CDRLabs.com

I'm looking at picking up two 2TB SATA hard drives for my server at home. The server is used primarily for occasional file serving, backups and streaming videos so the hard drives don't need to be fast. In fact, I'd rather have them be quiet and use less power. I don't need SATA 6.0 Gb/s and Advanced Format is a hassle I'd really not deal with at the moment.

Right now I'm looking at these:

Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB Hard Drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148413

Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS 2TB Hard Drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822136514

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB Hard Drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152245

HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 (0F12117) 2TB Hard Drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145475

The Seagate and WD drives are the cheapest of the four. Any thoughts?

Samsung seems to get really good reviews lately.
Maybe the Hitachi will be a collectors item since WD just bought them out
If you keep an eye on slickdeals.net, they seem to have deals posted every week or two for 2TB drives.

Thanks for the tip. They've got this one listed for $74 with coupon code lion1615.

http://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?nam ... Drive&c=CJ

Damn.. that deal expired.

I bought a drive from them. It came well packed and pretty quickly too. I would buy from them again.

$75 with free shipping @ Newegg with coupon code EMCKGJK24...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152245

The Samsung HD204UI and WD20EARS are advanced format drives and aren't ideal for WHS. I'm probably going to go with the Seagate.

I have these 2 TB-drives with 5x00 rpm:

Western Digital Caviar Green WD20EARS
Seagate Barracuda Green 5900.3
Samsung EcoGreen F4 (HD204UI)

The Seagate seems to be the best drive of these 3. Its fast, quiet, have no probs with my H55-Mainboard. It´s also a 4kB-drive, but with the Seagate SmartAlign-feature u should not have any prob with older OS. It offers also SATA3 and 64MB RAM, in c´t it was the best drive in Benchmark Iometer.

The WD is a descent drive, but WDs Load Cycle Count is awful, if U don´t disable it the power managament will decrease the lifetime of the drive

I´m not very happy with the F4, because some SATA-controllers don´t like it.

I went with the HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000. Amazon.com has it for $69.99 shipped.

Hitachi Deskstar 2 TB 3.5-Inch CoolSpin RPM SATA III 6Gbps 32 MB Cache Internal Hard Drive 0F12117

Could be a good deal, Hitachis last HDDs showed good speed and isn´t so loud like many Hitachis before.

Maybe I a 5K3000 soon, it´s one of the HDDs I didnt have already

Gabe wrote:Maybe I a 5K3000 soon, it´s one of the HDDs I didnt have already

Nice collection! You're as bad as I am with optical drives.

I got my Hitachi drive a couple of days ago. I installed it this morning and ran some quick tests. Not bad for low power drive.

Ian wrote:I'm looking at picking up two 2TB SATA hard drives for my server at home. The server is used primarily for occasional file serving, backups and streaming videos so the hard drives don't need to be fast. In fact, I'd rather have them be quiet and use less power. I don't need SATA 6.0 Gb/s and Advanced Format is a hassle I'd really not deal with at the moment.

You've had the Hitachi drives for a good year now. How are they working out for you? Any regrets? While my quest for a suitable drive has to be limited to one listed with QNAP, would you agree (at this time) that Hitachi has the most dependable drives? While I'm pretty sure that these are not really "enterprise" drives, do you leave them on 24/7? (This is what I want to do.)

An initial problem I ran into is that when I went to check a few of the QNAP-recommended drives on Newegg.com, they were not in stock, possibly not to be stocked/available again.....

Anyway, customer-reviewers really don't seem to like Seagate drives, and Western Digital is not far behind. But from what I'm reading, these/all drive companies are consolidating, and what was once a dependable drive, now that it is aquired by a lesser quality company, is itself now (has become) a lesser quality drive.... It seems like there are a lot of land mines out there. Wasn't Hitachi absorbed (taken over) by another drive mfr. also? And that flooding in the Far East last year continues to raise havoc, or this is at least the justification for continued higher drive prices. And reviewers are balking at buying any drive whose had its warrenty reduced to one year.... What's a guy to do?

I ended up buying only one drive due to the flood and resulting price increase. I've been very happy with the purchase though. Its in my home server which is powered on 24/7 and there have been no problems so far.

Hitachi's hard drive business was purchased by Western Digital. I'm not sure what's going to happen with their respective businesses but with WD transferring assets to Toshiba, I have a feeling they're going to use Hitachi's manufacturing facilities and designs.

Don't even get me started on the new 1 year warranty. If the high prices of hard drives weren't already driving people to SSDs, the warranty will. Thankfully, the Hitachi drives still have a 3 year warranty.. at least for now.