Please recomend a good quality new one

old one was a Hitachi and made in 2010 so not lasted very well

Go for Samsung …

Ebuyer have a good range at present.

Samsung or WD.

Samsung SSD if you’re trying to be trendy or don’t mind a bit of firmware hassles otherwise traditional Samsung or WD HDD.

Ask five geeks for a hard disk recommendation and you’ll get five different answers.

I’d go for a high RPM drive with a large cache. All other things being equal I’d pick whatever IBM are called these days, HSGT or whatever, I’ve have a string of Deathstars that have never put a foot wrong. But there will be no shortage of people disagreeing with me based on experiences of a bad batch about ten years ago.

Cougar – Member
I’d go for a high RPM drive with a large cache. All other things being equal I’d pick whatever IBM are called these days

IBM HDD? Where can you find one nowadays? I haven’t seen one for many years now … still available?

The deathstars of the early 2000s did put me off for life *click click click* ahhhh not again. SSD prices are very favouable ATM, can get a 120gb from Scan for under £60. Not synchronous/Sandforce/SATA3 but in the real world still very quick.

They are now HGST.

Why all these recommendations for big brand commercial units? Personally I’d go for one made in their garage by somebody small and independent who’s using all the latest tech rather than the outdated stuff the big boys have.

schrickvr6 – Member

They are now HGST.

Ahh … I see … I think it was a while back on some forums related to computer that talked about genuine IBM HDD and IBM OEM HGST. The reviews were rather mixed with the latter so majority move away from it. However, HGST are found in most computer when you buy new.

Seagate is fine too.

aracer … what garage brands are you referring to?

Samsung are made by seagate now, I think Hitachi are or are shortly becoming WD having been bought out.

Buy the cheapest one with the longest warranty. Basically no drives are without faults these days.

Seagate or WD. Had a Seagate one for 7 years hasn’t failed yet. Bought a Samsung last year and it broke within 2 months.

I think it was a while back on some forums related to computer that talked about genuine IBM HDD and IBM OEM HGST

I think, and I could be wrong, is that the connection is that Hitachi bought the production plant. Ie, it’s the same thing.

Got a sea gate barracuda still going strong from an old puter so was considering
getting another one .

what’s the normal lifespan of a hd

If you don’t need a huge amount of storage space I would risk getting an SSD(solid state drive), faster than a HDD but possibly less reliable due to it being new technology. I think Intel make the most reliable SSDs at the moment.

For HDDs I would go for Samsung or Seagate.

Normal life of a HD would depend on a few things, I think if they are left on 24/7 they are supposed to last longer, I had a Samsung on mostly 24/7 for over 5 years until it recently broke 🙁

Cougar – Member
I think, and I could be wrong, is that the connection is that Hitachi bought the production plant. Ie, it’s the same thing.

Yes, something like that after a surge of broken HD …

Bloody hell … all these brands … they are all the same I guess buying each other out as usual. 🙄

I guess it’s a hit or miss for all now so just any of them will do so long as you back up your data.

I am using Intel SSD (for OS) and Samsung 500HD (data storage) at the moment.

My old laptop is using WD Momentous something like that after the original Hitachi died after 5 years.

I think if they are left on 24/7 they are supposed to last longer,

It’s the opposite, regular HDDs are designed to be powered down sometimes. Server and “workstation” drives are designed to run 24/7.

Or at least, that’s what marketing would have us believe anyway. They’re probably all the same.

what’s the normal lifespan of a hd

Look for a “MTBF” statistic for a given model. That’s ‘mean time between failures’ or, speculatively, how long it’s likely to last.

Buy the cheapest one with the longest warranty

^ This ^

OS (win7/whatever) – SSD 128GB – 60 to 70 quid
Storage – 2TB seagate or WD – 80 quid/3y warranty.

2TB seems to be best £/GB

Troutie,

Mail me if you fancy a deal on light upgrade in exchange for a new HDD 🙂

Cheers
Clunk

Corsair Force 3 SSD. Ace.

I just had a look through a pile of dead hard drives from the last two weeks.

4 WD
3 Maxtor
3 Samsung
1 Toshiba
1 Deathstar

FWIW I’ve got two Intel 520 SSDs in raid-0 in my main rig and they absolutely rip.

I just had a look through a pile of dead hard drives from the last two weeks.

Meaningless without a baseline. How many working ones are there?

I’ve got two Intel 520 SSDs in raid-0 in my main rig and they absolutely rip.

Nothing like giving yourself a 100% increase of the chance of catastrophic failure.

I know it means absolutely nothing as I’d still recommend two of the three highest failures, but probably 30-35 and I have no recollection of what they were. I wasn’t suggesting it was any indicator of reliability just a random stat of the week.

Don’t particularly care, make a weekly image of the os and all data is stored on an ATA the backed up to a NAS, anything really really important I back up to a server to be absolutely safe. I would do that anyway so the extra possibilty of failure is of no consequence, not saying it will never happen but have used raid-0 or 5 for a long time and have never had an unbootable partition.

I’m really not sure how or why you’re comparing RAID0 to RAID5. When you say RAID0 do you actually mean RAID1?

But, yes, if you’ve got an OS image then that’s obviously less of an issue. I’d still rather avoid having to rebuild in the first place, myself.

I wasn’t suggesting it was any indicator of reliability just a random stat of the week.

I’m glad I asked then, or it might’ve been misinterpreted.

I wasn’t comparing but no I meant what I said raid-0/striping. I’ve used raid-5 when I want a level of redundancy with some of the benefits of 0, not needing fast writes.

You’re right I should have said so people don’t get the wrong end of the stick.

old one was a Hitachi and made in 2010 so not lasted very well

Never had any trouble with Hitachi myself. Nothing to add on what to buy but I’m guessing it’s a desktop so given the short lifetime I’d say it’s worth just having a quick check that the disk is getting enough cooling before you put a new one in – they can fry themselves if the fans or vents are blocked.

<nods> fair do’s.

I can’t see any compelling reason to ever use RAID5 in a home environment, and little reason to use RAID at all. Home RAID adapters are software RAID or at best ‘fake’ RAID which has overheads that generally offsets any performance gains you’d get, and RAID5 write performance, relatively, is absolutely bobbins.

Where redundancy was a necessity I’d go RAID1 every time in a home environment but, as I said, it’s usually not worth it. Better off with a good backup policy.

RAID0 is a ticking time bomb. There’s very specific situations where it’s a necessity but, generally, it’s a workaround at best. I’d avoid it wherever possible.

In my Opinion, anyway. I’m sure there’s situations where that doesn’t apply, but home RAID is often overrated.

Three Seagate drives here – two of them are a few years old, the other at least five years old. Also have a three year old Verbatim which is also fine, and a couple of fairly new 2TB Buffalo drives from Maplin – these are the only ones which make me anxious – lots of mechanical sounding clicks and clunks at startup.

Not a single failure yet, but they’re only ever written to, and rarely used to retrieve info (clients’ wedding photos).

… which you have backups of, of course. (-:

Cougar – Member
<nods> fair do’s.

I can’t see any compelling reason to ever use RAID5 in a home environment, and little reason to use RAID at all. Home RAID adapters are software RAID or at best ‘fake’ RAID which has overheads that generally offsets any performance gains you’d get, and RAID5 write performance, relatively, is absolutely bobbins.

Where redundancy was a necessity I’d go RAID1 every time in a home environment but, as I said, it’s usually not worth it. Better off with a good backup policy.

In my Opinion, anyway. I’m sure there’s situations where that doesn’t apply, but home RAID is often overrated.

That all depends on how much data you have.

Once you get into a few TB, RAID 1 is hugely expensive (50% disk space overhead), and regular backup of the entire dataset is impractical. Not to mention the convenience of having the storage space pooled, instead of separated into xTB chunks.

I personally run SnapRaid + AUFS instead of online RAID though. It’s somewhere between backup snapshots and RAID style redundancy. Plus it means lower power usage as the discs don’t all need to be spinning to use the pool as they do in RAID 5. The other thing is that unlike RAID 5, it prevents bit-rot in a similar way to ZFS (block checksumming), so you can be sure the data on disc is not corrupted.

Well, yeah, and you’re right, to a point. I should really have said “ever… in a typical home environment,” generalisations are bad. Sorry.

Once you get into a few TB, you’re beyond the realms of typical home usage (unless you’re collecting pirate copies of every film ever made).

Photographers, musicians, budding movie makers and the like may have unusually large amounts of data, but I’d argue that they aren’t really average users; in that capacity they should then be looking at more robust solutions above a poxy motherboard RAID controller.

RAID is not backup. Regular backup is practical or impractical depending on the value of your data. A TB of torrented Star Trek doesn’t really need backing up; your last ten years of .RAW photography images absolutely does.

I’m aware of SnapRaid but not familiar with it. Can you recover from that configuration if the controller has a fit and corrupts a stack? (Rare, but I’ve seen Enterprise-grade boards do it)

Cougar – Member
… which you have backups of, of course. (-:

Of course 🙂 Everything apart from RAW files are backed up onto DVDs as well as being backed up onto two seperate HDs. Once I’ve done my processing and saved a copy of my colour jpegs (I can produce a decent B+W image from jpeg), I’d love to just bin the RAW files, but haven’t been able to bring myself to do it yet.

This will change as I’ve spent hundreds of £s on external HDs and really can’t afford to save all the RAW files from every wedding this year…

As a non-typical home user, is it worth my while looking at a RAID system do you think?

EDIT; sorry, that’s not clear – at present I save all my RAW files. And it’s not cost effective to keep buying external HDs.

Cougar – Member
Well, yeah, and you’re right, to a point. I should really have said “ever… in a typical home environment,” generalisations are bad. Sorry.

Once you get into a few TB, you’re beyond the realms of typical home usage (unless you’re collecting pirate copies of every film ever made).

I don’t think we’re that weird 🙂 It’s just music, films (not pirated!) and photos really. Bearing in mind each photo is 12MB ish, film is approx 25gb and an album is approx 300mb it adds up quickly. The NAS also acts as a TimeMachine server for our Macs, which is another 500gb or so.

I’m aware of SnapRaid but not familiar with it. Can you recover from that configuration if the controller has a fit and corrupts a stack? (Rare, but I’ve seen Enterprise-grade boards do it)

I’m not sure what you mean by that TBH. Put it this way, it is in no way enterprise ready and the snapRaid folk never claim it is, however it does have nice features for home use:
– you can pull individual disks and use them in any pc
– you can add disks at any time
– you can restore files from the last sync if they’re accidentally deleted
– only the disk you’re using has to be spun up to use

It’s similar to FlexRaid and unRAID I suppose.

good tips for a non it bloke like me

so would I be advised to go the ssd for the OS. and a seperate drive for storage
and are the ssd s. easy to set up with said. OS

You don’t need raid, a SSD for OS etc and a HDD for storage is what I would do.

Not sure what’s leading people to recommend SSDs. Trout, do you care if your PC boots 10 seconds faster? Enough to pay a load more money? You’ve not given much info on your use, SSDs are faster but HDs aren’t slow and do the job most people want them to do.

Northwind – Member

Not sure what’s leading people to recommend SSDs.

The reason I bought SSD is to see how long it last since there are no moving parts and to see how fast they can be. Also trying out the technology … apart from those reasons it can be a pain if you do not get the right firmware.

Trout, do you care if your PC boots 10 seconds faster? Enough to pay a load more money? You’ve not given much info on your use, SSDs are faster but HDs aren’t slow and do the job most people want them to do.

Yes, traditional HD is not that slow if you want to save some cash.

To OP, I run two 128GB Crucial M4’s in my Macbook Pro (one in place of the optical drive), and 1 120 GB OCZ Vertex 3 for the OS on my iMac- Alongside a 2TB HDD. Works perfectly for me.

Northwind, I’m not sure about Windows, but on OSX SSDs make a massive difference in the speed at which apps open, and data is transferred, which to me is vital considering I have to move several GB’s of edited footage at a time between computers on a daily basis.

I did consider a ssd and hdd just to try out the new tech
but went the cheaper option of a sea gate. barracuda. 1 TB HDD and all working very nicely
Ta for the suggestions