Most reliable 7200 or 5400 rpm 3TB drive

Simply put, what 7200 or 5400 rpm 3TB drive has the lowest failure rate. I don't care about speed or anything else just reliability. Can only afford 1 drive now so it will be awhile till I can get another one for raid 1 data protection. In general are the 5400 rpm drives more reliable since they spin slower and create less heat?

Hitachi Ultrastar, Hitachi deskstar, Seagate Baracuda XT, Western digital caviar green, western digital AV-GP are my slim amount of choices for a 3TB drive.

I'm leaning towards the western digital av-gp because it's advertised as an enterprise type drive with extreme reliability but costs less then regular consumer 7.2k drives and considerably less than the enterprise 7.2k drives.

What do you guys think? Slower speed is ok because my crucial c300 256GB will be my boot drive and hold all the apps i use and most if not all my games installed on it. That is why I think the WD av-gp is the best buy, yeah it's expensive for a 5400 rpm 3tb drive but i dont need speed and its cheaper then regular 7200 drives and I get server reliability.

The hard drive will be for holding flac music collection and 1080p video collection mostly. I might even have to get another 3tb drive and not raid them the way my movie collection is growing.

There isn't going to be a study on this since they haven't been out that long, so an exact answer isn't going to exist. That being said, I've heard a lot of good things about the Hitachi drives and would personally buy them if I had the need.

I'm sure the technology is quite different, but I've been running seven (7) Hitachi 1 TB drives in a RAID array that gets hammered pretty hard and it has been solid for over two years. I'm also running nine (9) Hitachi 2 TB in the same server, which gives me a total of 25 TB of raw Hitachi disks. I wouldn't suggest the hard drives if I didn't use and depend on them myself.

thideras said:

There isn't going to be a study on this since they haven't been out that long, so an exact answer isn't going to exist. That being said, I've heard a lot of good things about the Hitachi drives and would personally buy them if I had the need.

I'm sure the technology is quite different, but I've been running seven (7) Hitachi 1 TB drives in a RAID array that gets hammered pretty hard and it has been solid for over two years. I'm also running nine (9) Hitachi 2 TB in the same server, which gives me a total of 25 TB of raw Hitachi disks. I wouldn't suggest the hard drives if I didn't use and depend on them myself.

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+1 I would just repeat everything he said.