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Due to the increasing amount of space games are now taking up, I'm thinking of buying a 4TB HDD for future games and this is the one I am  looking at:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822149627
I suppose I could get by with a cheaper 2TB instead. Is 4 TB overkill? Should I look at other brands instead?

There's a 4tb on the Friday sale on the front page.

Usacomp2k3 wrote:

There's a 4tb on the Friday sale on the front page.

Thanks. I'll take a look.

I have the 5TB version and it has been my main game drive/scratch drive for over a year now with no problems. It also holds a steady read of 182MB/s.

ClickClick5 wrote:

I have the 5TB version and it has been my main game drive/scratch drive for over a year now with no problems. It also holds a steady read of 182MB/s.

I just checked and the 5TB is just a little more then the 4TB. Thanks.

I've also been using the 5 TB Toshiba for the past 12 months for everything that won't fit on my SSD.  The drive is big, fast, cheap, reportedly reliable...  The only minor quibble I have is that the head seek noise is somewhat loud.

Thanks. Looks like I'll get the 5 TB instead of the 4 TB one as it is  just a little bit more.

I benched the drive (5tb) to double check it's speed:

HDTune Pro 5.50:
Transfer:
Minimum 99.8 MB/s
Maximum: 229.4 MB/s
Average: 169.4 MB/s

Access Time: 11.8 ms
Burst Rate: 388.0 MB/s
CPU Use: 0.7%

This is after 2704 run time hours. 

I have 2 of the 5tb versions, they were recommended to me by one of the techs at Microcenter; great drive, fast, reliable, they gave me good advice.

sophisticles wrote:

I have 2 of the 5tb versions, they were recommended to me by one of the techs at Microcenter; great drive, fast, reliable, they gave me good advice.

Were these retail packaged or OEM? A few months ago I went to Microcenter to get some Toshiba HDDs they had on sale, but decided to pass on them when I saw how they were handling OEM drives. No protective packaging other than the ESD bags, with the drives just piled on a shelf out on the sales floor.

just brew it! wrote:

sophisticles wrote:

I have 2 of the 5tb versions, they were recommended to me by one of the techs at Microcenter; great drive, fast, reliable, they gave me good advice.

Were these retail packaged or OEM? A few months ago I went to Microcenter to get some Toshiba HDDs they had on sale, but decided to pass on them when I saw how they were handling OEM drives. No protective packaging other than the ESD bags, with the drives just piled on a shelf out on the sales floor.

I wouldn't buy them either.

just brew it! wrote:

sophisticles wrote:

I have 2 of the 5tb versions, they were recommended to me by one of the techs at Microcenter; great drive, fast, reliable, they gave me good advice.

Were these retail packaged or OEM? A few months ago I went to Microcenter to get some Toshiba HDDs they had on sale, but decided to pass on them when I saw how they were handling OEM drives. No protective packaging other than the ESD bags, with the drives just piled on a shelf out on the sales floor.

They were retail packaged; I would never buy an OEM drive from anyone, for exactly the reasons you outlined. Retail, $145 each, a steal if you ask me.

I have 9 (yes 9) of these in my media server.  The 4TB 7200RPM X300, that is.  No failures yet, system is on 24x7 and has been since January of this year.  Drives are fast, reliable, and cheap.  That pretty much shouldn't exist...

Are the seek noise really loud? That's pretty much all I can find negative in the reviews. I have the P series 5TB already and this X300 seems to be marketed as a higher tier. Another negative comment that I read about is the bottom screw holes not matching, which is not a problem for me. My P series drive, with slightly louder sound (compared to ~5400rpm drives like my WD Red), may produce a "click" sound from time to time which initially scared me a bit. I wonder if the X300 has the same problem?

I almost pulled the trigger last time when the 6TB X300 was on sale at Newegg. If I can have some owner's reports that will be great. Thanks.

One more thing: compared to the HGST NAS series, which one would you trust more for a storage array (for me I am using Storage Space)? The HGST is not expensive, but the crazy deals of the Toshiba's are hard to ignore since I am looking at the 6TB level.

I've had 2-3 Seagate 1/1.5TB 7200.12 models fail under warranty over the past two years, and this looks like alternative worth trying out.

I've found good mentions of Toshiba drives in general on backblaze:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-look-a ... rd-drives/

But there' s no current Toshiba drive model they could perform enough of an analysis on:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... s-q1-2016/

Still, it's time to source differently.

FWIW the 7200.12 is a very old design (circa 2009), dating back to one of Seagate's "rough patches". I'm a little surprised you still had any that were under warranty, and even more surprised that they're still being sold. By most accounts, Seagate's current drives are better... though there was also that little incident with the 3TB model from ~4 years ago.

I boycotted Seagate for a few years after the 7200.11 debacle. They're finally off my "avoid" list; I am willing to buy them again if the price is right. If a Seagate drive is selling for roughly 20% less than an equivalent WD, HGST, or Toshiba drive, I'll generally bite.

I had snagged some of the last 7200.12s with 5-year warranties. Actually the majority of Seagates that failed did last three years on average until 2012-2013, except for a newer 3TB (ST1000DM003) I had bought in 2014 to replace the failed 1.5TB. That one was nearly the same generation as that of the Backblaze story, it went bits up in less than 2 years. The replacement 7200.12s have been running fine and out of warranty since then as media drives. Bad batches for sure, but like you I've been buying Seagate again on price, though only a very few for personal use.

just brew it! wrote:

A few months ago I went to Microcenter to get some Toshiba HDDs they had on sale, but decided to pass on them when I saw how they were handling OEM drives. No protective packaging other than the ESD bags, with the drives just piled on a shelf out on the sales floor.

Having worked at one of the major parcel companies in my earlier years, I can say that HDDs are surprisingly tolerant of shock (otherwise we'd probably see an 80% failure rate), though being packed in styrofoam probably helps a tremendous amount. I cringe when thinking about metal drive edges dragging across components on the bottom circuit boards though. I've often wondered why HDD makers don't use a cheap piece of plastic on the bottom for protection. It would cost almost nothing, yet I don't ever recall seeing it done.

The Egg wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

A few months ago I went to Microcenter to get some Toshiba HDDs they had on sale, but decided to pass on them when I saw how they were handling OEM drives. No protective packaging other than the ESD bags, with the drives just piled on a shelf out on the sales floor.

Having worked at one of the major parcel companies in my earlier years, I can say that HDDs are surprisingly tolerant of shock (otherwise we'd probably see an 80% failure rate), though being packed in styrofoam probably helps a tremendous amount. I cringe when thinking about metal drive edges dragging across components on the bottom circuit boards though. I've often wondered why HDD makers don't use a cheap piece of plastic on the bottom for protection. It would cost almost nothing, yet I don't ever recall seeing it done.

They're surprisingly tolerant if they are properly protected in shock absorbing packaging.

If anything, bare 3.5" desktop drives are surprisingly delicate. A drop of just a few inches onto a hard surface, or dropping a screwdriver onto the top cover can ruin them. And that's when they're powered down. When they're actually running, even loud noises can cause mis-tracking and reliability problems.

Besides two runs with reliability problems, has anyone actually had a lot of failures (out of the ordinary) from Seagate drives? I pretty much buy them exclusively because they're cheap and I can't recall out of my sample size in the multiple tens of drives any that stood out as bad besides the two runs with issues.

I have a stupid number of the ES.2 and NAS drives in service 24/7 at work as well, but I assume most don't buy enterprise drives for home use. My personal collection includes a smattering of 1 TB, 1.5 TB, 2 TB, and 3 TB drives. No unusual failures aside from a single drive that died 6 months in, but was happily replaced under warranty.

I imagine the strongest sticklers of anti-Seagate tend to be those with a single drive containing all their crap with no backups...

Unscientifically speaking, they seem to have had more than their share of "problematic" models over the past half decade or so.

That said, they seem to have gotten better lately, and I have started buying them again. I do tend to use them in RAID-1 arrays rather than standalone though...

Been meaning to ask:  I've had two WD Black drives now with substantial speed degradation around the 3 year mark.  Going off memory, I want to say the first one was a 1002FAEX (RMA'd while still under warranty) and now a 2003FZEX.  Tried the usual reformatting, cable replacement, etc.  No other errors or issues.  Seems almost like a firmware bug.

The Egg wrote:

Been meaning to ask:  I've had two WD Black drives now with substantial speed degradation around the 3 year mark.  Going off memory, I want to say the first one was a 1002FAEX (RMA'd while still under warranty) and now a 2003FZEX.  Tried the usual reformatting, cable replacement, etc.  No other errors or issues.  Seems almost like a firmware bug.

Did you look at the SMART stats at all? That'll tell you if you're getting read retries, seek errors, reallocated sectors, etc... any of which could result in performance problems if they're happening frequently. Was there any data loss, or just slowdowns? Significant slowdowns on a mechanical HDD without any other obvious errors would be very strange, unless they're in a high vibration environment.

just brew it! wrote:

The Egg wrote:

Been meaning to ask:  I've had two WD Black drives now with substantial speed degradation around the 3 year mark.  Going off memory, I want to say the first one was a 1002FAEX (RMA'd while still under warranty) and now a 2003FZEX.  Tried the usual reformatting, cable replacement, etc.  No other errors or issues.  Seems almost like a firmware bug.

Did you look at the SMART stats at all? That'll tell you if you're getting read retries, seek errors, reallocated sectors, etc... any of which could result in performance problems if they're happening frequently. Was there any data loss, or just slowdowns? Significant slowdowns on a mechanical HDD without any other obvious errors would be very strange, unless they're in a high vibration environment.

No data loss or errors in either case, though I haven't checked the SMART stats on the current drive. I'll give that a look, as well as getting some actual performance numbers once I'm back home.

The Egg wrote:

No data loss or errors in either case, though I haven't checked the SMART stats on the current drive. I'll give that a look, as well as getting some actual performance numbers once I'm back home.

I would imagine they're remapping sectors, retrying reads/writes, etc.

A quick fix for some of that is to read the entire drive end to end a few times. It'll suss out all of the weak sectors and force them to be rewritten.

Man I totally forgot about this thread and buying a large HDD. Of course then again I'm really not running out of storing space yet.

techguy wrote:

I have 9 (yes 9) of these in my media server.  The 4TB 7200RPM X300, that is.  No failures yet, system is on 24x7 and has been since January of this year.  Drives are fast, reliable, and cheap.  That pretty much shouldn't exist...

I just wanna say this made me feel a LOT better about my incoming 6Tb X300. You are correct, in the hard drive world fast, reliable, and cheap never ALL go together at once, or at least, usually don't.

The Egg wrote:

I've often wondered why HDD makers don't use a cheap piece of plastic on the bottom for protection. It would cost almost nothing, yet I don't ever recall seeing it done.

Seagate had their steel SeaShield on the Barracuda IV (7200.4 in modern parlance), and the rubber sleeve on their U-series 5 and 6 drives.


Many modern drives also put all of their chips on the side facing the drive, so the bottom is just a bare PCB that can presumably be coated with plastic conformal coating to avoid shorts.

Covering the PCB restricts airflow, which will in turn cause the drive to run hotter. A HDD which is properly mounted in a case or external enclosure shouldn't need any additional protection anyway; the only use case where it really matters is when the drive will be used bare in a docking bay or trayless hot swap cage.

Heat is less of an issue for SSDs since they don't have a spindle motor or head actuator, and the associated high-power electronics to drive them. SSDs also don't have the aluminum base casting to give them mechanical rigidity; I suspect this is why most 2'5" SSDs are fully enclosed, while HDDs are not.