Which of these 3TB HDDs would be better?

Hello,
My WD 500GB died on me today for no reason.. It's in the freezer now hoping I'd be able to recover some files from it. ( Freezer is my last resort anyways, can't do anything else ).

Anyways, I've been planning on grabbing a 3TB hdd for a while now and I have 2 options:
1)WD30EZRX
2)Deskstar 5K3000

Which one would you guys recommend? I never tried a Hitachi before in my life so I don't know about them. I hate seagate so it's out of the options.

Thanks,

Get the Hitachi while there are still some manufactured by better-than-WD standards

Hitachi, no question. I'm running 25 TB of disk in my server, which is all Hitachi. No TLER or power saving features to get in the way and great build quality.

I hope your frozen drive had stuck platters, otherwise freezing it isn't going to do anything but [possibly] kill it more.

Thanks for the suggestions, so I suppose there is no big difference between 64MB and 32MB cache ( because the hitachi have 32 )?

Edit: I guess the cache is just a gimmick, I read more on the subject and it seems like the difference is too small to make a difference.

WD's are pretty good though. Never used a Hitachi. But I think any of the 7200 rpm drives are pretty good. BTW, why dont you take your hdd to the customer care centre for data recovery?

lenix said:

Edit: I guess the cache is just a gimmick, I read more on the subject and it seems like the difference is too small to make a difference.

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It isn't a gimmick, you just won't see a large difference in daily usage.

Pavin said:

BTW, why dont you take your hdd to the customer care centre for data recovery?

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Proper hard drive recovery is extremely expensive. If it isn't expensive, they are just running tools that you could run yourself. Either way, no reason to drop money on it unless the data is very important.

Dont freeze your HDD, its completly useless, it will only cause even more damage because of the mechanics which doesnt enjoy temp differences! Another risk is the condensed water which is able to appear inside a fridge.

Freezing might help in order to store certain batterys (can enhance lifetime), but thats a completly different device and its not sensitive to temp differences.


Hitachi 4 TB definitely seems to be a great device but ist just so expensive. I got me 2, i feel like ripped off and leeched out, but im still happy. Those HDDs simply owns, and no other HDD can currently combine same speed, with same size and is even without any noise (under usual operation).

Ivy said:

Dont freeze your HDD, its completly useless, it will only cause even more damage because of the mechanics which doesnt enjoy temp differences!

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It can help if the platters won't spin. For anything else, agreed, it is completely worthless.

Ivy said:

Dont freeze your HDD, its completly useless,..

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Experience proves otherwise. I've saved literally dozens of drives using the freezer trick; works about 50% of the time, on average.

If the choice is "write off the data, as its not worth paying thousands of dollars to recover", it's a matter of "nothing ventured, nothing gained"...

lenix said:

Hello,
My WD 500GB died on me today for no reason.. It's in the freezer now hoping I'd be able to recover some files from it. ( Freezer is my last resort anyways, can't do anything else ).

Anyways, I've been planning on grabbing a 3TB hdd for a while now and I have 2 options:
1)WD30EZRX
2)Deskstar 5K3000

Click to expand...

I think the 3 TB Hitachi is no good, and same for the poor WD green. I would get a solid piece or nothing else. A good drive seems to cost a bit, both are cheap stuff which seems great deal but high failure rate.

hafa said:

Experience proves otherwise. I've saved literally dozens of drives using the freezer trick; works about 50% of the time, on average.

If the choice is "write off the data, as its not worth paying thousands of dollars to recover", it's a matter of "nothing ventured, nothing gained"...

Click to expand...

If i have a destroyed drive i dont use tricks such as freezing in order to decrease size of mechanical parts which can lead to temporary ability of making it run once again. As a result however, even more damage. The data can still be corrupted, such a drive im gonna throw away in a instant, its not suitable to recover data from, unless there is no backup... which is not me, im to paranoid for that. Even a well working drive is able to corrupt data and a drive which isnt even working anymore, or only after some freezing... is that unstable that i certainly would never savage any data from. To some extent when there is no backup, the platter will have to be removed and readout with a 100% precise solution, which at least is some savaging without additional risk of corruption but extremely expensive. I will never reach such a point, i have everything backed up 2 times, because i know the risk. Not backing up is a lottery which is 99% lost and just a few wins.

Those who dont care about theyr data to much, why not... its not my data.

Ivy said:

I think the 3 TB Hitachi is no good, and same for the poor WD green.

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Do you have data to back that up or is it just opinion? There are many people building home NAS/server systems that use these drives without issue.

Good drives is the 7k series from Hitachi me thinks.

I dont have own experience but i saw so much bad reviews (on of them at Newegg) from users related to those drives, that im certain that theyr reliability is rather at a low spot and definitely not comparable to most of the 7k drives. Cant truly call it a reliable device.

Something i have to agree: Quote: "Quality control from ALL drive manufacturers has gone down hill in the last several years". However, at the flagship models quality control is more likely to appear because of the "image" damage it could possibly create.

Btw: According to QNAP, WD green isnt even recommended... to use inside a NAS. So even QNAP does believe that this stuff is inferior. I mean they are building NAS systems since years, they should know reality.

I'll go tell the 5k3000's in my server that they suck, be right back.

The 5k's are fine...

What you use the server for and how much data used/how frequently? Are you using some kind of file integrity check? Just because a drive is "running" doesnt mean its accurate. I had something like that on a WD elements. It was running like a formula 1 car but so much corruption that it was on the bleeding edge of whats possible.

9x 2tb 5k3000's in RAID 6. Main data store for the network and 7+ virtual machines run off the array. This is in addition to the 7x 1tb 7k1000's in RAID 10. Not sure why that matters, though.

Isnt 5k3000 a 3TB?!

There were multiple. http://www.hgst.com/deskstar-5k3000

A WD Black or a WD Green would suffice IMO.(Makes more sense if you look at the Priceerformance ratio & its pretty reliable too, the reason why they offer a 5 year warranty)). Buy the one with the 5 year product warranty.

Experience proves otherwise. I've saved literally dozens of drives using the freezer trick; works about 50% of the time, on average.

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I've only tried it on a handful, but I also get about a 50% success rate. It's always worth trying if you're out of options.

Ivy said:

... i dont (sic) use tricks such as freezing in order to decrease size of mechanical parts which can lead to temporary ability of making it run once again...its (sic) not suitable to recover data from, unless there is no backup...

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That's the point. Customer x comes to us with their 8-year old P4 and a clicking Deathstar PATA drive that's never been backed up and they want their baby pictures of little Bobby back. They're not going to pay >$1K to get them, but if I can freeze it and get them back, I'm a hero with lots of great free word-of-mouth advertising...