Discussion Forums > Technology
2TB drive: Segate ST2000DL003 or good ol' Samsung HD204UI?
Sakura90:
You have no idea how I hate HDDs. But they are a necessary evil. I already went into code red alert (?) with less than 100GB available (plus it's respective backup, ofc). To the point then, I need a new 2TB. As I'm in a shitty country I don't have much choice. WD Greens grow from trees everywhere, but their performance is crap. I already have both of them, EADS and EARS revisions. Next in the list is the relatively new Seagate ST2000DL003. Looks fine and dandy but... the road looks bumpy. The are quite a few probs with these, that being not recognized by the bios at a random point in their lives. An angered thread here at Seagate forums. I know ALL HDDs have always a prob, with the Greens the stupid LCC count (mine are old but still up and running reliably, never saw that as a problem), the HD204UI a stupid hole if you were writing to the disk while seeing the SMART or something, I don't remember, fixable with a new firmware. But for these Seagate Greens it looks more serious. Didn't find much else apart the other forums mentioned there, it looks that the drive is too new. Another thing to note is that many complain but don't specify specs, running conditions, etc.
Sooooooooo, this is already too long. I was able to find one only vendor for the HD204UI on the net (remember my crappy country), it's a bit more expensive (116 USD the Seagate Green, 132 USD, but that's a $70 difference for me with my stupid currency). I LUB my old HD204UI, reliable, fast, never a single prob. I'm already leaning to it.
The main point of this is to see if someone tried that green Seagate (ST2000DL003) or the HD204UI as well. I even sleep with mine :-*, always steady at ~110-140 MB/s. It's a man's best companion and faithful friend ♥
Btw, SATA 6 Gb/s drives are fully compatible with SATA 3 Gb/s, right? As along the rollercoaster of investigating HDDs this afternoon (it was hell), I saw several threads with problems of SATA III drives on older SATA I hardware (but now with SATA II stuff, it seems the ST2000DL003 doesn't have a "SATA I mode") <_<
fohfoh:
I personally haven't touched seagate for a while now. But I'm sure someone knows better than I about what seagate has been up to these days to comment as to how they've improved.
I'd go with the samsung. There's no reason to use the green one IMO. Save a couple bucks a year on energy? If you're running like 5+ or those then maybe the savings become a little more apparent and useful... but not for me. Unless they're a necessity for some who have a shitty PSU? I don't know.
Samsung.
TMRNetShark:
Go with the Samsung... I've never heard of anything good come from Seagate.
Sakura90:
--- Quote from: fohfoh on September 27, 2011, 01:04:52 AM ---I personally haven't touched seagate for a while now. But I'm sure someone knows better than I about what seagate has been up to these days to comment as to how they've improved.
I'd go with the samsung. There's no reason to use the green one IMO. Save a couple bucks a year on energy? If you're running like 5+ or those then maybe the savings become a little more apparent and useful... but not for me. Unless they're a necessity for some who have a shitty PSU? I don't know.
Samsung.
--- End quote ---
For >1TB drives, only greens are available here. Or maybe if you're lucky to find a non-green one it costs 1000 USD or so :P. This country to the shittiest :-\. Importing for myself is not an option. And there's not much variety in technology here if you're looking for "specific stuff", things that the regular Joe Sixpack won't ever buy. Like a 2TB HDD, a dual esata dock (not to mention one of those racks to put multiple HDDs), an electronic dictionary, a branded MP3 that's not an Ipod, etc :(
--- Quote from: TMRNetShark on September 27, 2011, 01:14:49 AM ---Go with the Samsung... I've never heard of anything good come from Seagate.
--- End quote ---
Lol, so it seems from researching he series of tubes. But many go for WD, and their Green drives suck speed wise. So it's a mixed bag in the end, there's no "sure" thing. I'll stick with the Samsung though. It's the best drive I had for now. Too bad it was bought by Seagate :-\. Any news about the approval of the merge? Last time I read some heads with suits had to approve the merge and that could take a while.
ColdFission:
Loooove my ST2000DL003 HDD. I've had it for for than 2 or 3 months now and no problems with it. I am sitting on SATA 3 Gb/s and not SATA 6 Gb/s, but its plenty fast for me as I only use it as an archive drive and not an OS drive (So yes, SATA 6 Gb/s is backward compatible with 3 Gb/s so you're fine). Speeds I got was around the 50 MB/s average when writing about 70 GB for testing according to HDTune Pro (great HDD tool btw), reads I think are about the 100 MB/s mark. I love this drive so much that I bought another one for the same price at $69.99.
The second Seagate that I bought is residing in a USB 3.0 external case at the moment. Had to get new drivers for my PCIe USB 3.0 card as the ones that came with the CD kept BSODing my computer when connecting and disconnecting the drive.
I also just did a SMART check on my Seagate and its all green, health is all green according to HDTune Pro as well. As for the Samsung drives, my main online retailer, NCIX, currently doesn't carry any Samsung HDDs.
I have used green drives in the past from Western Digital, but I had MASSIVE problems with those bloody things. Here was my thread on the whole issue (I am a member of another forum):
http://forum.xbitlabs.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=17913
I did do an RMA for my borked drives and got a refurbed/recertified 1.5 TB Green, 500 GB WD Black, and a 1 TB Green. Incidentally, I was running out of space on my C drive so I had to get that 1.5TB Green installed to make room. So far, no problems with it.
All drives do fail at some time, so regular backups are good thing to do. Although, you will be limited by your budget on what backup methods to use. Originally, I was planning to use my older model Seagate 2TB (ST3200542AS) for my anime that I wasn't seeding and use the new Seagate as my backup for those anime. But I was also quickly running out of space on those drive so I had to delete my copies and had to gather my other non-seeding anime that was also on my C and E drives (the E drive is a WD 1TB Black for my seeding, planning to replace that with a 2TB Black when I get around using WD's Loyalty Program to get a discount on that drive) onto the Seagate drives. So right now, I really have not backup plan setup simply because I don't have the cash to get a much larger case (might as well get a 12 drive server chassis and a couple of mini-SAS RAID cards and mini-SAS to SATA fanout cables for the backup plan that I want), more drives, and the additional RAID card that I would need for redundancy. Burning to DVDs (which I used to do a lot in the past) for backups is just impractical for me as well simply because I would have towers of that lying around.
I also had a much older model Seagate at 500 GB which was used in my original system build as the OS drive and never had any problems with that either during its use.
If you want to stay on top on the health of your drives, again, use HDTune Pro. It does testing and benchmarking. You can also use Windows Event Viewer to view HDD errors like bad blocks. There are tons of SMART checking tools out there (HDTune Pro does that as well) so you can check the SMART status of your drive. I just use the ones from the manufacturers and they work fine. They also do various testing on your drives to see if they are stable or not. SeaTools for Seagate and WDLifeGuard for WD drives is what I have in my system right now.
Hope I helped a little!
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