# Shopping for 7200 RPM drives



## NameOfBand (Jul 16, 2017)

Hi,

When looking for 7200 RPM drives, what is good to think of? How important is the cache? Is there an optimal size of storage? I'd be using it to store oneshots and sample libraries that I don't use so often (the more frequently used ones on SSD).

Thankful for tips!

//NoB


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## holywilly (Jul 16, 2017)

I like HGST drives, quiet and reliable, I have bunch of them for raid 5 configuration and single backup use for years and still working strong.


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## Jeremy Spencer (Jul 17, 2017)

IMO, they are all good. Just make sure if it's not a energy-saving "green" drive. And if it's external, I would recommend one with its own power supply.


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## synthpunk (Jul 17, 2017)

I use the OWC Guardian Maximus in RAID 0 for local backups which gives you a duplicate redundant back up in one unit. I think they're using Western drives right now which to be honest can be hit-and-miss. I had one fail within a year or so. If I had my druthers I would probably rather use Glyphs similar product instead now.


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## kitekrazy (Jul 17, 2017)

I'm a fan of WD Blue. WD Black has a 5 year warranty but the only drives I ever had to RMA after owning Seagate and WD are WD Blacks. WD has one of the best RMA services out there. I'm looking for a 2TB internal drive as well. Unfortunately WD no longer makes a 7200 RM Blue.


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## kitekrazy (Jul 17, 2017)

holywilly said:


> I like HGST drives, quiet and reliable, I have bunch of them for raid 5 configuration and single backup use for years and still working strong.



Anyone else using these? I guess they are made by WD. How is Toshiba?


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## charlieclouser (Jul 17, 2017)

I also like HGST drives, and I've got a couple dozen in rotation at the moment - 2tb, 4tb, and even four of the new 10tb (!) helium-filled drives. Zero failures in the last 15 years. The HGST drives are the descendants of the IBM Deskstar line, and I've been using them since then - back when 75gb was considered a big drive. My ancient G5 machines still start up just fine with their 100gb boot drives from a long time ago.

Back in the SCSI era, Seagate Cheetah's were the shiz, but I had a few failures. Same with WD drives - I had a few go down on me. Deskstar / HGST have not failed me yet.

For the HGST drives I've tended to favor the "enterprise" versions since they came out, and I stay away from the NAS, Cinema, or Video Surveillance models. Not sure why exactly. I guess I suspect that in NAS, cinema and surveillance use cases the drives *are* intended to be spinning 24/7, but are *not* expected to be pushed to the absolute max i/o throughput. I don't know how accurate my assumptions are. I do have a lot of the non-enterprise versions with 64mb cache and they work just fine - but three years ago I switched to all-SSD for sample and project storage, and now I only use the spinning drives for offline backup.

Enterprise drives have a longer warranty, longer MTBF, but at a higher price. I like a bigger cache size, but I don't choose the drive solely on that criterion.


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## benatural (Jul 17, 2017)

charlieclouser said:


> I also like HGST drives, and I've got a couple dozen in rotation at the moment - 2tb, 4tb, and even four of the new 10tb (!) helium-filled drives. Zero failures in the last 15 years. The HGST drives are the descendants of the IBM Deskstar line, and I've been using them since then - back when 75gb was considered a big drive. My ancient G5 machines still start up just fine with their 100gb boot drives from a long time ago.



I recently picked up an 8tb drive and while I was doing my research I stumbled on this https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/

Some interesting statistics in there that I found useful in my search, and it proves what you've experienced.


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## AllanH (Jul 17, 2017)

I've always had good experience with Western Digital. My current main drive in my DAW system is a
WD Gold Datacenter Hard Disk Drive (e.g. http://a.co/fxfyP2U). Been an excellent performer so far.

I never buy Seagate.


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## charlieclouser (Jul 17, 2017)

benatural said:


> I recently picked up an 8tb drive and while I was doing my research I stumbled on this https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/
> 
> Some interesting statistics in there that I found useful in my search, and it proves what you've experienced.



Yeah, I've been following the BackBlaze failure analysis page for a while now - it's so great of them to make that info public and so easy to understand.


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## charlieclouser (Feb 22, 2018)

For what it's worth, a while back Western Digital bought HGST in its entirety. So I guess the ownership of my favorite drive manufacturer goes something like IBM > Hitachi > HGST > Western Digital. I don't think they're all being made in the same factory, but there's probably a good bit of technology sharing between the product lines. I think they still position the various lines to aim at different market segments and capitalize on the long reputations those lines have in their respective markets. 

Looks like the 12tb drives are shipping now from HGST, WD, and Seagate.


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## EvilDragon (Feb 22, 2018)

I only use WD Blacks for platter drives. Owned 7-8 of them, they were (and still are) all good. I only used 1 and 2 TB ones. These newfangled double digit TB drives is something I'm a bit wary of as far as reliability... Plus with so much data on the drive, that head sure needs to travel about an awful lot to read/write stuff when pushed - I'd never do DFD streaming on those! I wouldn't use such drives for anything other than backup honestly...


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## Pietro (Feb 23, 2018)

Beware o the high capacity hard drives, that use SMR or similar technology. Some of the cheaper Seagates over 4TB for example. The way they work makes them slow down significantly especially during massive writes. Down to a ridiculous 0.1MB/s. They basically stack data on top of each other, so they have to read multiple layers before writing. Often they get too much data to write at once, so they cannot keep up with all the operations.

I use Blacks for samples, though I had 2 out of 6 die in the last 5 years without warning. 

- Piotr


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## synthpunk (Feb 23, 2018)

Does partitioning still effect drive lifespans ?

Im only using spinning drives for backups.


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## gamma-ut (Feb 23, 2018)

I really didn't like the noise on the WD Black I got recently - the 'tock tock' of its lubricant dispersal became just too annoying so wound up putting an old Barracuda in its place.


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## EvilDragon (Feb 23, 2018)

synthpunk said:


> Does partitioning still effect drive lifespans ?



Partitioning affects performance of each subsequent partition. Lifespan... I guess it depends how much you tear over multiple partitions at the same time.


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## Leon Portelance (Feb 25, 2018)

I have a 4 TB G-tech Thunderbolt drive for my samples that works very well.


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