Bought 4 of these for my home NAS and they really are great for the price. The only negative thing is the noise.. I wouldn't have 4 of these in my room for sure.
I use a 2TB version of this drive in 1 of my pc's and I don't notice any offending noise. The case does have noise dampening foam all around it and the hard drive is elastically suspended and isolated from the frame but I use all noctua fans and a fanless psu so if the HDD was making a lot of noise it should be audible. Maybe it's just your set up. You need to properly suspend the drive off the case with rubber so no vibrations are transferred to the case which is the main cause of noise.
Yeah, except it would generate extra heat. If the drives operate in synchrony theoretically they could be arranged in such a manner that their noise cancel out, but it be quite the feat of engineering. It would be tremendously easier to simply dampen and absorb the noise.
I just got done doing a burn in with five of these for my FreeNAS and inside a 4U sitting on my kitchen table the fans were louder than the drives by far. The case is a rosewill RSV-L4500, the two rear 80mm fans have been changed out to PWM fans but the 120's are the ones that came with the case. Not that it's loud at all but the drives were the least on my mind.
Burn test was done with BadBlocks and took about 65 hours to run completely. Running a smart long test now and that is the only thing that is a little different. Drives are ranging from 548 minutes to 582 minutes to complete.
Got the drives for less than a 4TB WD Red (not the pro version) so I am loving it. Still need to get two more to finish out my pool but RaidZ3 should be great with a set of seven drives.
I double-checked my tables and indeed the Red and the NAS HDD have only 3 year warranties. Basically, 5 year warranties are only for enterprise-targeted drives (and the WD Red Pro).
In effect, the extra $15 for the Deskstar NAS is only for the extra RPM / performance. If you need a 5-year warranty, you need to go the enterprise drive route.
Having used Hitachi drives in multiple applications from IO intensive NAS to cold storage, the results Backblaze has match my own. The 75GXP days are long passed us, and from here, all we can hope is WD (my second go-to manufacture for drives, and owner of HGST) will use Hitachi technology. Seagate has fallen apart from their prime "Barracuda 7200.7" days. I pulled one of those out of a desktop a year ago, it was a decade old and still quiet as a kitten. 95,000 hours on it, 4,000 power cycles. Simply amazing for a consumer class drive.
sabresiberian the warranties aren't everything. Hitachi has the lowest failure rate in my experience and in googles experience and I'm sure the link samus gave will also say that i dont even need to look because it's just a fact hitachi's are like the energizer battery they keep going and going and going...
Well in my 20 years of dealing with pc's I've gone through many hard drives from many manufacturers and I can confidently say Hitachi has given me the fewest problems of all the current manufacturers. If i had to rank them I would say Seagate has been the absolute worst for me by far. They are so bad I once had a drive fail the warranty replacement fail within a month then the replacement to that replacement fail in the first week. Many other seagates failed too I've had over a dozen seagate failures in 20 years. Next worse would be Toshiba i think about 5 ot 6 toshiba drives have failed on me. Samsung about the same 5 or 6 failures. Western digital has done me pretty well i can only think of 3 times a WD drive has failed on me. Now hitachi only once. I have a 120GB hitachi drive that is going strong still the thing wont die. I have a stack of old hitachi drives that still work fine just have no use for such low densities. I dont know if its random luck or chance but I have nothing but good times with hitachi drives. Google seems to agree I read a report for them where they had a HUGE data sample on drive failure rates and hitachi was number 1 for them too with lowest failure rates of all brands. I don't think it is luck, Hitachi just really makes the best hard drives. I just hope this reliability does not change because WD bought them. But at least they were bought by WD and not some 1 else as WD isn't terrible like seagate and toshiba and samsung especially seagate, buying a seagate is throwing your money away.
I'm sure experience would vary based on how many drives you own, what density the drives are, where you live or where the drives are located (external environment / thermals), what kind of actions the system is doing, OS / BIOS setup.
There's a lot of factors, which is why its tough to draw from a person's experience and why it's more suitable to go to sites that have testbeds set up.
The reason I'm commenting because I thought it was Seagate or Hitatchi that had something that became the "DeathStar" because the drives would always fail. Vendors have had bad batches of products, but also good batches. They're almost like cars, so you have to make sure you're getting one of the better quality ones the manufacturer is putting out and not judge the manufacturer based on all the models they're making. Just like wine, some years are better than others.
According to WD, the Red Pro is rated at 1 in 10^15 not 10^14 before URE. Are you working from some other data or is your comparison chart inaccurate? Planning on purchasing several drives in the next few weeks and that was going to be the key factor in my decision.
When the WD Red Pro was launched, the datasheet had URE < 10 in 10^15, which I had denoted as 1 in 10^14 in our initial review. Backed up by a third-party post on another forum here: http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/western-...
It looks like WD has fixed this 'error' in their latest datasheet. I will update the table shortly.
Fact : As of Today (Dec 5th 2015) the Western Digital Spec Sheet for The Red Pro STILL lists the URE rate as 10 in 10^15. It is not "a mistake in the specs sheet". It has been listed that way since product launch and has never been corrected. 1 in 10^14 = 10 in 10^15. This is a 1 in 10^14 drive. I called WD myself to confirm this. Three days later I got the answer I suspected all along. It IS 10 in 10^15 ( which equals 1 in 10^14). This is just clever marketing, and it irks me to no end that countless review sites such as this have incorrectly listed the URE rates.
I cannot tell you how many review sites have made the mistake of listing it as 1 in 10^15.
Read throughly the backblaze report on reliability of hard-disks, as pointed out above. HGST (former hitachi) build very robust hard disks, and they deal with vibration pretty good. Thats one of the factors (not sure if mentioned in the article) that the NAS deskstar incorporates,and which could be rated as "enterprise only".
7200rpm? Sorry but as far as I'm concerned, that's not a NAS drive. Nope nope nope nope and nope. Too hot, too noisy, silly - just silly design choice.
hmm, you might want to tell the likes of HP about that since they let you stuff their NAS appliances with up to 15k RPM drives. Not all NAS appliances sit in your living room ;)
Reliability of HDDs has become a huge problem. I bought this drive as it's apparently the most reliable consumer mechanical drive out there. I was hoping there would be some commentary on this.
Not really.... just MTBF and unrecoverable errors rate. The one that is collecting data since its foundation is, as stated multiple times along the comments, backblaze. They are collecting a lot of data and reporting those to the community in a periodic basis. They have surveyed several branched, and they have a pool of more than 30k disks and growing. Even if they are a very respectable firm, their strategy to offer unlimited backup for a very low feed lead them to look for a design that while being robust is very cheap... hence the NAS disks "consumer" grade. I find fascinating what they have achieved in no time! You might want to check at their blog, with plenty of nice information. Cheers!
Anyone happen to know when the 5TB and 6TB versions are due to hit UK? They're listed on the HGST website but when I look for them for sale I only find them available on US retailers
The biggest issue with RAID are the unrecoverable read errors. If you loose the drive, the RAID has to read 100% of the remaining drives even if there is no data on portions of the drive. If you get an error on rebuild, the entire array will die.
A UER on SATA of 1 in 10^14 bits read means a read failure every 12.5 terabytes. A 500 GB drive has 0.04E14 bits, so in the worst case rebuilding that drive in a five-drive RAID-5 group means transferring 0.20E14 bits. This means there is a 20% probability of an unrecoverable error during the rebuild. Enterprise class disks are less prone to this problem:
I've done receiver testing on sata drives before and I can tell you while drives are only tested to 10^-14 BER with 95% confidence that if the channel is clean and both the host and hard drive have good phys and you don't do something like put your phone on the hard drive then you won't see a single phy related error until something fails. A URE refers to a drive failure to read a bit. It's unrelated to sata as you implied.
Is it really worth it to get these NAS drives vs their regular versions? My use case is a home NAS, Linux software RAID or ZFS (no HBA). Will I miss anything by not using the NAS version of the drive? The difference in price is not trivial in Spain (some 20% more for the NAS model).
Comcast won't send you your neglected password https://xfinitylogin.us/ On top of the homepage, you must see the Sign in link, Click it to get redirected.
I bumped into your web site checking spec. on Hitachi 4TB, and saw your comparison chart , extremely useful, do you have any such comparison table for Seagate, or by Model No. across any given brand, and manufacturer ?? , Thanks
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cen - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
Bought 4 of these for my home NAS and they really are great for the price. The only negative thing is the noise.. I wouldn't have 4 of these in my room for sure.Laststop311 - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
I use a 2TB version of this drive in 1 of my pc's and I don't notice any offending noise. The case does have noise dampening foam all around it and the hard drive is elastically suspended and isolated from the frame but I use all noctua fans and a fanless psu so if the HDD was making a lot of noise it should be audible. Maybe it's just your set up. You need to properly suspend the drive off the case with rubber so no vibrations are transferred to the case which is the main cause of noise.Laststop311 - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Maybe the GPU drowns it out but even when the GPU is not in use i still don't hear the HDD even with large file transfers with no gpu activitycen - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
You only use a single one, I have 4 of these. This is a big difference.ddriver - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Well, you do have an even number of disks, arrange them the right way and their noise will cancel out ;)melgross - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
That would be nice, if it actually worked.ddriver - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Yeah, except it would generate extra heat. If the drives operate in synchrony theoretically they could be arranged in such a manner that their noise cancel out, but it be quite the feat of engineering. It would be tremendously easier to simply dampen and absorb the noise.Zertzable - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Is that why datacenters are so quiet? ;)jota83 - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
I am getting 60 of those by the end of the week :) Let's see how they perform within a JBOD (Quanta M4600H)NightShade00013 - Saturday, January 16, 2016 - link
I just got done doing a burn in with five of these for my FreeNAS and inside a 4U sitting on my kitchen table the fans were louder than the drives by far. The case is a rosewill RSV-L4500, the two rear 80mm fans have been changed out to PWM fans but the 120's are the ones that came with the case. Not that it's loud at all but the drives were the least on my mind.Burn test was done with BadBlocks and took about 65 hours to run completely. Running a smart long test now and that is the only thing that is a little different. Drives are ranging from 548 minutes to 582 minutes to complete.
Got the drives for less than a 4TB WD Red (not the pro version) so I am loving it. Still need to get two more to finish out my pool but RaidZ3 should be great with a set of seven drives.
Sabresiberian - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
The Deskstar looks like a good choice for its purpose, but I have to wonder why it is the only one in the bunch with a 3-yr warranty instead of 5-yr.cen - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
I checked WD Red 4TB and Seagate NAS 4TB and both have 3 year warranty. Mind to explain?ganeshts - Saturday, November 22, 2014 - link
I double-checked my tables and indeed the Red and the NAS HDD have only 3 year warranties. Basically, 5 year warranties are only for enterprise-targeted drives (and the WD Red Pro).In effect, the extra $15 for the Deskstar NAS is only for the extra RPM / performance. If you need a 5-year warranty, you need to go the enterprise drive route.
Samus - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Because you don't need a 5 year warranty with these drives. I point you to a study outside the scope of Anandtech's capacity:https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliabil...
Having used Hitachi drives in multiple applications from IO intensive NAS to cold storage, the results Backblaze has match my own. The 75GXP days are long passed us, and from here, all we can hope is WD (my second go-to manufacture for drives, and owner of HGST) will use Hitachi technology. Seagate has fallen apart from their prime "Barracuda 7200.7" days. I pulled one of those out of a desktop a year ago, it was a decade old and still quiet as a kitten. 95,000 hours on it, 4,000 power cycles. Simply amazing for a consumer class drive.
josue16 - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
Thanks for the link. I was looking for this.Laststop311 - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
sabresiberian the warranties aren't everything. Hitachi has the lowest failure rate in my experience and in googles experience and I'm sure the link samus gave will also say that i dont even need to look because it's just a fact hitachi's are like the energizer battery they keep going and going and going...CaedenV - Tuesday, November 25, 2014 - link
the warranty that you never have to use is by far the best warranty. Especially when it comes to data storagechrcoluk - Saturday, October 20, 2018 - link
not to mention what value is a warranty on a hdd, warranties dont recover lost data.HGST drives are the best on the market, I just wished they made 5400rpm models as a 7200rpm drive is louder.
Just because something has a longer warranty it doesnt mean it will last longer, warranties are used as a marketing tool now days.
Laststop311 - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Well in my 20 years of dealing with pc's I've gone through many hard drives from many manufacturers and I can confidently say Hitachi has given me the fewest problems of all the current manufacturers. If i had to rank them I would say Seagate has been the absolute worst for me by far. They are so bad I once had a drive fail the warranty replacement fail within a month then the replacement to that replacement fail in the first week. Many other seagates failed too I've had over a dozen seagate failures in 20 years. Next worse would be Toshiba i think about 5 ot 6 toshiba drives have failed on me. Samsung about the same 5 or 6 failures. Western digital has done me pretty well i can only think of 3 times a WD drive has failed on me. Now hitachi only once. I have a 120GB hitachi drive that is going strong still the thing wont die. I have a stack of old hitachi drives that still work fine just have no use for such low densities. I dont know if its random luck or chance but I have nothing but good times with hitachi drives. Google seems to agree I read a report for them where they had a HUGE data sample on drive failure rates and hitachi was number 1 for them too with lowest failure rates of all brands. I don't think it is luck, Hitachi just really makes the best hard drives. I just hope this reliability does not change because WD bought them. But at least they were bought by WD and not some 1 else as WD isn't terrible like seagate and toshiba and samsung especially seagate, buying a seagate is throwing your money away.vol7ron - Wednesday, November 26, 2014 - link
I'm sure experience would vary based on how many drives you own, what density the drives are, where you live or where the drives are located (external environment / thermals), what kind of actions the system is doing, OS / BIOS setup.There's a lot of factors, which is why its tough to draw from a person's experience and why it's more suitable to go to sites that have testbeds set up.
The reason I'm commenting because I thought it was Seagate or Hitatchi that had something that became the "DeathStar" because the drives would always fail. Vendors have had bad batches of products, but also good batches. They're almost like cars, so you have to make sure you're getting one of the better quality ones the manufacturer is putting out and not judge the manufacturer based on all the models they're making. Just like wine, some years are better than others.
abhaxus - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
According to WD, the Red Pro is rated at 1 in 10^15 not 10^14 before URE. Are you working from some other data or is your comparison chart inaccurate? Planning on purchasing several drives in the next few weeks and that was going to be the key factor in my decision.ganeshts - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Thanks for bringing this to my attention.When the WD Red Pro was launched, the datasheet had URE < 10 in 10^15, which I had denoted as 1 in 10^14 in our initial review. Backed up by a third-party post on another forum here: http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/western-...
It looks like WD has fixed this 'error' in their latest datasheet. I will update the table shortly.
abhaxus - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
I do remember that from their launch now that you mention it. Still torn about my purchase.Julian Boolean - Saturday, December 5, 2015 - link
Fact : As of Today (Dec 5th 2015) the Western Digital Spec Sheet for The Red Pro STILL lists the URE rate as 10 in 10^15. It is not "a mistake in the specs sheet". It has been listed that way since product launch and has never been corrected. 1 in 10^14 = 10 in 10^15. This is a 1 in 10^14 drive. I called WD myself to confirm this. Three days later I got the answer I suspected all along. It IS 10 in 10^15 ( which equals 1 in 10^14). This is just clever marketing, and it irks me to no end that countless review sites such as this have incorrectly listed the URE rates.I cannot tell you how many review sites have made the mistake of listing it as 1 in 10^15.
jota83 - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
Read throughly the backblaze report on reliability of hard-disks, as pointed out above. HGST (former hitachi) build very robust hard disks, and they deal with vibration pretty good. Thats one of the factors (not sure if mentioned in the article) that the NAS deskstar incorporates,and which could be rated as "enterprise only".Mikemk - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
I'd like to see http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... reviewedAbRASiON - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
7200rpm? Sorry but as far as I'm concerned, that's not a NAS drive. Nope nope nope nope and nope. Too hot, too noisy, silly - just silly design choice.Daiz - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
hmm, you might want to tell the likes of HP about that since they let you stuff their NAS appliances with up to 15k RPM drives. Not all NAS appliances sit in your living room ;)MikeMurphy - Sunday, November 23, 2014 - link
Reliability of HDDs has become a huge problem. I bought this drive as it's apparently the most reliable consumer mechanical drive out there. I was hoping there would be some commentary on this.NoSoMo - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
Anyone interested in HDDs and their reliability should check this article out...https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliabil...
josue16 - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
So, which of the 4 TB drives are more reliable? Are there companies that report HDD reliability?jota83 - Monday, November 24, 2014 - link
Not really.... just MTBF and unrecoverable errors rate. The one that is collecting data since its foundation is, as stated multiple times along the comments, backblaze. They are collecting a lot of data and reporting those to the community in a periodic basis. They have surveyed several branched, and they have a pool of more than 30k disks and growing. Even if they are a very respectable firm, their strategy to offer unlimited backup for a very low feed lead them to look for a design that while being robust is very cheap... hence the NAS disks "consumer" grade. I find fascinating what they have achieved in no time! You might want to check at their blog, with plenty of nice information. Cheers!Jeff Biscuits - Tuesday, December 9, 2014 - link
Anyone happen to know when the 5TB and 6TB versions are due to hit UK? They're listed on the HGST website but when I look for them for sale I only find them available on US retailersalecweder - Wednesday, February 4, 2015 - link
The biggest issue with RAID are the unrecoverable read errors.If you loose the drive, the RAID has to read 100% of the remaining drives even if there is no data on portions of the drive. If you get an error on rebuild, the entire array will die.
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/storage-mana...
A UER on SATA of 1 in 10^14 bits read means a read failure every 12.5 terabytes. A 500
GB drive has 0.04E14 bits, so in the worst case rebuilding that drive in a five-drive
RAID-5 group means transferring 0.20E14 bits. This means there is a 20% probability
of an unrecoverable error during the rebuild. Enterprise class disks are less prone to this problem:
http://www.lucidti.com/zfs-checksums-add-reliabili...
hansmuff - Thursday, March 5, 2015 - link
You can circumvent these issues by using ZFS. Put that on a box with ECC RAM and back it up online, and you've got a pretty reliable solution.willis936 - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
I've done receiver testing on sata drives before and I can tell you while drives are only tested to 10^-14 BER with 95% confidence that if the channel is clean and both the host and hard drive have good phys and you don't do something like put your phone on the hard drive then you won't see a single phy related error until something fails. A URE refers to a drive failure to read a bit. It's unrelated to sata as you implied.comomolo - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link
Is it really worth it to get these NAS drives vs their regular versions? My use case is a home NAS, Linux software RAID or ZFS (no HBA). Will I miss anything by not using the NAS version of the drive? The difference in price is not trivial in Spain (some 20% more for the NAS model).Thanks for any help.
Hisated936 - Saturday, June 9, 2018 - link
Comcast won't send you your neglected password https://xfinitylogin.us/ On top of the homepage, you must see the Sign in link, Click it to get redirected.ffarzan - Tuesday, June 29, 2021 - link
I bumped into your web site checking spec. on Hitachi 4TB, and saw your comparison chart , extremely useful,do you have any such comparison table for Seagate, or by Model No. across any given brand, and manufacturer ?? , Thanks