume 6 watts all the time (doubtful), I can live with that.

Thanks Mark!
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 13:29

Originally Posted By: Roger
Windows' built-in DISKPART will show you this information

I actually checked DISKPART before I suggested that he download something else. It doesn't show sector information for me:
Code:
DISKPART> detail partition

Partition 1
Type  : 07
Hidden: No
Active: Yes

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
* Volume 1     C                NTFS   Partition     40 GB  Healthy    System
Posted by: TigerJimmy

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 13:57

Can you tell me where to find that new version of wdide? I did some googling and I couldn't find a working version of the utility.

Thanks,

Jim
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 14:11

Have a look here. smile
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 13/08/2010 15:24

Originally Posted By: Archeon
Have a look here. smile

Thank you. I have a pair of WD green drives that my wife will be bringing back from California next week (I'd have paid about $150 in customs duty if I'd had them shipped directly to me) and this is a newer version of the program than I had been able to find.

My two 1-TB drives each have about 2 GB of space free, not even enough to properly defrag them. Times have changed... I remember when the very idea of having a whole gigabyte of hard drive was preposterous, what would anybody do with that much space? Oh, hell, I remember when I had four double-density 5.25" floppies in my CPM machine and was on top of the world with nearly three megabytes of storage.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/08/2010 03:21

Hi,

I lost 750GB to a Seagate drive. I didn't buy Seagate because I couldn't trust them. I use regular back-up procedures so, (in-grained from the old Windows driver development days), I lost very little. I have LOTS of WD drives (laptop in Empegs and desktop),and they seem real solid.

BTW, the WD 2TB I just bought is used only as a data drive for Music Database storage. It is not my system drive. With it installed, I still get a 5.9 Windows Experience becuase Windows Experience is really only interested in the system drive.


I also still have an old Shugart 8 inch dual sided floppy drive around here.

Ross
Posted by: Roger

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/08/2010 05:56

Originally Posted By: wfaulk
DISKPART ... doesn't show sector information for me


Code:
Microsoft DiskPart version 6.1.7600
Copyright (C) 1999-2008 Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: ROGER-NC10

DISKPART> sel disk 0

Disk 0 is now the selected disk.

DISKPART> sel part 1

Partition 1 is now the selected partition.

DISKPART> detail part

Partition 1
Type  : 07
Hidden: No
Active: Yes
Offset in Bytes: 1048576

  Volume ###  Ltr  Label        Fs     Type        Size     Status     Info
  ----------  ---  -----------  -----  ----------  -------  ---------  --------
* Volume 1         System Rese  NTFS   Partition    100 MB  Healthy    System


Windows 7.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/08/2010 06:27

Originally Posted By: Roger

Offset in Bytes: 1048576

So you need to divide this number by 512 (number of bytes per sector), which results in 2048. I've already read that since Vista, this is the sector where the Windows OS starts the partition (was 63 before?). Does this number HAVE to be 2048 to be correct, or can this be any power of 2 number?

BTW, I've also found another way to see the offset in Windows:

How to tell if your disks are aligned?
How can you tell if a disk is unaligned at the Windows partition level? Remember the MBR statement — that x86 systems use the first 63 sectors. Usually there are 512 bytes per sector. If you do the math, 63 x 512 = 32,256. To verify this, log into a machine (physical or virtual) as an administrator that has not had its system volume aligned. Go to Start, then Run, then type in "msinfo32.exe" and press enter. Navigate down to Components, then Storage, then Disks. Notice that the partition starting offset for Disk #0, Partition #0 (the system volume) is 32,256 bytes. This means that the disk is not aligned.

If the partition Starting Offset is 65.536 bytes, the disk is aligned.




This looks like Windows XP though... not sure that "msinfo32.exe" command works the same in Vista or 7. I'll check when I'm back home and have access to my win7 system, but I can't check this on the PC I'm using now.
Posted by: Roger

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 15/08/2010 06:13

Originally Posted By: Archeon
Does this number HAVE to be 2048 to be correct, or can this be any power of 2 number?


That was Windows 7 running on an SSD, so the Windows installer deliberately aligned it on a 4K boundary. According to msinfo32 -- which does exist in Windows 7 -- on my desktop PC with normal disks, it's done the same thing: the first partition starts at 1MB.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 15/08/2010 10:06

If I'm not mistaken, this is the way Windows 7 aligns partitions with every disk, not only SSD's. So that's normal behaviour.
Posted by: pedrohoon

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 30/08/2010 02:32

I seem to recall reading somewhere that 2.5" laptop drives are more reliable overall than 3.5" desktop drives.

Is this the case in peoples experience here?
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 30/08/2010 13:17

I'm sure that's true if the drives moves a lot. Otherwise, no.
Posted by: tfabris

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 30/08/2010 14:10

Yeah, I've had laptop and desktop drives fail pretty equally. The difference between the two is that laptop drives will tend to tolerate mobile environments (G, thermal) a little better. That doesn't make them less susceptible to other kinds of failures.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/09/2010 17:20

Originally Posted By: mlord
I'm rather keen on the 64MB cache drives from WD right now, but not the older 32MB cache drives.

And with the caveat that one must run the wdidle3 program (once) on them to fix the stupid 8-second head park default.

Continuing to eat my own medicine here.. today I picked up another WD Green drive -- the 2TB/64MB model.

This replaces the 1.5TB drive currently in the MythTV box. The 1.5TB then becomes the backup disk for that same box, freeing up the 1TB Black drive formerly used for backup.

And the 1TB Black is now the WinXP-Pro drive for our sole Windows box.

Did I mention that I _like_ the current Black and Green models from WD ? smile
Apart from having to run WDIDLE3.EXE from a diskette once per drive, that is.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/09/2010 18:04

Knock on wood, so far I have had good luck with the 2TB WD EARS (green) drive in my Windows 7 system (primary recording drive) and a pair of Seagate 2TB drives in my ReadyNAS. The WD is running with an idle timer of 2:30 and with the factory jumper set to compatibility mode.
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/09/2010 21:01

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Knock on wood, so far I have had good luck with the 2TB WD EARS (green) drive in my Windows 7 system
Uhhh... yeah. What he said, except I'm running Vista and not Win-7. WDidle3 timer is set to 30 seconds, but I could have left it at default, since the only time those drives are accessed is to read or write 10 GB or larger chunks of data.

tanstaafl.
Posted by: Taym

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/09/2010 21:47

So, if you were looking for reliable 2TB HDD (to be used in RAID 1 for a home server, and possibly stay up and running for years until they become too small), what would you guys recommend? Most likely recommendations on this thread are perfectly good when looking for reliability, but I've been looking in particular to these ones:

Western Digital Caviar RE4 2TB 64MB SATA-II
Western Digital Caviar RE4-GP 2TB 64MB SATA-II
Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB 64MB SATA

I'll be happy with performances, but that would have no priority over reliability and long MTBF. I am looking for the differences in tech spec, but maybe somebody here already knows? I ranked them by decreasing price on my usual shop.

For years I've purchased IBM/Hitachi HDD, but can't easily find any. Also, I recently had really bad experiences with Seagate, and I'd rather stay away from those in this particular instance. So, it really seems to me that WD is the only alternative left.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/09/2010 00:32

I would get exactly the same drive I just bought: WD20EARS
That's the non-RAID, regular edition.
Especially if reliability is the concern.

The whole idea of the RAID edition drives, is to sacrifice error-recovery (aka. "reliability") for guaranteed response time in error situations.

Fast error response times are important for high-throughput transaction rates (eg. credit card processing), but 100% irrelevant and harmful for a home server.

And in non-error situations, the regular unit is one fast drive by any relevant measures.

I want the drive to try harder to read partially corrupted data. Don't you?

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/09/2010 00:38

So for me, the choice would be between the Black (7200rpm) and the Green (5400rpm) models. Since the Green runs cooler, it'll probably outlast a Black in the same situation, so I'd choose the Green one.

Sure, the Black is (slightly) faster. It seeks faster, which is great for a busy server. But in a home server situation, the difference will be negligible. And the cooler, lower power consumption of the Green wins.

That's my view, anyway. smile
Posted by: Taym

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/09/2010 13:23

Ok, I must be going crazy. I was positive I read the whole thread and instead I probably skipped the entire first page, which on the other hand I did know was there! It really must be work, which keeps interfering with my hobbies and prevents me from properly concentrate on what's important. smile So sorry for asking useless questons.

Mark, it makes perfect sense for me as well. Actually, very useful information. I did assume the RE versione had better - in whatever way - materials and were designed to better cope with an always-on environmente.

So, given all the info I got from this thread, I guess I'll go with WD20EARS as well, which can be found for € 100 here (usual 1:1 €/$ conversion, which is killer for us in EU most times).

So, would completely disabling the head park timeout be advisable to extend drive life, for example, or for whatever other reason? Again, these disks will be used in a home server, and kept on at all times possibly for years, so obviously I am not at all interested in having the disks enter power saving mode at all.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/09/2010 17:38

For the vendor-proprietary "WD IDLE3 timeout", I would do as I have done here, and set it to perhaps 30 seconds. That way, during long idle periods, the drive will save power/heat, and not be unloading the heads too often during busy periods. The default of 8 seconds is just insanity, though.

The wdidle3.exe (1.05) utility works well for that.

There's another utility out there to convert a "regular" drive into a "Raid Edition", and vice-versa. Dunno if it still works on the latest firmwares, though.

Cheers
Posted by: DWallach

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/09/2010 17:50

Dragging this thread slightly askew: I need an external HD enclosure that can do Firewire 800, and will thus play nicely with my various Mac gear. Any preferences?
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 30/09/2010 04:45

Hi,

Another supporter of the 2TB WD Green Drives purchased from a local retailer - BestBuy, (to avoid a DOA due to poor shipping/packing advice I heard here). Got 'em for $139.95 each - they matched their website price.

I have them in my Windows 7 Ultimate system i7 Simulation System. Easy to Install, they're working fine.

Ross
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 13:53

Mark,

I've bought the WD Green 2TB drive, and, while I'm relatively happy with it, there's one thing that bugs me:

When I want to open up some maps in Windows 7, especially maps with large volumes of files and sub maps in them, the drive takes a few seconds to show me what's in the map. Up to five seconds, maybe even more. This is annoying, especially when the rest of my system is blazingly fast with my Intel SSD as a boot drive. This never happened to me with my Samsung F1 7200 RPM drive, which held the exact same data (using Windows XP back then)
Is this because of the 'slower' 5400 rpm green drive (is this a setting? - I've already disabled all the harddisk power saving settings in Windows). Would a WD black drive fix this issue? Or could this be Windows related? (does this happen in Linux too?)
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 13:55

All of my mechanical drives here seem sluggish, now that our primary systems all boot/run from SSDs.

Even the 1TB Black, and the 750GB Hitachi. SSDs really raise expectations.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 14:04

But I never had this problem with my Samsung F1 series. The data from the F1 drive was copied to the WD green, so it's identical. (granted, I used XP then)
Posted by: StigOE

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 15:32

I've noticed on Win7 it looks like it is scanning the whole folder many times when you enter a folder or if you're trying to copy something. You'll see this by the progress bar in the address field.

Stig
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 16:45

Anybody I know who runs either Vista or Win7, has a continuously active hard drive. No clue what the heck it's doing all of the time, but.. what a way to live.

Cheers
Posted by: andy

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 17:03

Strange. I've just sat and watched the hard drive light on my Win7 machine for 60 seconds. In that time it flicked on a couple of times briefly.

I've got 120 processes running, including Skype and several other background services. I'm running two email clients, three browsers, a couple of instances of Visual Studio, iTunes (spit). There is even a copy of WinXP chugging away in the background somewhere in VMWare !

My Vista box is a little more chatty, but then it is running my webserver, hosting torrents, hosting a couple of Ubuntu installs under VMWare and running my Squeezebox servers.

I'm not denying that Windows doesn't hit the disk more often, it comes out of the box with a load of background services that most people don't need most of the time. But none of the Windows machines I run have even close to continuously active drives.

I suspect that you typically come in contact with Windows machines that are shall we say, in need of attention wink

And again, I'm not claiming that Windows isn't more skilled at getting into that state than Linux, because it is (with a little help from the user).
Posted by: tman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 17:43

What Andy said. The W7 machine I'm in front of right now has a mostly idle hard disk.
Posted by: tfabris

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 17:59

If your Win7/WinVista box has an idle disk, it just means that your search indexer is taking a breather. :-)
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 18:33

Originally Posted By: StigOE
I've noticed on Win7 it looks like it is scanning the whole folder many times when you enter a folder or if you're trying to copy something. You'll see this by the progress bar in the address field.

Stig

This is exactly what I'm experiencing. Ok, so it isn't the fault of the harddrive then, but a Windows problem.
I should have known...
Posted by: Taym

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 19:45

Originally Posted By: tfabris
If your Win7/WinVista box has an idle disk, it just means that your search indexer is taking a breather. :-)

You may either let it finish the indexing, or just disable it. We've lived without it for years and I did not even need it at all, personally.
Once first indexing was done, I forget search even exists until I have to use it. Rarely.
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/10/2010 21:05

I don't see this problem with multiple 2TB drives in my Simulation system.

Ross
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 11:16

Western Digital today released their 3TB and 2.5TB Green models, $240 and $190 respectively. It's about time - hopefully we'll see other manufacturers follow suit "real soon now."
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 11:18

Seagate has had their 3TB out (in some markets) for several weeks now.
NOT recommended (seagate).
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 11:54

I believe Seagate is currently only shipping its drive in an external enclosure for USB use. WD was doing the same thing until today.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 12:49

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
Western Digital today released their 3TB and 2.5TB Green models, $240 and $190 respectively. It's about time - hopefully we'll see other manufacturers follow suit "real soon now."

Holy hefty price premium Batman! $240 is a lot of money for one third more capacity. Most 2TB drives for consumers can now be found well below $100! The prices will lower here as well, no doubt, but why start this high?
Posted by: tman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 13:18

Originally Posted By: Archeon
Holy hefty price premium Batman! $240 is a lot of money for one third more capacity. Most 2TB drives for consumers can now be found well below $100! The prices will lower here as well, no doubt, but why start this high?

It is the latest/greatest and you'll pay a premium for that.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 13:37

I know that... but this high?? If so: bring on the 4TB drives! grin
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 14:41

1TB drives apparently cost $400 when they debuted - according to the article on Engadget anyway.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 16:31

Yeah, I know, I know... but I've been waiting a long time for larger drives than 2TB to show up. I was hoping for a better price point, somting like $180 or something. It also took the manufacturers longer than usual to come up with larger drives. 2TB has been the maximum size for about two years now I'm guessing, so I don't really want to wait a whole lot longer for the price to go down for these drives. Guess I'll have to bite the bullet then..
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 19/10/2010 18:13

Originally Posted By: archeon
Holy hefty price premium Batman! $240 is a lot of money
You gotta be kidding me! smile

I remember how exciting it was when the price of hard drive storage dropped down to just one dollar per megabyte. Now the "premium" price is .008 cents (that's eight one-thousandths of a penny!) per megabyte. If you factor in inflation (i.e., the loss of value to the dollar) since those heady dollar-per-megabyte days, the cost of storage back then was about 20,000 times higher than it is now.

Count your blessings!

tanstaafl.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 20/10/2010 10:43

That's not really a fair comparison, this holds true for almost everything. If you bought a car twenty years ago and you buy one now, for the same amount of your money's worth, you will receive more than you did back then.

And a good thing, otherwise there would be no innovation at all.

I've just checked. I can buy a Samsung 2TB drive for €75. This new WD 3TB drive costs €240. While I understand the idea behind the latest and greatest, I really think the difference in this case is a bit too big. (but I'll pay it, nonetheless. smile )
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 20/10/2010 11:18

Originally Posted By: Archeon
I really think the difference in this case is a bit too big. (but I'll pay it, nonetheless. smile )

Then, obviously the difference is NOT too big. smile
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 09:48

Digging up this older thread again because things have changed a bit (again :))

Mark, what is your stance of Hitachi HD's? I know they were pretty good in the IBM days (until the Deathstar debacle), but how are they now? Reason I'm asking is because it seems that Hitachi has quietly released their 3TB 7K3000 Deskstar HD, and initial reviews seem to be pretty good.

Prices of 3TB HD's have finally started to drop a bit, too. As far as I know, there are now 3 manufacturers offering a 3TB drive: Western Digital, Seagate (bleh!) and now Hitachi. I'm still waiting for Samsung to release theirs to be honest though, but maybe this Hitachi drive isn't that bad also: 5 platters instead of 4 compared to the other two brands, but also pretty fast, 7200RPM and 64MB cache.
Posted by: Taym

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 11:31

Yes, I was looking at the Hitachi 3TB as well.
It ais almost time for me to upgrade my home server, and I am starting to consider 2x3TB.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 12:13

Originally Posted By: Archeon
Digging up this older thread again because things have changed a bit (again :))

Mark, what is your stance of Hitachi HD's?

Very well engineered yet unreliable junk.

Now, ask me how I really feel about them. smile

Two years ago, I received four very new, very modern Hitachi drives. These have been used very sparingly, and yet three of the four are now dead.

I am sooo glad I didn't pay any money for them.

Meanwhile, yesterday I purchased yet another 2TB WD "Green" drive for use here. Love those, despite the stupid default behaviour.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 13:26

Ok, that's quite clear! laugh
Let me rephrase my former comment then!

"As far as I know, there are now 3 manufacturers offering a 3TB drive: Western Digital, Seagate (bleh!) and now Hitachi (BLEH!) smile . I'm still waiting for Samsung to release theirs! (oh yes!)"

Thanks for your input Mark, I think I'll wait just a little bit longer, or get me another WD drive..
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 14:22

Around here, I can purchase two three WD 2TB "Green" drives for less than about the cost of a single WD 3TB drive.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 14:43

I know, it's the same here.
But one 2TB drive will not hold all my stuff. A single 3TB drive would, so that's why I'm interested in buying two. (one to work with and one for backup use) I'll wait just a little longer though. I'm really hoping Samsung will release a 3TB drive soon. Samsung has a knack for releasing drives that are cheaper than most other brands, but can compete with WDC in terms of speed and quality. Usually, when a Samsung drive is released, the others start dropping in price as well. smile
Posted by: Roger

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 15:42

Originally Posted By: Archeon
But one 2TB drive will not hold all my stuff.


So buy two.
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 15:58

Hi,

The WD Green 2TB drives are still hanging in there.

I recently (last week) had downloaded 355GB in 3 large sets of database from one (that has 1.8TB of data on it) to a player for a test. The loads were 77GB, 93GB, and and 185GB each.

Not a problem for the 2TB drives or the player drives. For more information, see the 250GB thread and the Windows 7 64Bit crashes emplode thread on the BBS.

It took "days" of access to the drive. I know it isn't recommended, but the 2, 250GB drives in the player are getting old and I controlled the environment very carefully, it's all in the threads.


I am purchasing 2 more WD 2TB today for back-up, plus a 500GB WD SATA laptop drive to work through SATA drives for the Empegs.

Ross
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 16:14

Maybe it's time we respun the empeg images to mount/access music over the network rather than from local storage?
Posted by: peter

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 18:28

Originally Posted By: mlord
Maybe it's time we respun the empeg images to mount/access music over the network rather than from local storage?

Oh, but we did. We called it the Receiver Edition. We also made sure that it could deal with arbitrarily large databases, bigger than would ever fit in a player's own memory. The down-side, of course, is that it requires the network server to be available in order to do anything.

Peter
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 20:21

Wouldn't that take all of the fun out of this? <grin>

Ross
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 20:27

Hi,

By the way, I purchased 2 ea WD 2TB WD20EARS drives locally and opted to order a WD 1TB Laptop drive for the Empeg.

One of the 2TB drives is backing up one of the system drives in my simulation system right now.


The Laptop drive is a WD SATA and is 12.5mm high. It should fit into the player fine. It should be here early next week.

Let the fun begin...

Ross
Posted by: altman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 28/01/2011 21:26

Originally Posted By: peter
Originally Posted By: mlord
Maybe it's time we respun the empeg images to mount/access music over the network rather than from local storage?

Oh, but we did. We called it the Receiver Edition. We also made sure that it could deal with arbitrarily large databases, bigger than would ever fit in a player's own memory. The down-side, of course, is that it requires the network server to be available in order to do anything.


Hmm. Sounds like a job for a more modern embedded linux box plugged into the empeg's ethernet port smile

I can't remember... were the car semantics still preserved in the receiver edition?
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 06:00

Originally Posted By: Roger
Originally Posted By: Archeon
But one 2TB drive will not hold all my stuff.


So buy two.

I want one drive to hold all of my stuff, and I don't want to use RAID. Call me picky. smile
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 06:04

Originally Posted By: Ross Wellington

(...)
and opted to order a WD 1TB Laptop drive for the Empeg.
(...)

I suppose those don't come as IDE anymore? So I'm guessing you're using some kind of SATA to IDE converter? Which one if I may ask? How do you fit that into the empeg? (the secondary drive bay most likely?)
Posted by: peter

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 08:54

Originally Posted By: altman
I can't remember... were the car semantics still preserved in the receiver edition?

Mostly, but not bookmarks, Wendy filters, biased (parametric) shuffle, or the search screens. Though it does have soup menus, which reduce the need for the search screens.

Peter
Posted by: peter

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 10:50

Originally Posted By: altman
Hmm. Sounds like a job for a more modern embedded linux box plugged into the empeg's ethernet port smile

Actually if you wanted to do it in-car that would be the way to go. Plus, as Mark suggests, NFS music storage or indeed full NFS diskless boot. You'd either need to fit the "more modern embedded linux box" internally, or arrange to dock the ethernet somehow. And you'd probably need to use SSD, as the server wouldn't see the Empeg's drive-spindown commands.

Peter
Posted by: Taym

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 10:54

[dream]
Ah.. MK3...
[/dream]
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 11:36

At the point of starting to develop custom hardware, IMO it's a better idea to connect storage to an iPhone or iPod touch or iPad and write a brand new player app for iOS.
Posted by: Taym

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 11:52

Originally Posted By: mlord
Around here, I can purchase two three WD 2TB "Green" drives for less than about the cost of a single WD 3TB drive.

Prices dropped here too. I did not realize that. You can easily find such units at € 77 each. That's very very nice.
Posted by: andy

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 13:33

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
At the point of starting to develop custom hardware, IMO it's a better idea to connect storage to an iPhone or iPod touch or iPad and write a brand new player app for iOS.


Someone needs to knockup a Bluetooth board with a rotary encoder and 4 or 5 buttons. That an an iOS app.
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 14:05

And put that BT remote onto the steering wheel. Sounds nice. I'm pretty sure I could easily have such a device made. That's not the hard part. The hard part is still the player software. smile

Otherwise we're left with the player software that already exists, and as we've covered in other threads, it's not all that great.

Now that this is out there... If anyone wanted to SERIOUSLY consider writing a really great music player app for iOS, I'd be willing to partner up on this, contributing both design and capital investment. Hardware doodads could easily be looked at once the software is well enough along.
Posted by: andy

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 15:16

The thing is, I wouldn't want an in car iOS app that didn't make use of the add on hardware. I don't want to have to touch the screen at all to use it.

Whether you'd ever get an app like that approved by Apple seems worryingly unlikely. And it is an awful lot of effort to go to only to get it turned down frown

And I'd never want a remote like that on my steering wheel, but that comes down to personal choice wink
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 15:22

A music playing app should be able to work with or without extra hardware. I don't think anything we've thought up would preclude such an app from approval.

A third-party music playing app would use (to start) the music stored on the iOS device itself. It would provide a better UI than the built-in music player app and could do so in a couple of modes, depending on the usage scenario. Hand-held (normal) mode and in-car mode are two pretty basic choices.

I believe someone already has hardware out or coming out that allows you to access external storage. There are a number of ways to attack this, from directly connected USB dongle to WiFI (I'm not sure if BT is possible given what's availabe in the BT stack in iOS). That would provide the secondary source of music where the app would manage its own database.

I wouldn't be ready to commit financially if I didn't see an opportunity for healthy return just with a new third party music player that could only play music already on the iOS device. The other stuff is a bonus and any hardware is a great markup opportunity.

Oh, and to tell you the truth, I'd kind of hope for a rejection at some point. It could make for a nice PR piece which can really build momentum for an app. There are a number of examples in the app store that would not be anywhere near as successful as they are now were it not for the PR generated by initial or update rejections. I think it's pretty obvious at this time what does and doesn't get you rejected from the store.

I'll come back and delete this comment and its Google cache should I ever find myself in a situation where I have an app about to be rejected. smile
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 17:38

Hi,

[ Archeon says....

(...)
and opted to order a WD 1TB Laptop drive for the Empeg.
(...)

I suppose those don't come as IDE anymore? So I'm guessing you're using some kind of SATA to IDE converter? Which one if I may ask? How do you fit that into the empeg? (the secondary drive bay most likely?) .....




That's correct. It looks like everyone's going to top out on 320GB for IDE/PATA. One objective I have is to help see if I can get a reliable SATA interface working for all of us. I think someone else has tried it, asked about it, never heard back what happened.


******** If someone else has done this, please let the community know of your success or what you found out. *********


The last time, Mark Lord made it possible for us to go beyond the 132GB threshold with his wizardry. At this point, the maximum drive size of 320GB is driven by the manufacturer's marketing of PATA drives, not player capability.

I may need Mark's help on this one too. If there is hardware stuff, that needs to be debugged, I can provide that. At least the upper boundary of the player software has been expanded in the last go at this, so it allows for larger drives. It can handle at least 640GB now. I know it works on 500GB, I have several players with dual WD 250GB drives that have been working great for quite some time now. I expect that player memory may be the big problem now with the expanded playlist files & caching. Luckily, with v508 Mark restructured the block size (now 4k), to make more efficient use of disk and memory space, but I may besurprised by something else. I am also leary of the emplode and jemplode, I think I am having problems with that now because it is taking a very long time to build such large databases and I think we may run up against some punt timer somewhere (because no one in their right mind would ever exceed 60GB of drive space, right <grin>). If that occurs, I think I will be screwed, although Roger and Mark have helped me out on that one recently. There are a lot of things to consider and can go wrong with this kind of venture.


Yes, I am using an IDE to SATA adapter. At this point it is an older one. I don't think I will have problems with the on-board power supply (which could bite me). I'm hoping with the adapter and just one drive (the drive draws <1 Amp @ +5V, 1.7W max.), I won't have a problem. Older drives used to suck a lot more current at spin-up. Each 250GB drive in there now draws 1 Amp, 2.5W each, I should be okay.

When I get a working configuration, I will try to test it with a few adapters and publish the information. As soon as we go SATA, I think we'll only get one drive. I think we lose dual drive address capability, not sure about that though. That's one of the reasons why I'm starting with a large (1TB) drive. I doubt that I will ever need more than 1TB of capacity at this point.


I plan to work out some kind of mounting arrangement for the drive and the adapter (or universal mounting method for adapters). This could be interesting since most of these adapters attach directly to the drive connector for Signal Integrity and other reasons. I may have to orient the drive differently in the player, or use extension cabling (I haven't seen short ones), for one side or the other, maybe mount the adapter under the drive tray, etc. Drive re-orientation may require some analysis for X/Y/Z intertia with the existing player shelf isolation design. The drives are 12.5mm high which may dictate some of those mounting compromises.


As soon as I get on my way, I will probably open a new thread to document the process and provide feedback/get-help/crash & burn/look-stupid/etc. I have 10 players (mostly Mk2a, a few Mk2 - less memory 12MB vs 16MB, may limit Mk2 applicability), that I can use for development/regression testing efforts, so when I'm done, hopefully, it should be good for the community.

Ross
Posted by: tanstaafl.

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 20:11

Originally Posted By: Ross Wellington
I doubt that I will ever need more than 1TB of capacity at this point.
"...(because no one in their right mind would ever exceed 60GB 1 TB of drive space, right <grin>)"

smile

tanstaafl.
Posted by: Ross Wellington

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 29/01/2011 23:17

Gee, I don't know quite how to respond to that one. I'm not easily tongue-tied. <grin>

Ross
Posted by: pedrohoon

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 30/01/2011 02:33

What audio output options are there from the 'iDevices' direct to an amp? 3.5mm TRS?
Posted by: altman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 31/01/2011 20:36

Originally Posted By: pedrohoon
What audio output options are there from the 'iDevices' direct to an amp? 3.5mm TRS?


On the dock connector there's 1v RMS line out, plus it will stream digitally over USB too as long as you identify as a suitably blessed accessory.

Technically you can do generic "whatever you want" BT accessories (ideal for a remote empeg front panel), but they too have to be iAP blessed. I think the wakemate wristband falls into that category.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/02/2011 00:36

Are iDevices easily accessed as "mass storage" in some form or another, or does that also require the blessings of Job ?
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/02/2011 00:43

No mass storage access. Not without rooting/hacking anyway.
Posted by: drakino

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/02/2011 00:51

Originally Posted By: hybrid8
No mass storage access. Not without rooting/hacking anyway.

Is there a jailbreak hack that adds proper USB mass storage? (I hadn't seen one) And does it do any FS translation, or just present the HFS+ filesystem as is?
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/02/2011 00:56

I wonder which interface the Numark / Akai Digital DJ decks were using then?

And ditto for the iTunes-style interfaces used in (?)Rhythmbox et al. ?
Posted by: hybrid8

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/02/2011 00:59

I thought I'd read something about some JB install that would allow you to mount the filesystem as a drive, but I don't know how it works. I've got SSH active for use with the filesystem and currently I'm happy with SFTP over WiFi.

I did just find one program "USB Drive" which allows you to create virtual drives that work as mass storage, but I don't think it shows the rest of the filesystem. It's not the program I'd read about before.
Posted by: tman

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 01/02/2011 02:03

Originally Posted By: mlord
I wonder which interface the Numark / Akai Digital DJ decks were using then?

The regular iPods like in the photo are USB mass storage. Its just the iPod touch, iPad and iPhone that need the special USB mux driver and apps that talk over it.

If your app knows how to then it can talk to the Apple File Connection service for limited access to the media area of iPod touches, iPads and iPhones.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/06/2011 10:49

Reviving this old thread again... and a question for Mark. smile
The price of the 3TB drives has now dropped to an acceptable price point (for me that is) of 125 euro/drive.

For that price, I can buy either the WD30EZRSDTL or the WD30EZRX. The only difference I can see is the WD30EZRSDTL uses a 3Gb/s interface and the WD30EZRX a 6Gb/s interface.

Now, logic would dictate that I would choose the WD30EZRX over the WD30EZRSDTL because of the faster interface, especially at the same price. BUT... I'm wondering if this disk is just as good as the other one. And mostly, my current motherboard does not have a 6Gb/s interface (but my next one will, no doubt, and I like being future-proof if the choice is there).

Can I use this 6Gb/s interface drive without a problem on a 3Gb/s motherboard? Is there any danger in using the drive like this? (data loss?) Or should I just buy the 3Gb/s version and be done with it?
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/06/2011 13:31

Either drive is probably as good as the other. The 6gb/sec doesn't matter at all --> sure it will make reading/writing the on-drive memory buffer (aka. "cache") faster, but you'll never be able to see/measure it in real life.

The drives themselves are maxed out over a 1.5gb/sec SATA-1 link, so no need to go all googley-eyed over 6gb/sec for mechanical media.

The 6gb/sec SATA link is being brought out for SSDs, which actually do need it to achieve maximum speeds.

As for the drives, dunno. All I have here are 2TB and 1.5TB Green drives, still working well.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/06/2011 13:33

Oh, I believe the most recent 2TB WD Green drive that I purchased was of the 6gb/sec variety. One benefit I found with it, compared to the older 3gb/sec stock, is that the 6gb/sec model correctly identifies itself to the operating system as a 4KB hard sectored drive.

That's useful for Linux, as it saves having to do manual partitioning to achieve 4KB alignment. The partitioning tools can automatically do that since they now see the real characteristics of the drive.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/06/2011 13:39

Originally Posted By: Archeon
Can I use this 6Gb/s interface drive without a problem on a 3Gb/s motherboard?

The 6gb/sec 2TB drive I have here has been trouble-free on both controllers (Intel and JMicron) of the 3gb/sec motherboard I use it with.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 12/06/2011 13:51

Thanks a lot Mark! The 6Gb/s version it is!
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 16/06/2011 19:23

Update. I ended up buying the 3Gb/s version anyway since, as it turned out, the 3Gb/s version comes with a necessary (for me) HBA SATA controller card included. The 6Gb/s version however, does not.

Since it seems it's still not possible to connect drives larger than 2TB directly to any Intel southbridge controller (in my case, the most recent one: ICH-10R) and use it in ACHI mode, I decided to go with the 3Gb/s model.

The order has been placed. Is it normal to be excited about the upcoming arrival of a new harddrive? smile
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 16/06/2011 19:31

Originally Posted By: Archeon
.. it seems it's still not possible to connect drives larger than 2TB directly to any Intel southbridge controller (in my case, the most recent one: ICH-10R) and use it in ACHI mode ..

That must be a MS-Windows restriction. We don't have that restriction with Linux.

Cheers
Posted by: drakino

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 16/06/2011 20:08

Originally Posted By: mlord
Originally Posted By: Archeon
.. it seems it's still not possible to connect drives larger than 2TB directly to any Intel southbridge controller (in my case, the most recent one: ICH-10R) and use it in ACHI mode ..

That must be a MS-Windows restriction. We don't have that restriction with Linux.

There are two different limitations that come into play when going above 2TB:

1. The old MBR setup caps out at ~2TB. This is what commonly causes problems on the OS side unless the user has switched to GUID based partitioning.

2. LBA addressing is also capped at ~2TB with older Command Descriptor Block size. While drives are switching to 4k sectors, this is an on platter change only, the downstream pieces still talk in 512bytes per address for compatibility reasons. CDB was previously limited to 10 bytes, with 4 bytes of that dedicated to the LBA. 4 byte LBA address (4,294,967,296) * 512 byte sectors = LBA address limit capped at ~2.1TB.

The fix for #2 is to shift to Long LBA, which at a minimum doubles the LBA address block to 8 bytes.

More info from Seagate here.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 17/06/2011 02:16

SATA drives, such as the 3TB WD unit being discussed here, don't use SCSI CDBs. They use SATA FISs, with 48-bit sector addressing. So there is no "2TB limit" for LBA addressing. Ditto for the SATA controllers (Eg. AHCI) as well.

Some OSs might internally use 32-bit numbers to hold LBAs, in which case those OSs could suffer from a 2TB "barrier".

There are still BIOS boot issues and partition table concerns, but those wouldn't be unique to "AHCI mode" versus "non-AHCI mode".

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 17/06/2011 04:43

From what I understand, it's a (Windows) driver issue with the Intel Southbridge. As it seems, in IDE legacy mode, the entire available space of the 3TB drive is show in partitioning programs (after making the drive a GPT drive). In AHCI mode, only 700+ something GB's are shown. Intel has not come up with a driver update for AHCI modus, I don't know why. AMD's SB850 southbridge which is used on their most recent motherboards does not have this issue. And neither has the Marvell 88SE9025 SATA600-controller, which is also often used on motherboards as away to offer more than the standard 6 SATA channels. It's this Marvell controller that is bundled with the 3TB WD drive (the 3Gb/s version), on a Highpoint RocketRAID 62x controller card.

So it seems it's a (windows) driver issue, which of course is why Linux does not experience this problem. And because this Intel ICH controller is probably the one that is used on 80% (or more) of the motherboards out there, Western Digital has opted to include an alternative controller card with this drive.
Posted by: drakino

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 17/06/2011 14:52

Originally Posted By: mlord
SATA drives, such as the 3TB WD unit being discussed here, don't use SCSI CDBs. They use SATA FISs, with 48-bit sector addressing. So there is no "2TB limit" for LBA addressing. Ditto for the SATA controllers (Eg. AHCI) as well.

Ahh, right, my head is still somewhat planted in the enterprise storage world, where the CDB limit was being hit on some RAID setups a while back. It also comes into play with certain SATA devices attached to SAS controllers.
Posted by: RobotCaleb

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 18/01/2012 01:32

I never changed my idle park timeout and my drives are showing ~330k LCC. My WD10EADS is showing approximately the same powered hours (~10k) but only 29 LCC.

First question(s), is 330k bad? What will happen because this number is high? I'm going to change the park time in the next few minutes, but have I already gone wrong?

Second, is the fact WD10EADS only shows 29 an indicator that something is wrong? Should it be higher?

Thanks
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 18/01/2012 02:12

WD originally spec'd the head-parking mechanics at 300,000 cycles (minimum). When they heard that their screwed-up firmware was causing that count to be hit in mere months, they changed the spec to 1,000,000 cycles (minimum).

I wouldn't want any of my drives to be even in the ballpark of either spec.

The WDIDLE3.EXE-1.05 program is the official way to tweak the drives, and is the way one should use if they can. But if you're really stuck, "hdparm -J" also works (latest version -- sourceforge).

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 18/01/2012 02:14

Originally Posted By: RobotCaleb
I never changed my idle park timeout and my drives are showing ~330k LCC. My WD10EADS is showing approximately the same powered hours (~10k) but only 29 LCC. ... is the fact WD10EADS only shows 29 an indicator that something is wrong? Should it be higher?

It should be higher only if you've been powering the drive on/off regularly. If instead the drive is in a 24/7 server and never powered off, then the could should be really low, in the same order as the number of power/reset cycles.

Not all WD drives do the "constant head parking" silliness.

Cheers
Posted by: pedrohoon

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 07/05/2012 04:56

Dragging up this thread yet again...

I am looking at replacing the 1TB Samsung drives in my Synology NAS with 2TB WD20EARX drives (non-RAID). Do these drives need the idle timer altered or has WD seen the light on this by now?

Also, will the advanced format cause issues? I will be formatting them as ext4.

I was going to look at more Samsung drives until I read this
Quote:
...while Seagate will provide Samsung with the hard drives it needs for its computer business.
which kind of put me off....
Posted by: tonyc

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 07/05/2012 10:00

Dunno about that specific model, but I have 3 WD30EZRXs in my Synology NAS, and they need the idle timer to be tweaked. The Synology firmware actually does it for you in the latest releases, which is rather nice.

I think the idle timer is basically a feature of all of the green drives.
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 07/05/2012 10:14

Yeah, you'll probably want to tweak the idle timer on those -- I did on the one I have here.

Ext4 will be very happy on the 4KB physical sectors (aka. "advanced format", yeah, right).

Just partition with a recent fdisk/gdisk/gparted/whatever so that it aligns the first partition to begin on a multiple of 8 sectors (4KB).

Cheers
Posted by: pedrohoon

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 07/05/2012 14:38

Thank you for the replies Tony & Mark.

Tony, it looks as if they brought in a feature to disable the idle timer from DSM3.2-1922 onwards so I will have to upgrade (no big deal) - thanks for the heads-up!

Mark, I will be using the Synology NAS OS to do the formatting/partitioning so hopefully, being a recent version of Linux, it should be 4K 'aware' - is this likely? Can I check this (eg. via the terminal)?
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 07/05/2012 17:09

If your NAS distro knows enough to kill the idle timer, then I expect it will also know how to partition the drives. smile

You can check it afterwards with fdisk, or with "hdparm /dev/XXX1" (run hdparm with no flags on the first partition, it will print out the sector offset).

Cheers
Posted by: pedrohoon

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 14/05/2012 02:04

Thanks again, Mark.
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 02/07/2012 18:30

Digging up this old thread again... it's about 3TB drives now, but everything else should still apply.

Mark, have you heard anything about bad series of WD 3TB drives? More in particular the WD30EZRX series? On Newegg, 33% of all user reviews claim this to be a bad drive since a lot of them seem to be DOA or die within the first couple of days. I know you like Western Digital the best of all brands, and so do I. But this news is disturbing to me. Does it hold any truth to it? This seems an exceptionally bad track record for a Western Digital drive. (and I'm in the market for one because I want to built an unRAID server)
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 03/07/2012 09:53

I have two WD Green 3TB drives, as of three weeks ago. They work, and I like the capacity. The previous 2TB drives were pretty close to dead silent, cool, and just wonderful units. The new 3TB drives, with the extra platter, vibrate more than the 2TB drives do, but thus far they're still very quiet and cool running. RECOMMENDED. smile

The thing with Newegg, is the drives get banged up in the delivery system, and with something as delicate as a 2TB/3TB drive, one gets what one should have expected after a bumpy ride through UPS! smile

Buy at a large local shop instead, and avoid delivery-DOAs that way.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 03/07/2012 09:55

Note that the Newegg threads for the 2TB drives were equally negative when those drives first appeared too. Same problem: single-drive retail shipments are rarely packed well enough to protect the drive from UPS guys who throw parcels 20' to the doorstep.

Cheers
Posted by: mlord

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 03/07/2012 10:01

Oh, and same deal with the WD "Idle3" timer: the factory default is still 8-seconds on the new 3TB versions. I recommend using the WDIDLE3.EXE utility to change it to 30 seconds. Or if you just cannot boot MS-DOS to do that, then the latest version of my Linux hdparm program also now has a flag to change the timer setting.

Cheers
Posted by: BartDG

Re: 2 TB hard drive advice wanted - 03/07/2012 17:51

Cheers Mark, that reassures me somewhat. I guess the delivery services in Belgium aren't (yet?) as bad as in the US. smile

Originally Posted By: mlord
Oh, and same deal with the WD "Idle3" timer: the factory default is still 8-seconds on the new 3TB versions. I recommend using the WDIDLE3.EXE utility to change it to 30 seconds. Or if you just cannot boot MS-DOS to do that, then the latest version of my Linux hdparm program also now has a flag to change the timer setting.
Cheers

I remembered to do that. No problem whatsoever with the WDIDLE3.EXE utility. Now happily spinning around with a 30 seconds timer. smile

Cheers!