laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

[dmill89]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

hmm interesting. Also I suspect a lot of AIO PCs use 2.5" drives too, though there may be enough space to squeeze a 3.5" somewhere...

It varies, some AIOs use 3.5" HDDs and some use 2.5", newer units are more likely to have 2.5", but they are also more likely to come with SSDs. I haven't seen inside any really new (<2year old) AIOs yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they go the way of many newer laptops and ditch the SATA drive entirely and only have an NVMe slot for an SSD.

[eccerr0r]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

hmm...looking at my spare parts I found a WD Blue 2.5" ... I should expect this drive to die an early death in a desktop/server situation...?

(Also it seems that a lot of these laptop drives have low POH limits, as in their counter hit 0 fairly quickly, unlike some desktop drives. Then again I see some server disks also show likewise...)

[nobbnobb1]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

I don't know if drive manufacturers still make "extreme" editions of their drives for severe industrial or 24/7 environments, but that used to be common. I built a home server back in 2009 using basic WD Green 1TB 3.5" drives for storage and running the OS on a Seagate EE25 80GB extreme edition "industrial" drive. I'm STILL using this machine and it's running Windows 10 as my server OS (slowly), but all the drives have been working fine all these years. The oldest of the drives has about 90,000 hours on it!

I should probably eventually get a proper NAS but too lazy to do the migration. Might wait until Windows 10 is no longer supported. It still works fine for basic server tasks but it's definitely slow. I'm using Storage Spaces for drive mirroring which seems super easy as compared to RAID.

[eccerr0r]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

I ended up getting a bunch of old WD disks recently, and now have two blues (different models -- one is faster than the other), an enterprise, and two greens. One of the two greens is an "always on" AVDS disk... which is kind of weird.

Most of these disks are in a Linux full disk encrypted software RAID now as I don't quite trust the used disks. RAID for loss, and encryption so I can give or throw away the disk any time... These are all 3.5" disks however.

[stj]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

strange, the "video" drives used to be "white" series.
video drives have different formware btw, for pc use they will seem a little slow on seek.
the firmware tries to write consecutive sectors like a dvd to keep head seek to a minimum while writing live video.
a data drive normally scatters the data all over the platters to minimise and even our the wear.

[eccerr0r]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

Doing sequential reads from the Green AV disk doesn't seem that spectacular.
The Enterprise WD disk and one of the two Blue WD disks seems to be the two that stand out in sequential reads at around 90MB/sec - they may be newer than the others and use a single high density platter though this usually makes them slower, go figure.

The others seem very pedestrian and around 60MB/sec sequential though some hit 70MB/sec. Did not test seek performance.

I extracted the two faster disks and put the slower WD disks with a like-slow Seagate 500G disks in a RAID5 and its performance is ho-hum, about as expected.

I also RAIDed a bunch of 750G disks, all identical Seagates that hit around 74MB/sec. This RAID feels much snappier in performance than the hodge podge RAID with dissimilar brand and model disks. Likewise untrusted disks so they are also encrypted.

[TechGeek]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

Doing sequential reads from the Green AV disk doesn't seem that spectacular.
The Enterprise WD disk and one of the two Blue WD disks seems to be the two that stand out in sequential reads at around 90MB/sec - they may be newer than the others and use a single high density platter though this usually makes them slower, go figure.

The others seem very pedestrian and around 60MB/sec sequential though some hit 70MB/sec. Did not test seek performance.

I extracted the two faster disks and put the slower WD disks with a like-slow Seagate 500G disks in a RAID5 and its performance is ho-hum, about as expected.

I also RAIDed a bunch of 750G disks, all identical Seagates that hit around 74MB/sec. This RAID feels much snappier in performance than the hodge podge RAID with dissimilar brand and model disks. Likewise untrusted disks so they are also encrypted.

I've got a triplet of WD Black drives in my main computer, and they'd blow the socks off of those drives at 120MB/s+ all day long.

[eccerr0r]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

Yeah, newer disks are all faster, so what's your point?

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

yupp and newer disks are all more failure prone because they try to pack too many bits per square inch into the platters so just a minute defect results in the loss of quite a few megabytes of data, so yea, whats his point indeed? hehe!

so the older drives may be slower but they tend to last much longer than the newer, faster ones.

[eccerr0r]

Re: laptop vs desktop rust spinner longevity

Can't say that's true, they all will fail at some point.

Hmm... my WD Green 2TB HDD (3.5", which incidentally gets 120MB/sec sequential - probably one of my slower 2T disks) in my PVR now is 83K POH... I wonder when this disk is going to croak. Has exactly 1 pending sector at the moment, and been backing this up to other media frequently now. Don't know what things would be like if I had a 2.5" there from the start...

I have yet to find where that pending sector is... must be in the slack space somewhere as I can read all files (that's what backup is doing!) without invoking a read error.

(My dying 2T WD 5400 RPM RE4 disk is the slowest, it only gets about 100MB/sec. It's still working however, at least the first part of the disk. I wonder if I should simply HPA the bad portion of the disk...)