Best high-capacity HDD

MAC_Addy

All,

I'm looking for a 3TB or higher hard drive to replace my 2x 500GB in my NAS. I've been looking on Newegg - their prices are really unbeatable. Does anyone have any recommendations on what to get? In the past I've usually gone with Western Digital, but based on the reviews I might go with a different brand.

Here's one that I've had my eye on TOSHIBA PH3300U-1I72 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - Newegg.com

Thanks!

MrBigg

I picked up 2 of the ones you have linked a few months ago, and they have been great. I too was in the Western Digital boat, but I'm glad I tried these out... the price is hard to beat for what you get.

WafflesAndRootbeer

I'd stick with the WD NAS drives but I wouldn't touch a 4TB for some time. Still too new and they won't work with every NAS out there.

PurpleIT

This advice won't really help you for another 4 months, but...

I get the Seagate external drives from Costco on Black Friday and pull the drives out. I end up with some USB3 to SATA converters, some bare drives and a few miscellaneous parts; pay $99 each (2 years ago that was for 2Tb drives, last year it was 3TB and I assume 4TB this year)... just something to keep in mind. I believe it is limit 5 per person, but I have never needed more than 3 at a time.

I did have to replace one under warranty, but there was no issue going through Seagate's website and treating it like a bare drive.

Plantwiz

I've had good success with Seagate and Toshiba drives. To this day will not use Western doomable drives. Just too many with failed drives, bad sectors and even when replaced by the company, too many problems overall. Bottom line, I don't think you should see issues with Toshiba drives. It is one of the few that have been pretty decent overall over the years (and there was a time I was a diehard Maxtor fan, but Toshiba's have been pretty good).

SteveLord

I have WD 500, 640 and 1TB Black drives that have been fine. It's the others that are risky. I am shocked Toshiba makes a good drive, considering their laptops are poo.

networkjutsu

As someone already mentioned, I'd go with WD Red drives. I bought three and I still haven't installed two yet. They have some of the features of an enterprise drive that aren't in consumer drives like WD Green, Blue, and Black. I do, however, have six Black drives currently installed in my Synology DS1812+. Hoping to take out two of them soon.

datgirl

I recently purchased the Seagate Barracuda 3 TB HDD SATA 6 Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 7200 RPM 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST3000DM001 and plan to purchase more of them for future deployments.

SteveLord

networkjutsu wrote: »

As someone already mentioned, I'd go with WD Red drives. I bought three and I still haven't installed two yet. They have some of the features of an enterprise drive that aren't in consumer drives like WD Green, Blue, and Black. I do, however, have six Black drives currently installed in my Synology DS1812+. Hoping to take out two of them soon.

Reviews put the WD Red drives as too unreliable for me. WD seems to be striving for quantity (and color) over quality these last few years.

I ordered the Toshiba mentioned above as I need to backup/lockup nearly 1TB of data that is currently not.

networkjutsu

SteveLord wrote: »

Reviews put the WD Red drives as too unreliable for me. WD seems to be striving for quantity (and color) over quality these last few years.

I ordered the Toshiba mentioned above as I need to backup/lockup nearly 1TB of data that is currently not.

I read about that before but most of them were older reviews. Again, this is long ago. The quality on these Red drives were horrible from what I've read but WD rectified the problem as far as I know. I don't believe I've had the drive for a year yet so I can't say for sure. The WD Blacks and Blues are always reliable for me. Though, my DS1812+ detected a SMART failure on one of the newer WD Blacks that I have. Moved it to my desktop and WD's tool found it working fine. Now, it's been in and out of my system. Gotta RMA soon but I guess I need to prove to WD that it is a bad drive.

Asif Dasl

networkjutsu wrote: »

my DS1812+ detected a SMART failure on one of the newer WD Blacks that I have. Moved it to my desktop and WD's tool found it working fine. Now, it's been in and out of my system. Gotta RMA soon but I guess I need to prove to WD that it is a bad drive.

Do a "Chkdsk \ /f /r" on it and run something like this to check the SMART information manually.

SteveLord

networkjutsu wrote: »

I read about that before but most of them were older reviews.

Not really. Roughly half of the reviews on the first 3 pages for the 3TB are bad. And that covers June and July.

For me personally to pull the trigger on any product, I combine the 4/5 egg reviews and they need to be in the 70-80% range. Then I also see what Amazon's reviews are like as well. This method has never earned me a DOA or dead within a few months in the 10 years I have been purchasing computer hardware online. I even refer to Newegg/Amazon when I am interested in a product at Walmart, Bestbuy, etc.