Forum power time, need some storage and it's been a while since I bought any new hardware so not really up on whose kit would be most reliable. Don't need blazing speed as I have a 500Gb SSD that my OSes sit on, this is just a data drive on my main desktop machine.

In the blue corner we have

And in the blue corner we have

Doesn't seem much difference on paper to me, £10 difference in price and the Seagate has a longer warranty. Can I have a poll please?

There's little to no difference in reliability between the major manufacturers, so I'd go with whatever had the longest warranty if performance is equal.

But if it's just a data drive, why bother with the flash buffer? It's unlikely to make any difference in performance as you presumably wouldn't be constantly accessing the same 8GB of data, unlike with a boot/OS drive.

You'd get a faster (7200 rpm) 4TB drive for the same cost or a much cheaper 4TB 5400 rpm drive without the flash. Just don't get an SMR drive if you want decent write performance.

Cheers, a plain 5400 could be an option on the basis that it would be quieter than a 7200.

In the green corner

There may still be a rationale for a hybrid drive though, I should probably detail how my drives are set up to explain why.

Note to mods
I've no idea why I posted this in here, could it be moved to general chat please?

I recently got a Seagate hybrid 1TB drive for my laptop. Good price and happy with it. I did a bit of research at the time, and Seagate seemed to hit the spot.

It is very quiet and very fast to load up and it's the 5400 version.

Seagate 1TB

There's the desktop version (non hybrid) of that for a tenner cheaper albeit with a year less warranty.

Yet another blue corner

Yeah, but the solid state bit does make for quick load ups. I'd pay the extra personally.

Summarising the choices so far

3 year warranty, 8G Hybrid, £123.43

2 year warranty, £114.99

1 year warranty, £104.99

<man maths>I'm veering towards the hybrid with the longer warranty. It may or may not make any difference in my system but for the sake of £20£18something I get a longer warranty. </man maths>

As you already have an SSD for your boot drive I personally would go with a reliable DATA drive, rather than a hybrid.

4TB WD Black

That's a fair jump up in price and would probably be a fair bit noisier. Out of interest, why would that drive be more reliable? I'm just trying to quantify the extra £60.

If you want storage, reliability and speed then why not go for a RAID array?

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/

Theres some really rather good options out there

The hybrid drive is a bit pointless as a data drive unless you're doing something a bit unusual like running a huge database off it and have very low RAM in the PC.

I'd go for the Hitachi 7K4000 4TB drive with 5 year warranty at £133.98 on Ebuyer , at 7200 prm it seems to be best performance with longest warranty at the price.

Or if cost is an issue there's a 7200 rpm Toshiba 4TB drive at £94.98 with a 2 year warranty.

Unless you've got a fanless/silent PC I doubt the noise level will be much different. I'm still running a few 15K rpm SAS drives and the general fan noise drowns them out anyway. I also run an external RAID array with 10 x 7.2K rpm drives and even that's not bad with some sound deadening (dynamat style stuff) lining the case.

Hybrid drive by WD doesn't do well in reviews

FINAL THOUGHTS

The premise behind SSHDs is to combine the responsiveness of solid-state drives with the capacity and low cost per byte of mechanical drives. Unfortunately, it's not a simple task— Seagate has been doing this for a few years yet their drives still pale in comparison to true SSDs. Western Digital is not as experienced in this genre and their latest foray is even more disappointing, with their Blue SSHDs somehow managing to produce poorer overall results than their purely mechanical predecessors. Both the 4TB and 1TB models can boast quick loading times compared to most hard drives, but in all other areas, they lag behind their equivalent capacity WD Red counterparts. Assuming they are simply Green drives with NAND Flash tacked on, this shouldn't be the case, suggesting that WD's hybrid technology has some kinks to iron out.

The 1TB model in particular should be avoided as it is plagued by unusual seek activity. After some of our tests, it would seek for an inordinate amount of time and when it finally stopped, it would continue to seek less frequently in short sporadic busts, delaying headparking and motor spin-down. Not only is this annoying, it decreases its overall idle energy efficiency and will reduce battery time if used in a notebook. Furthermore, its seeks use a relative high amount of power and the drive also produces more vibration than most modern 2.5-inch drives.

The 4TB variant's physical characteristics are excellent, almost indistinguishable form the equivalent WD Red, though it suffers more of a relative performance penalty than its little brother. It may be a good budget choice for a small system that can only fit one drive and needs to be snappy at loading applications above all else, but that's a fairly limited use case. If you're looking for a compromise, it should be noted that for the price of a Blue SSHD 4TB, you can purchase a decent 120GB SSD along with a 3TB WD Red. This route does mean managing an extra drive, however it's tremendously faster solution.

http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1482-page6.html

Fair enough, now veering away from the hybrid option. I do a bit 3D CAD work every now now and again which can involve manipulating some reasonably large files but not often enough for it to be a major driver in this. The machine currently has 16Gb of RAM and I may replace the CPU/Mobo?RAM at some point in the next year or so in which case I'd put more in it. In other words it isn't short of RAM.

It looks like the warranty on that Hitachi is actually just 3 years. I did also notice the Toshiba one but it seemed suspiciously too cheap although the price has gone up to £110 on Ebuyer now. Dabs still has it for £94.98 though.....


Options
Cheap as chips with 2 year warranty, £94.98

Bit more for 3 years warranty, £132.99

Smidge more for 3 years again, £133.98

King's ransom for 5 years, £183.99

The datasheet for the hitachi @

https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/US7K4000_ds.pdf

says it has a 5 year warranty. Maybe that's only in the US or something though?

Even in the text it says "HGST Ultrastar® 7K4000 is the world’s first 4TB 7200 RPM hard drive with a 2.0 million hours MTBF specification and backed by a full 5-year warranty"

My 3 years comes from questions at the bottom of the ebuyer link relating to whether it is an ultrastar (server class HD with 5 year warranty as per your datasheet) or a deskstar (which has a 3 year warranty).

There seems to some confusion possibly caused by ebuyer using a part number for an ultrastar but selling it as a deskstar.

If the warranty is 5 years (I'll check with them) then I'll probably get this otherwise take punt on the cheap as chips one.

I'd just like to point something out: the warranty on any disc drive is pointless except to replace the drive. The data is what you need to preserve and without either a raid array that can tolerate a dead disc in the cluster, or a very robust backup system, you're stuffed once the disc fails.

Note that a raid array is *not* a substitute for a backup regime; it will not protect you from e.g. a virus or an OS foulup that trashes the allocation clusters.

Fine with all of that, I'm sure my back up regime could be improved but none of the hard drive failures I've ever suffered have resulted in me losing anything other than time and the cost of new drive. The last time (which was quite recent) was certainly eased by being within warranty and getting the drive replaced without having to put my hand in my pocket.

Years ago I lost one half of a striped array containing data that I desperately needed that wasn't backed up. I did get the data recovered eventually but the pain of the experience taught me to be a bit more diligent with backups.

Enough procrastinating, based on the highly unscientific research methods of reading this, the reviews here and a double check of the UK warranty here, my wallet has convinced me that the Toshiba is worth a punt so I've ordered it.

Thanks as always for the help and advice.

Western digital BLACK are the drives we use in our data servers at work. They are very reliable and ship with a 5 year warranty. I have a 2.5 inch BLACK that used to be in my PS3. It is currently used as storage in a server and has never missed a beat. I had a GREEN in a WD MYBOOK which recently packed up. It too has been replaced with a WD BLACK.

Cheers, I'll probably look at something like that when I build my media server proper later this year/next year/the year after!