How to find the right HDD for your application

[aquataur]

One of my hdd´s was becoming noisy. Since my new PC is silent, this was becoming more and more obnoxious. It is a 7200 drive and seems to work towards an intermittent bearing problem. So I was looking for a new hdd. Phew. So many vendors, so many products.

Deciding on a piece of computer hardware can be a time consuming process. Every time I look something up it takes days until I find helpful documents that turn me into the right direction. Somebody looking for a hard disk may find the following useful.

Background (skip ahead to the conclusion if not interested):

Let´s see what the market research says on reliability.

HGST (never heard about them before, formerly Hitachi but now a WD subsidiary) are according to this survey the most reliable. They are very expensive and are said to be fairly loud.

Seagate and Toshiba appear non reliable.

WD look good. Now this survey is about bigger disks so it may not be entirely true for all sizes.
But let it be a WD. Never had any trouble with their drives.

This article is the one that appeared most thorough and profound to me. It makes the decision easy: RED.

There is one snag about this drive: it is tailored to meet the needs of a NAS system.

Although increased reliability, warranty, anti-vibrational measures do not hurt in a stand-alone application, they have some quirks that need to be attended to to make them run reliable in a non-NAS environment: TLER needs to be turned off (good for NAS, possibly problematic in stand-alone), and possibly a high Load Cycle Count requires a firmware update. Not to worry. WD supplies a patch tool to fix this. However, it was already fixed by a factory firmware update.

The TLER problem can be fixed by running smartctl but only temporarily.

You´d have to run this fix on every boot by autorun and upon wake-up from sleep with the following free tool: W7 suspend and resume control.

In a nutshell:

* the WD reds are very economically priced, pretty fast, silent, reliable.
* Since they are optimized for NAS storage, they need a little attention to make them great desktop drives. A few free tools assist us along here.
* Download the supporting programs from the WD site. Make sure you download Acronis Backup Tool for free.
* Run the patch to see if the drive needs a firmware update at all.
* Download SmartMonTools.
* You may wish to optionally download HDDguardian to scrutinize your drive(s). This program needs SmartMonTools installed first.

* If you wish to change the TLER values, add an autostart entry to task scheduler to run smartctl on startup.
* Download W7 suspend and resume control to run smartctl after resume.

* Enjoy a great HDD.

I am not affiliated with any of those companies, but I am glad I found a great solution, which is why I am passing the information on. This may save you hours and hours of poking around the internet.

-helmut

[gypsy101]

WD Blue Caviar for the win.
http://www.amazon.com/WD-Blue-Desktop-H ... B00461LT6S

[aquataur]

Just phased one out - too noisy in a silent PC.

-helmut

[Ianpb]

WD Blue Caviar for the win.
http://www.amazon.com/WD-Blue-Desktop-H ... B00461LT6S

Or WD Caviar Black, which has twice the size of buffer compared to the Blue.

[AHornsby]

Have you checked out the SSD's? They generate NO sound and have a MTBF of about 2,000,000 hours. (In other words you'll be Dust in the Wind before you have to get another one.) All for $100.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t1Xxco5-S4


-h