3TB Hard Drive Round Up

MojoKid writes "When 3TB hard drives first arrived compatible motherboards with newer UEFI setup utilities weren't quite ready for prime time. However, with the latest Intel and AMD chipsets hitting the market, UEFI has become commonplace and compatibility with 3TB drives is no longer an issue... A detailed look at four of the latest 3TB drives to hit the market from Hitachi, Seagate, and Western Digital shows ... there are some distinct differences between them. Performance-wise, Seagate's Barracuda XT 3TB drive seems to be the current leader but other, slightly less expensive drives, come close."

Comments

750,000 hours MTBF.

[Kenja]

Seems the trend that as capacity increased so does failure rate. For comparison the older 1TB Seagates claim 1,200,000 hours.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[Hatta]

If you bought 3 1TB seagate, you'd be 3x as likely to suffer a failure. So that's really more like a 400,000 hour MTBF for 3TB worth of space.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[SimonTheSoundMan]

I break in to your house and steal your Drobo, then what?

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[TheRaven64]

Then he is in exactly the same situation as if you broke into his house and stole his 3TB disk, which is completely orthogonal to the MTBF.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[Anonymous Coward]

you get shot?

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[ColdWetDog]

I've got 3 1TB Barracudas. Actually I can't remember the last time I had an HD failure, although I have noticed that heavy loading (through bit torrent, for example) does make them start to emit strange clunking noises after a while! But overall I would consider them a trusted brand because I've never had one fail, personally.

Those 'strange clunking noises' are actually hardware viruses chewing on the shell of the drive and trying to get out. Best to spray some Clorox mixed with WD-40 all over everything and let it sit for a while. That should quiet things down a bit.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[Hatta]

You're using ZFS and manually managing backups with rsync? That's ass backwards.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[Waffle Iron]

(750 000 / 24) / 365.25 = 85.5578371 years

Whats the problem?

The problem is that HDD manufacturers don't tell you that all their MTBF ratings are actually specified in "dog hours".

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[jovius]

Yes it is (http://zfsonlinux.org/). I installed it from Darik Horn's PPA as instructed in the FAQ. I don't know how fast the disks should optimally be (100 MB/s reads from single disk, WD Caviar Green), but disk to disk rate peaks and goes a bit above 60 MB/s compared to 30 MB/s before. Average is somewhere a bit above 40 MB/s.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[billcopc]

Even the 750k MTBF feels bogus. In my experience actual failure rate is just a hair under 3%, which works out to about 300k MTBF. Maybe they're quoting the MTBF of a drive still in its anti-static bag, sitting in the spares drawer :)

Try shoving 36 3TB drives in one of these: http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/847/SC847E26-R1400LP.cfm and you'll appreciate MTBF in a whole new light. My approach is simple: I take the number of drives, times 3% annual failure, times the number of years I want to keep that box in operation. The result is how many spares I'll need. For the 36-drive box, I use 32 drives for the RAID + hot spares, and leave the remaining 4 as spun-down spares. That ensures at least 5 years of hassle-free operation. Add JBODs to the mix and you get an even smoother curve, as a 100-drive array is more deterministic in its failures due to the larger sample size.

For a single drive, well, failure rate becomes a lottery. MTBF won't help you here. If you buy a 3TB drive for your desktop, you should also get a 3TB external drive to back it up, and sync them regularly. Always assume one of them will die at the time you need it the most, and be prepared to deal with it gracefully. The odds of both failing at the same time are pretty slim, certainly slim enough for most residential users.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[Ex-MislTech]

First off as someone who has a Seagate manufacturing facility close by
you do not want to buy their drives. I'd buy Western Digital or some
company that doesn't use temp workers for their consumer drives.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[Pharmboy]

and since the drives read and write in lock step, odds are remarkably good that the next drive in the array will die before you finish rebuilding the RAID set.

Utter nonsense. If one drive failing caused the next to fail, then millions would not be using RAID as the defacto method of redundancy. I've had many, many RAID setups for many years (ie: every server and workstation for almost 20 years), and had the occasional drive failure. I've never had two drives fail in the same array. Ever. And that was with both hardware and software RAID setups. Drives fail due to manufacturing flaws, even minor ones that don't show up for a long time. You overstate the ability of manufacturers to create multiple products exactly the same. They may be built to the same minimum STANDARD, but that isn't the same as being IDENTICAL.

a good RAID array should contain no more than one of any single drive model by any single manufacturer

Sorry, but this is bullocks and if someone told you this, they were pulling your leg. This guarantees nothing, except that your array will likely perform like crap because they will all have different latency, as well as sustained and burst throughput. This would be most noticeable in a software RAID, and slow the whole system down. The entire purpose of a RAID is to use identical drives in size, performance and specifications so the entire array, regardless of RAID type, will seamlessly act like a single drive, while using the least amount of overhead.

Try a different subject matter, you are seriously missing some information about this one.

Re:750,000 hours MTBF.

[Curate]

Could you expand on why you object to Seagate's use of temp workers? Is it for philosophical reasons, or do you think it impacts quality?

Why the comment on the capacity

[beelsebob]

For every drive they comment that the drives have a 2.72TB capacity reported in windows. Why is this surprising them so much? Everyone knows that Windows misreports TiB as TB. Given that all these drives are advertised as 3TB, and 3TB is equal to 2.728TiB it's hardly surprising the capacity that windows reports, is it?

Re:Why the comment on the capacity

[Grishnakh]

Because most people think the attempt to change the accepted definition of terabyte is retarded. Rather like Slashdot's posting interface.

This comment will not be saved until you click the Submit button below.You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.

The time-delay isn't that bad. What's really retarded is how every time you click inside the comment window, instead of simply placing the cursor where you clicked, it has to unnest another level of comments above. It's impossible to place the cursor with the mouse until all the levels of nesting are opened. I've never seen anything more stupid on a website in my life. Why does Slashdot do this?

Graphed speeds are wrong?

[Nemilar]

Am I reading the graphs wrong, or are they claiming 160,000MB/s throughput on those drives?

Is that supposed to be KB/s? I might buy 160MB/s (that's still crazy high), but 160GB?

Re:7200 RPM data drives

[akirapill]

The speed of high capacity drives can matter a great deal depending on what the system is used for, and read/write speed is not just important for applications and the OS. Ask anyone who does realtime uncompressed video or multi-track audio recording.

Re:That's not what MTBF "means"

[rthille]

Between two drives, one with 750,000 hour MTBF and one with 75,000 hour MTBF, which would you choose for one or 2 drives? The MTBF isn't exactly predictive of your drives' lifespans, but it definitely has real application to the decision about which drives to buy...

Here's an example

[Quila]

http://db.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html

Scroll down to the table and see for example a 1 million hour MTBF drive with a real-world annual replacement rate (how many die every year) one-sixth that of a 1.5 million MTBF drive.

Re:EFI and Linux

[compro01]

Windows Vista 64-bit since SP1, Windows 7 64-bit (32-bit versions are SOL), and Server 2008 support UEFI/GPT.

Re:3 TB? Pshaw!

[oik]

..and I'd be wrong apparently: http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/9/7/seagate-ships-4tb-hard-drive/

It's not exactly clear sailing.

[ResidentSourcerer]

There may be little problem with newer motherboards, but I can tell you there is a lot of combinations of stuff out there that won't work with a 3TB drive.

I just got burned on this. Had a not very old 500 GB Lacie external drive. The 500 GB drive in it was getting noisy, so I bought a Hitachi 3 TB drive, popped the case, and swapped drives. My Mac recognized it as a 801 GB drive. WTF!

A couple hours later I knew more about LBA. (Hitachi has good info on their web site.)

You need an OS that supports 48 bit LBA. You need drivers that support 48 bit LBA. You need adapter cards that support 48 bit LBA.

In my case the Lacie is a multi protocol box, so IT has firmware. And that firmware does not support 48 bit LBA, so bit 33 of the capacity is stripped off and I see 1 TB - 2 TiB -1 = 801 GB

I find it amusing.

3 TB for $150 bucks. 50 bucks a TB. My first hard drive added 1200 to the price of the computer. It was 10 MB and even that had to be logically divided into 8 chunks to be addressable by the 2 MHz Zilog Z-80.

I remember when CHS limitations restricted disks to 32 MB. There have been a series of limits since. Some of the limits were clearly stopgaps for a short respite, (We'll write bigger sectors and get a factor of 8) But several have been on the basis of "This should fix the problem for a few decades."

ZFS uses 64 bit addressing. Bets on how long before the first company ships a disk that won't address it.