most reliable 2tb hdd for media storage

arnoldma · 9 Jun 2011 at 20:28

In the market for a few 2tb drives to boost my storage capacity, i know some of these have firmware problems etc... what do you guys think are the most reliable and problem free ones? wd vs seagate vs samnsung?

thanks all!

Paddyw01 · 9 Jun 2011 at 21:10

I have a 2tb Caviar Black and never had a problem. I'd recommend one of those.

Craig321 · 9 Jun 2011 at 21:12

No problem with a WD20EARS here. Excellent drives.

AbsenceJam · 9 Jun 2011 at 21:28

There's no such thing as a more reliable drive than any other really with some isolated issues aside. Buy whatever is cheapest really.

Surveyor · 9 Jun 2011 at 21:36

Paddyw01 said:
I have a 2tb Caviar Black and never had a problem. I'd recommend one of those.

Not worth the price for storage drives.

You can buy 2 of the 5,400-5,900rpm drives for the price of one of those.

RJC · 9 Jun 2011 at 21:43

Using 4 Samsung 2tb drives and so far all seems to be good

Craig321 · 10 Jun 2011 at 00:17

AbsenceJam said:
There's no such thing as a more reliable drive than any other really with some isolated issues aside. Buy whatever is cheapest really.

There is if you bought the first 1.5TB Seagate drives (with CC1G or lower firmware).

75% failure rate for me (3 of the 4 drives between my brother and I failed) :cool:

. Saying that, all 3 failed ones are still going strong after replacement and upgrade to CC1H

MagicBoy · 10 Jun 2011 at 00:20

Come back in 2 years and ask again. There's no sensible data when they're this new.

Boss_man · 10 Jun 2011 at 00:20

these Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB SATA-II 64MB Cache are great drives for 59 quid

Stoner81 · 10 Jun 2011 at 00:30

WDC WD20EARS is the one I have and never had a single issue with it.

Stoner81.

Mattus · 10 Jun 2011 at 15:31

Paddyw01 said:
I have a 2tb Caviar Black and never had a problem. I'd recommend one of those.

Pretty expensive though. Great as a large, fast system drive, but overkill if you're just using it to store videos or photos (as I imagine many hard drives this big are used).

I'm trying to decide between the WD Green (WD20EARS) and the Samsung F4 (HD204UI). Normally impossible to judge hard drives on reliability - a small but significant proportion of all mechanical HDs will fail. The Samsung is a bit cheaper and apparently slightly faster (though I'm not too bothered about speed for a media drive). The WD is supposedly quieter, but I've heard some bad reports about it taking too long to spin up and thus crashing Windows 7 on resume from sleep. Can anyone confirm that?

(edit) Anyone have any comments on the Seagate offering (Barracuda Green)? That's quite cheap on OcUK at the minute.

Gammawolf · 10 Jun 2011 at 16:08

The samsung 2TB on offer for £51.98 atm seems like a steal!

cmndr_andi · 10 Jun 2011 at 16:09

Most reliable? For a single drive I would bet on a WD Black, however with just a single drive the chance of a failure which loses all your data is still very much a possibility - even with a high quality drive. To counter this you either need to have a good backup routine or use a RAID array that maintains all the data if a single drive fails at one time (though still vulnerable to data loss if something causes more than one drive to fail at once).

Two Samsung F4 2TB drives (£52 each at the moment, £104 for two) in RAID1.

Alternatively, three Samsung F1 1TB drives in RAID5 would be a relatively quick and relaible option for 2TB @£102 (motherboard dependent of course and takes up a fair bit of physical space).

Mattus · 10 Jun 2011 at 16:21

Tempted to buy a couple and stick one in a USB caddy or similar. Since I'd mainly be using it for video content, weekly backups would probably suffice as well as RAID1. With RAID1, I'm always a little concerned at the thought of my PSU blowing up and taking both the disks out...

JasonM · 10 Jun 2011 at 17:20

I quite like Western Digital simply because you hear very few failures with them. They also make the excellent Raid Edition (enterprise) drives that gives me confidence Western Digital know what there doing.

For reliability (on a budget) I would choose 2 Western Digital 2TB greens and use in mirrored raid.

Mattus · 10 Jun 2011 at 17:25

I think it's practically impossible to compare the reliability of different drive makes (outside of a few isolated models which are well-known to be rubbish). For every person who swears by a particular manufacturer, there's always someone else who thinks they're the spawn of Satan because all their drives failed! I wish there was a large-scale statistical comparison of disk reliability. Google wrote an interesting piece on it, but didn't include what would have been the most interesting information - which brands are the most reliable!

413x · 10 Jun 2011 at 20:21

I may be getting the seagate green as I'm in desperate need of space, I'm not going for the wd just cause of the issues I've heard, my raid 0 velociraptirs are faultless and both second hand, 100% good in hdtune

Want to but this weekend myself

Boss_man · 10 Jun 2011 at 20:30

Ive had wd20ears for over a year now without any probs or crashing on windows 7 64bit
gonna get another very soon

robgmun · 10 Jun 2011 at 22:58

Paddyw01 said:
I have a 2tb Caviar Black and never had a problem. I'd recommend one of those.

I have the same drive, solid as a rock.

+1 recommendation

panyan · 10 Jun 2011 at 23:01

Mattus said:
For every person who swears by a particular manufacturer, there's always someone else who thinks they're the spawn of Satan because all their drives failed!

+1,000,000 you need to buy from personal experience, i like samsung and hitachi and wont touch WD with a barge pole due to my recent failures - but this is MY opinion and everyones will be different