What 2nd HDD

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Blured eyes

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I need a new 2nd HDD as my old one I think is had it. It will be my 2nd HD alongside my SSD samsung 250evo which is set as the C drive and has the OS and all my programs and working -on files on.
So what is a good one WD - Segate - hitatachi and then there the WD Blue, black. purple, so no wonder I am confused, this drive will be used for files that I want quick access to but not all the time and so trying to keep them off the C drive.
I have another external HD for longer term archive storage.
Thanks
 
from what i hear seagate are to be avoided, I'm in a similar predicament and I'm looking at the Hitachi drives as the reviews are good
 
FWIW I use WD Blacks and for the record keep them cool with two fans blowing room air across the disk mounting rack. Heat is killer of HDDs so just IMO make sure you keep them well ventilated ;)
 
Another vote for WD black or Hitachi 7200rpm ones. Always back up to another drive or two no matter what you go for.
 
Another vote for WD Blacks. Not the cheapest but this is probably a good thing.

I use WD Blacks in my two desktop PCs, originally as RAID1 pairs but now as backup drives to 1TB SSDs which has let me retire the SATA300 drives; WD Reds in my NAS & servers and WD Greens as monthly archive drives.

I've tried 4TB HGST drives and they're as good as the reviews say but just run a little warmer than the Reds in the cramped confines of a NAS.
 
Thanks all for your replies - looks like I cant go far wrong with a WD then, but what is the difference with the colours, is it the buffer memory or whatever and would I notice 6mb over 8, I don’t need super fast read and write on this drive as that is what the SSD is for. This is internal 2nd drive for short term storage, I also have separate back up.

Funny thing is the HDD drive I am replacing is a WD.

Its a referb PC apart from my SSD, now they will want to replace but I might ask for a refund on the cost of the HD and put it towards a new one, its a WD 2003fyps-27y2bo that I think has died.

I unplugged the pc to move it and then plugged it back in and it then took 5 mins to load win7 from the usual 30 seconds and the program menu would not load - it was just a white space for 10 mins, other actions like creating a restore point were impossible to do as the available disc would not even populate. It was doing my nut in until I disabled the 2nd HD and then everything worked as normal.

Any Ideas ??
 
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Blues are every day, black are performance, green low power, red 24/7 reliabily for nas. Supposedly.

Don't get too hung up on makes over reliability stats. Mechanical drives will always be capable of failing after 0.1s or 1 decade. That's why its always important to have multiple drives as backup.

Have you checked the connectors? Not impossible for a loose connector to eventually lose it's connection.
 
neil_g said:
Blues are every day, black are performance, green low power, red 24/7 reliabily for nas. Supposedly.

Have you checked the connectors? Not impossible for a loose connector to eventually lose it's connection.
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Sounds like a Blue would do me then.
It is a new (to me ) pc and I have yet to even load anything on to the 2 HD apart from a restore or boot file or whatever, it was sent to me via courrer so I could un plug and plug back in the hd to see if that was a cause.
 
Blured eyes said:
Sounds like a Blue would do me then.
It is a new (to me ) pc and I have yet to even load anything on to the 2 HD apart from a restore or boot file or whatever, it was sent to me via courrer so I could un plug and plug back in the hd to see if that was a cause.
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Anything sent assembled and a victim of being thrown around a courier system IMO needs all the connectors checked for integrity and to put Neil says about HDDs more pithily 'there are only two types of hard drives, those that have failed and those that will fail...' hence the need for, in the case of data, copies and backups preferably external ones ;)
 
Problem there is £36.48 + £6.99 del = £43.47
Where as pc world £47 Its this one
WD Mainstream 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - 1 TB
so not a lot in it and at pc world If I left now it can me in my machine in 30 mins.
 
Blured eyes said:
Thanks for your constructive help
Click to expand...

Q. Shall I buy this drive?
A. Well, my personal experience (and industry standard advice) is that all hard drives fail eventually so with that in mind, it makes sense to buy a less expensive drive. Here's one that's cheaper than yours.
Q. Well it's only slightly more expensive to buy the one I chose and it's more convenient
A. Cool - that's a good way to choose. Have fun and don't forget backups!

You're welcome.

You can read all the reviews you like from Backblaze (and really, it's riveting stuff) but you need to bear in mind 2 things:

  1. They run their drives 24/7. A lifetime of home use is likely to equate to a couple of weeks in their server farm. And that's if you ignore the issues around variability of use (e.g. does powering them off and on make them last longer or shorter?)
  2. As a home user, you are dealing with single point samples of a binary condition. It doesn't matter if reliability is 99.9999% or it's 60%. You have a hard drive that either works or it doesn't. Failure is total and (can be) irrevocable.
  3. I'm slightly dubious of any reliability scale that has a 222% failure rate. I bet there's a good reason for this - but it makes me think I don't understand the other figures.
 
few things on that..

its worth avoiding poor drives no matter how cheap they are. sure all mechanical drives will fail eventually but keep buying drives with poor record is just counter productive and more likely to cost more in the long run.

there some debate in whether turning a drive on and off is worse than running a drive 24/7.

otherwise you're right in that whatever you do you should ensure that you have at least 2 copies of your data at all times (RAID counting as 1 copy).
 
And another question when i install my hd if i just have 1 big partition can I add another later by making the big one smaller, I have just come from xp to win 7 so never had partition options before.

Do I need any separate partitions for say, a back up image of the ssd or system reg back ups or can they just sit with all my other stuff on 1 full partition
 
neil_g said:
its worth avoiding poor drives no matter how cheap they are. sure all mechanical drives will fail eventually but keep buying drives with poor record is just counter productive and more likely to cost more in the long run.
Click to expand...

You're right of course. But even Seagate on their worst ever year hit a little under 12%. Most manufacturers run somewhere around 5% failure in an average year while the best ones are running at about 2%. On a non essential item costing £50 or so, that's not a big enough variation for me to worry about.
 
Don't buy any hard drives from PC world, they deliberately buy bad ones so they sell them cheap and you go back to them.
 
Another vote for WD Black I have two of them
 
Well its too late as I have just returned from pc world, and althouth the website is saying mainstream, it is actually a blue.
Will be fitting shortly
 
Forgot to ask.
Do I first go device manager and right click the old HDlisted and uninstall or just (after turning off ) swap it with the new one
 
Whatever you do DO NOT "uninstall" the HDD with windows on...........if I remember right you just want to add a 2nd HDD for storage?
Should be able to connect it to your motherboard & have it recognised in Computer automatically.
Don't forget to back up your data first & then you can copy back whatever files you need.
 
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Mad Badger said:
Whatever you do DO NOT "uninstall" the HDD with windows on...........if I remember right you just want to add a 2nd HDD for storage?
Should be able to connect it to your motherboard & have it recognised in Computer automatically.
Don't forget to back up your data first & then you can copy back whatever files you need.
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No I have two, 1 ssd with OS and all programs and a 2nd normal hd which has failed and is the one I am about to swap with another .
Do I need to uninstall the old one or do I just swap - and if I just swap wont I be left with its old drivers or will they be over written on detection of the new drive
 
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power down, swap, power up, use it.
 
the only storage drives i will use anymore are WD, had failures on most of the others and read far too many bad things about most of them to make me change my mind. I currently have a WD blue as the second drive in my main pc and it has been fine since i installed it about 4/5 years ago and across a couple of computer builds.
 
Snapsh0t said:
Inserting 'initialise, partition, format' between 'power up' & 'use' may help the novice a bit....
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Well thats the 'use' bit
 
From my experience, to the average user 'use' means 'Well I've plugged it in so why can't I see it in Windows Explorer?' and I've had those support calls. You & I know the extra actions needed but yer average PC user doesn't stand a chance. But, then, that's what keeps us in business....
 
As has been said previously, all hard drives will fail eventually regardless of manufacturer. At any one time, any manufacturer can produce a bad batch of drives, in my last job before I retired I ran a computer network in a school with 800+ PCs & servers. The technicians who worked for me would replace failed drives on a regular basis. Over a 10 year period no particular brand was any worse than any other.

My strategy when buying replacement drives was to buy whatever was cheapest at the size I needed, apart from for servers or SAN arrays where we used SCSI or SAS drives which are much more expensive than desktop/laptop drives.

Yo might think that the higher the rotational speed a drive has the faster it is, but this is not always the case. A slower drive with higher density platters can often out-perform faster drives, cache size is an important factor too. A slower drive will use less power & run cooler.

I quite like using 2.5" HDD as they use less power, run cooler & mean my PC is a lot quieter. My recent experience suggests they are more reliable too.
 
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