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]

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.

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 . 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

Go with the Samsung... I've never heard of anything good come from Seagate.

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!

[Sakura90]

Awesome post ^_^

So both your ST2000DL003 are good. Nice to hear. I ordered for import a Startech dual esata dock two weeks ago, as it was the cheapest thing I could find with 2 actual ports, and not one and relying on the "port multiplier" feature of the sata controller (I have a AMD SB750 southbridge, controller is so-so, it doesn't even list the "safe remove" icon for HDDs, even though the hotswap functionality works like in any other mobo). I think it's safer with two separate ports


One thing I don't get though... 50 MB/s write and 100 read? Are you sure? My HD204UI goes between 110-140 read/write, and your Seagate should be around the same according to this review. Maybe you're referring to the speeds on the lowest end? In "real life" if I copy MKVs around ~1GB each I get between 100 and 140 MB/s. Lots of little files like MP3s go at ~50-60 MB/s.

Well... now I don't know what to do. Maybe flip a coin? <_<

[ColdFission]

I get that 50 MB/s because speeds actually decreased when I was transferring 70 GB of anime from my Caviar Black to the Seagate drive in question. My guess is that the longer and larger the file(s), it will gradually go down to your average speeds. I just did a transfer test for a smaller 2 GB file and writes were around 85-90 MB/s. When I benchmarked the drive, the data point gradually slope down downwards. I can't exactly explain the graph to you in text, its best that you see it yourself when you try out HDTUne pro. It can also be a little bit of contention with SATA bus system (mobo is a Giga-Byte EP45-DS3L with the Intel P45 Northbridge and the Intel ICH10 Southbridge) as I have all 6 SATA ports filed up with my DVD burner and my 5 HDDs.I did mention that I have another Seagate just sitting in an enclosure at the moment, I also have three other drives in a box, two of them not even used yet (1 TB WD Green and a 500 GB WD Black), the other was the older model Seagate 500 GB mentioned earlier in my post above.

I don't actually know why the numbers are like that, but I am not complaining.

[Tiffanys]

I use Western Digital, but I can't say anything good about any of the large drives. I mostly use 1TB Caviar Blacks. I've had quite a few fail... Western Digital does have a great RMA policy though.

[ColdFission]

Hmm, after some thought, I think the reason why speeds do go down is that the onboard cache on the HDD gets filled up too fast for it to be written to the platters (mind you, cache is designed to be extremely quick, faster than the the platters can physically do, usually designed to go at SATA port speeds) as the the files sizes go up, therefore, the average speed that I was writing at was as fast as the physical components can go (like the arms, platters, spindle, etc). When the file sizes are smaller, the transfer speeds are most likely just the cache doing its job of fooling windows that the file is written or read successfully when it reality, it is a few nanosecond delay between the cache and the actual platters. IIRC, this is called Write-Caching that can be disabled if you wanted to. If you are happen to be transferring some files and the power gets cut, whatever was in cache is gone as it is volatile memory. And when you turn you PC back on, you may discover your files that were supposed to be written on the platters are either corrupted or never made it there.

In high-end systems like workstations and servers, they have their drives hooked up to specialized RAID cards that have on-board cache. The cards also have special batteries to keep the card (and the cache) alive when a power outage occurs to preserve that data in the cache. In the business world, data means money and lots of it.

[fohfoh]

Actually, I agree. 2TB drives if you're saying selection is shitty, might not be the best choice for you. For sure 1TB drives in general are far more reliable than 2TB.

[Freedom Kira]

Yeah, that's pretty much it. A larger cache helps improve speeds. 32MB is the least you'd want; 64MB if it's available.

Anyway, I've always loved Samsung and Hitachi drives. Currently have six of the Hitachi 3TB drives in my server; none were DOA and all have been working nearly 24/7 for the past month and a half. My older NAS box has four 1.5TB Samsung 5400RPMs, and they're all also chugging along nicely; just had one problem once when I took the computer to work to dust it out with an air compressor and one of the drives was not detected when I put it back in. Restarted a couple times, jiggled a few wires, and it came back, no problem.

As for sizes, you're likely to have better performance with a higher capacity disk. That's because the data stored on each platter is more dense on a higher capacity disk, meaning the disk can access more data for the same number of revolutions. Still, don't expect any conventional HDD to fully reach SATA II speeds.

[ColdFission]

Yeah, that's pretty much it. A larger cache helps improve speeds. 32MB is the least you'd want; 64MB if it's available.

Anyway, I've always loved Samsung and Hitachi drives. Currently have six of the Hitachi 3TB drives in my server; none were DOA and all have been working nearly 24/7 for the past month and a half. My older NAS box has four 1.5TB Samsung 5400RPMs, and they're all also chugging along nicely; just had one problem once when I took the computer to work to dust it out with an air compressor and one of the drives was not detected when I put it back in. Restarted a couple times, jiggled a few wires, and it came back, no problem.

As for sizes, you're likely to have better performance with a higher capacity disk. That's because the data stored on each platter is more dense on a higher capacity disk, meaning the disk can access more data for the same number of revolutions. Still, don't expect any conventional HDD to fully reach SATA II speeds.

Wooh, that's a very impressive server you got there. Are you using SATA RAID cards that support drives beyond the BIOS limited 2.19 TB barrier or are you using and EFI enabled mobo? Really curious on what hardware you're running with your Hitachis.

[Lupin]

Seagate, from my experience is very sensitive to voltage fluctuations. I've killed several drives due to simple power failures while none of my WD drives (connected to the same system) weren't affected.

For WD green drives, I recommend turning off all power saving features in the OS. You can also modify the time before the drive parks the head with a utility. Check WD site for that.

I'd pick Samsungs over Seagates. I also recommend Hitachi especially if your building RAID

[fohfoh]

IIRC Hitachi was purchased by WD recently? Or was that someone else?

[Gamerzhell]

Hitachi sold their HDD division to Western Digital.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-07/western-digital-to-buy-hitachi-unit-for-4-3-billion-in-cash-stock-deal.html
Samsung sold their HDD division to Seagate.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/19/samsung-sells-hdd-division-to-seagate-for-1-375-billion/

WD or Seagate, pick your poison.

[nstgc]

I use to swear by Seagate, but then they started to suck, and not just a little. They started to suck HARD. I don't trust them and I've been hearing all sorts of bad things about their SATA drives (their SAS drives are apparently decent). I personaly have 4 1TB F3s, 1 1.5TB F2, and 1 2TB F4. They are great, and I'd advice you to buy Samsung.

[Freedom Kira]

Wooh, that's a very impressive server you got there. Are you using SATA RAID cards that support drives beyond the BIOS limited 2.19 TB barrier or are you using and EFI enabled mobo? Really curious on what hardware you're running with your Hitachis.

Nah. Just attached them to the mobo (I had to find one with eight SATA ports) and used mdadm (Linux). I believe it's EFI, yeah; the Newegg description page is not very helpful.

See this post for exact specs.

Hitachi sold their HDD division to Western Digital.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-07/western-digital-to-buy-hitachi-unit-for-4-3-billion-in-cash-stock-deal.html
Samsung sold their HDD division to Seagate.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/19/samsung-sells-hdd-division-to-seagate-for-1-375-billion/

WD or Seagate, pick your poison.

Interesting. I never expected this, especially since I still see Samsung and Hitachi HDDs available for sale, and they're even coming out with new HDDs every so often. They must have received branding rights too.

[Lupin]

IIRC Hitachi was purchased by WD recently? Or was that someone else?

The deal is yet to be finalized. As of now they are separate companies.

[nstgc]

Well shit. That sucks

[AnimeJanai]

But it sort of explains why in the past few months Hitachi drives have been dumping at my local Fry's megastore instead of the usual maxtor or samsung.  It's hard buying a 1TB drive for $54 when the 2TB drive is $69.  You can see some of Fry's retail store prices at a non-fry's website below.  Individual stores have their own additional bargains that are usually better than the advertised price, particularly if it is to clear something out like unadvertised Compaq desktops for $249 each (everything but the monitor) and it included the latest windows O/S.

    http://www.frys-electronics-ads.com/