WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

[dood]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

Guess I'm part of the small percentage in Google's study... I just had a HP-Branded Seagate drive fail (146gb 2.5" 10k SAS drive) after 1 year and 5 months. Puts me squarely in the "drives aren't likely to fail" period. Granted, that was one out of 8 spindles in the server, and out of around 80 spindles in the datacenter (if not more). Inlet air temperature of the server is kept at a fairly constant 72*f.

As for drives not being damaged by heat, I have anecdotal evidence that the statement isn't true. Twice since I started at this company, we've had air conditioner failures that sent temps in the datacenter up over 100*F. Both times, we had 2 drive failures in different servers in the week after the event.

[Pentium4]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

Awesome, I'm so glad to see that people are still using P4's. They are really useful procs still....I always pick Seagate first but i'd take WD over Hitachi anyday...Hitachi always runs hot and loud. Never been a fan of them...

[shovenose]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

I think p4s run hot for how little oomph they have but they are still good for general usage.

[Pentium4]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

I think p4s run hot for how little oomph they have but they are still good for general usage.

Oh yeah. Sometimes all you need is a single core. I have a 478 P4 in my HTPC, one in my backup laptop, and used to have one in my server but figured out a Celeron D is just as good in a server and uses less power

[severach]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

In my testing I found that Willamette (180 nm) and Prescott (90 nm) Pentium 4 processors used more power than Northwood (130 nm) processors. HT in Northwood improves responsiveness without using more power. The 2.4, 2.6, and 2.8 Northwood HT processors are the most power efficient and not substantially slower than the >=3.0 processors.

The most readily available Celeron D processors are Prescott which aren't power efficient and without HT are not responsive.

My GX270 865G + my hand selected Northwood 2.8 HT draws 46W at the wall. Randomly selected 2.4, 2.6, 2.8 processors have increased power consumption up to 69W. Randomly selected power supplies also increase power consumption.

[UraBahn]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

P4's certainly have quite the long life, don't they? Kinda odd considering how amazingly hot they run, even the lower-end ones. Oh well, just so long as they load YouTube at a reasonable speed

One word regarding WD.... Idle3. It. Will. Drive. You. Insane. WDIDLE3 is not guaranteed to fix it either.

Also, Blue's and Green's are, by firmware design, crippled to prevent you from using them in RAID (without mucking with WDTLER.)

Friggin' annoying. If you want to use WD, then use only either Black or Velociraptor, which use less aggressive Idle3 settings and seem to tolerate RAIDing better. Forget anything Blue or Green, they'll drive you up the wall within two weeks.

[shovenose]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

P4's certainly have quite the long life, don't they? Kinda odd considering how amazingly hot they run, even the lower-end ones. Oh well, just so long as they load YouTube at a reasonable speed

One word regarding WD.... Idle3. It. Will. Drive. You. Insane. WDIDLE3 is not guaranteed to fix it either.

Also, Blue's and Green's are, by firmware design, crippled to prevent you from using them in RAID (without mucking with WDTLER.)

Friggin' annoying. If you want to use WD, then use only either Black or Velociraptor, which use less aggressive Idle3 settings and seem to tolerate RAIDing better. Forget anything Blue or Green, they'll drive you up the wall within two weeks.

WTH is Idle3? never heard of it?

[UraBahn]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

WTH is Idle3? never heard of it?

Idle3 is also known as Intellipark. It's a powersaving "feature" that tries a bit too hard. It spins the drive down after 4~8 seconds of idle time, completely afoul of the OS's power management settings. It can take awhile for the drive to spin up after it's spun back down, during which time the computer won't respond. It's a very common issue, google Intellipark problems.

On my WD5000BEVT, WDIDLE3 wouldn't/couldn't turn off Idle3, so I had to put up with the occasional random 3-5 second long lags. After half a year of pure irritation I just got rid of the drive and got a used Seagate (which came with a nice occasional clack, wonderful. :P)

Sometimes I hate hard drives.

[shovenose]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

xD I've never noticed that. But then again it seems that a hard drive is never idle - the activity LED makes a quick blink every few seconds so I doubt it would fall asleep?

[UraBahn]

Re: WD 320GB or Hitachi 500GB

xD I've never noticed that. But then again it seems that a hard drive is never idle - the activity LED makes a quick blink every few seconds so I doubt it would fall asleep?

Some systems seem to blink that light every so often. Could it mean that there's a device in there running in slow old PIO mode? (CD/DVD drive perhaps - they're notorious for being problematic in this area.)

On mine, I like running without a swapfile and with all search indexing features disabled because it usually runs noticeably faster without all that nonsense choking the system down. (I rarely use Windows Search so the loss of indexing is a non-issue.) I also intensely abhor random disk grinding or spikes in CPU usage (which can, depending on the situation, kick my CPU out of low-speed mode, causing the fan to spin up and get really noisy.)

I also prefer to specify my own spindown timeouts. Idle3 completely renders the OS's power settings regarding the hard drive useless, since it won't obey the OS.