Author Topic: Western Digital or Seagate (Read 13160 times)

limefc · « **Reply #200 on:** August 20, 2012, 04:23:06 PM »

If it's an external, they are often WD Greens, have power management built in or other similar bullshit so trying to maximize their life is something the disk itself actively works against. Not to mention because they are in a small enclosure, the temperature is less controllable.

Anyway, if you were to keep it on 24/7 and it doesn't have power management active that parks heads/turns it off when idle, then it can potentially last a lot longer.

So far out of my 24/7 drives, only one out of 7 has broken in less than 2 years. Was a defective Seagate drive with "click of death".
I have one that is only 2 years old but it's working, two at age of 3 years and working, 2 at age of 6 years and working and 1 at age of 8 years - broke down shortly after I took it off 24/7 operation. Was using it as a boot drive for some old computers. And for the age numbers, it's how long they were in 24/7 operation. The 6 year drives are at this point either 9 or 10 years old.

Dhruv · « **Reply #201 on:** August 20, 2012, 04:28:13 PM »

Mine is Seagate 2TB... FreeAgent GoFlex Desk To be specific... Can you tell me if it has than power management system?

And WTF... 6 and 8 year old drives?

limefc · « **Reply #202 on:** August 20, 2012, 05:01:59 PM »

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/214107en

Yes. It does have self contained power management. Says it can be controlled by the OS on MacOS but I don't know about Windows.

And yes.6 and 8 year old drives. They'd be older if I didn't have to replace them on grounds of insufficient capacity/outdated interface.

Dhruv · « **Reply #203 on:** August 20, 2012, 05:11:17 PM »

Quote from: limefc on August 20, 2012, 05:01:59 PM

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/214107en

Yes. It does have self contained power management. Says it can be controlled by the OS on MacOS but I don't know about Windows.

And yes.6 and 8 year old drives. They'd be older if I didn't have to replace them on grounds of insufficient capacity/outdated interface.

Okay so what do you say about putting it on usage for 24x7? It won't be out of usage anytime I guess.
And yes drive capacities are insufficient atleast for us anime watchers... Downloading 1080p FLAC wherever possible doesn't help that.

limefc · « **Reply #204 on:** August 20, 2012, 05:22:32 PM »

Quote

Okay so what do you say about putting it on usage for 24x7?

A pointless endeavour if it isn't being used.

Dhruv · « **Reply #205 on:** August 20, 2012, 05:26:23 PM »

Quote from: limefc on August 20, 2012, 05:22:32 PM

Quote
Okay so what do you say about putting it on usage for 24x7?
A pointless endeavour if it isn't being used.

Well it will be. I used it like this for almost 6 months until someone told me that HDD's shouldn't be used this much and gave a number(8hrs a day)
So I guess it should be fine.

limefc · « **Reply #206 on:** August 20, 2012, 05:38:09 PM »

Of course. The safest thing for a HDD is to be spinning at constant RPM with read heads levitating over LZ. Which is mostly the case when it's idle and spun up.

Dhruv · « **Reply #207 on:** August 20, 2012, 05:41:11 PM »

Quote from: limefc on August 20, 2012, 05:38:09 PM

Of course. The safest thing for a HDD is to be spinning at constant RPM with read heads levitating over LZ. Which is mostly the case when it's idle and spun up.

Okay so what is the verdict? Should I use it 24x7 or not?

* Dhruv ready to put his HDD for seeding

limefc · « **Reply #208 on:** August 20, 2012, 05:54:20 PM »

Like I said, the best thing for a hard drive is to be constantly on and active with no parking or spin downs. How you use it is your own business.

Realistically it shouldn't make a difference either way unless the drive is defective. 2 power cycles per day is well within even conservative design limits. Shit like caviar greens can park/spin down like 100 times a day.

Dhruv · « **Reply #209 on:** August 20, 2012, 06:04:51 PM »

Quote from: limefc on August 20, 2012, 05:54:20 PM

Like I said, the best thing for a hard drive is to be constantly on and active with no parking or spin downs. How you use it is your own business.

Realistically it shouldn't make a difference either way unless the drive is defective. 2 power cycles per day is well within even conservative design limits. Shit like caviar greens can park/spin down like 100 times a day.

Mine isn't defective I can say that much. It was just Mae before the time when seagate started releasing their shitty batches. The only problem I can see is the temperature but the room fan and AC should be able to control it to an extent.
I personally feel it was working better before I removed it from 24x7 seeding.
Caviar Green's are supposed to be shit anyways.

megido-rev.M · « **Reply #210 on:** August 21, 2012, 01:10:04 AM »

Unless you're bombarding your equipment with dust piles or shaking it a lot, you're more likely to overheat the drive or cause a power surge than anything. Frankly, stuff like boards and chips can boast power-saving features, but mechanical devices should not.

Dhruv · « **Reply #211 on:** August 21, 2012, 03:38:10 AM »

^Well i usually don't do all this. I keep my hard disk in a cool clean area.

And also keep it from falling down.

xShadow · « **Reply #212 on:** August 25, 2012, 11:56:12 AM »

Just an FYI, they're having a 15% off on all WD hard drives right now; it's gonna be over today.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136792

^ This came down to 147 dollars within my cart, which is pretty much comparable to prices on this particular drive before they jacked them up to hell. If Samsung's F4 was still the price that it used to be, I would be buying the fuck out of it over this drive. Unfortunately, Seagate has turned it into crap, so that's not an option. This is pretty much the best thing on the market, and at 15% off its price is pretty much comparable to HGST's offering which is the only other thing that's even close to being worth a damn in the current HDD market.

Just a heads up.

Dhruv · « **Reply #213 on:** August 26, 2012, 04:14:44 AM »

Black is a pretty good drive I must say. Can be used as an as an external after putting it in an enclosure. I don't need it right now though. And I am pretty much stuck on elements. I'd I don't get that drive I'll probably consider Black with an external enclosure.

raandomer · « **Reply #214 on:** August 26, 2012, 04:36:40 AM »

Quote from: xShadow on August 25, 2012, 11:56:12 AM

Seagate has turned it into crap

curious to know why you consider seagate to be crap

also a black for an external is way overkill (unless your buying it for the warranty) and is its damn noisy.
since your set on the element just get it and be happy.

Dhruv · « **Reply #215 on:** August 26, 2012, 04:46:06 AM »

Quote from: raandomer on August 26, 2012, 04:36:40 AM

since your set on the element just get it and be happy.

Elements is pretty tough considering what tsutujin(not sure of the spelling) said... He has 4 of them and all of them are working fine and are very old.

Also I have heard about Black's warranty... 5 years I guess. Pretty long but it is expensive with a high per TB cost. But if it works... Probably worth it.

xShadow · « **Reply #216 on:** August 26, 2012, 06:39:14 AM »

Quote from: Dhruv on August 26, 2012, 04:14:44 AM

Black is a pretty good drive I must say. Can be used as an as an external after putting it in an enclosure. I don't need it right now though. And I am pretty much stuck on elements. I'd I don't get that drive I'll probably consider Black with an external enclosure.

I was simply putting it out there in a random hard drive thread. Didn't have to be this one.

Quote from: raandomer on August 26, 2012, 04:36:40 AM

curious to know why you consider seagate to be crap

It's no secret. They've generally been on the worse side when it comes to any kind of reviews. I don't know if they've improved recently, but even if they have with the WD Black being an overall higher quality drive and costing just a bit more while having a FIVE year warranty as opposed to Seagate's generally amazing ONE year warranties. As someone pointed out in a review that addressed Samsung's warranties going down to ONE YEAR (!!!!!!) recently, I really doubt they have much faith in their drives themselves, if the warranty is just one friggin year. Not to mention the current costs of Seagate 2TB drives is around 120-200 dollars. With that deal I pointed out earlier you're spending 27 dollars more to have a vastly superior drive. If you can't see the advantage here, I don't know what else to say.

raandomer · « **Reply #217 on:** August 26, 2012, 07:58:07 AM »

oh so its value your looking at, not performance/reliability, fair enough. Btw, can you link me to the reviews that show seagates perform significantly worse (or less reliable) than other drives.

And with the warranty cuttings (wd was doing it as well btw) i find it a good thing really since theres less warranty overhead, more money can be used for r&d which will ultimate benefit the consumer in the end. It's fine for me since most my drives either fail in the first year, or i pull them out of service as they're not efficient anymore (usually in 3-4 years). I rarely get any drives that fail on me after their first year for some reason (except those deathstars).

xShadow · « **Reply #218 on:** August 26, 2012, 09:04:09 AM »

I always look at value. I live my life by the Bayesian probability trees.

Well perhaps that's a bit of a stretch. But I do use it extensively for purchases. The values are a bit subjective, though, since you rarely have an exactly X probability for Y event supplied.

Quote

Btw, can you link me to the reviews that show seagates perform significantly worse (or less reliable) than other drives.

That's difficult to supply. Generally when I assess hard disks I sort the reviews list on newegg by ownership length and then look at how many people have them failing past one year. The only authoritative study on hard drive reliability (Google's) in recent history will pretty much tell you why. Just look at some of their graphs.

(click to show/hide)

tl;dr:
Generally, it boils down 3 risk categories: high, medium, low. With at best mediocre reviews (which is for their 200 dollar line) and a one year warranty, Seagate naturally goes into the "high risk" pool. There isn't any way around this. I mean when When they have a 1 year warranty on their drives, that also says something about their expected quality. When I can get a WD Black for 145 bucks, which is guaranteed to at least give me some place to put my shit for 5 years (ie low risk category), why would I bother?

limefc · « **Reply #219 on:** August 26, 2012, 08:36:05 PM »

A longer warranty is good to have. No arguments there. However, you can't use warranty to gauge the quality of parts. That's like saying "This item is cheaper than the other item, thus it is clearly of lesser quality."

As an example, Kingwin Lazer Platinum power supplies come with 3 year warranty while Corsair low wattage AX (eg not AX1200i which pretty much blows anything out of the water) come with 7 year warranty. Arguably, the LZP units are superiour in quality despite having lesser warranty.

As for risk assessment, if Seagate shit has 1 year warranty, you'd expect it to be cheap to match. If it is, then why you should bother (or not) is obvious.

Reviews on the egg? 99.9% of reviewers on Newegg do not know what they are doing. Case in point, since I like power supplies so much, the majority of power supplies below 25 dollars in price have 4 egg ratings and a few have 3 eggs. There is nothing below 3 eggs. Nothing. And practically all of these with a few noteable exceptions are harmful to your computer and unreliable. I mean come on, when items that are provably destructive to equipment connected to them are getting above 1 egg reviews with the only complaints being people who got the unit "dead on arrival" then you know something is fucked up. People claiming high tech level are rating these piece of shit 5/5 or complaining about irrelevant bullshit like fans being noisy.

You know what, I'm gonna rant about this some more. Here is a quote from a review: "To all those folks that knock this power supply unit, you are going to wish you had one laying around to get you onto the internet to use newegg to order a new one if YOUR power supply DIES unexpectedly! That reason alone is good enough to keep one of these guys around." 4 fucking stars.

That particular piece of shit couldn't even power on my system let alone get it far enough to let me order a new one on Newegg. God damn...
and if I connected my equipment to it, I'd be replacing every other part as well, not just the power supply.
This fucker had the audacity to claim his "tech level" was exceptional.

Oh man, I am hating myself pretty hard for going over to newegg comments after a long time of ignoring their existance.
Here is another fun quote on topic of power supplies: "What is even worse is that it doesn't weigh more than a few ounces. What that means is that it is completely solid-state (no transformers.) That could be a good thing except that due to it's light weight there is no way that it can have adequate cooling fins for the rectifiers/transistors/CMOS chips."
I can barely contain my rage. I hope to god that's a troll, thinking he's all hilarious and shit.