Could you give me a suggestion for a reliable and affordable HDD 1 TB for My daw?
It will store NI libraries, and replace a Seagate just broken yesterday (now I hate Seagate, obviously.....)
No money enough for such a big SSD

Thanks in advance

 

For reliability & Performance i would go with WD Black, 1 TB HDD in my area is $89 but if you want to be cheap for now you can get the NAS(Red) or Green versions(you will need to change their timers to 5min or it will kill itself in 2 to 5 years maybe less or in-between)

May your wallet be with you!!!!

 

Many thanks, Guru , I was just thinking to WD, I'll check on Amazing.......

 

I second WD Black if you are looking for an internal drive. The latest lines of WD are great. I have four WD Red running in my NAS and they have never failed.

I also have a couple of Seagates running for random tasks (temporary downloads and the like); they are good for that, just in-and-out tasks but not for constant data-crunching.

A word of advice: stay away from anything with the words Lacie on it.

Good luck!

 

what do u mean by changing their timers?

 

I agree with the WD Black recommendations, they're very reliable drives in my experience. I have a 1 TB external Lacie drive though, and it's been the best of almost a dozen external drives I've used over the last decade. I've never had a problem with it and it has always run perfectly. Having said that though, I use it for storage, not audio work. Just out of interest, why not Lacie?

 

Probably head parking timer
They use a default aggressive setting, and the head spend his time parking/unparking.

I don't know if you can totally disable it.

 

I recommend WD Black as well! I own several WD hard drives, and none of them ever betrayed me

If you have a look at some reports, you'll see that WD drives have a low failure rate (together with Hitachi, if I remember correctly). On the contraty, Seagates seem to be not that safe a bet...

 

WD Black 1TB here too
7200rpm 64MB Cache
for a HDD really really fast
and i have 5 years warranty on mine

The Huge Libs are loading very fast

it costs a little bit more than standard HDDs, but its really worth it (5y warranty ;) )

 

Pereira,

I'm agreed with WD Black is one of best choices to make, but remember, all HDD will die sooner or later (3 to 5 years, more or less...)
I also recomend some HDD monitoring app like Hard Disk Sentinel Pro or something similar to avoid more surprises.

 

As everybody above I also recomend the WD Black.
I have one with 3.0 usb conection and I have never had a problem. If you are going to use for having there the NI Kontakt libraries, I make the same and works really well the libraries load quite quickly

 

AKA "Intellipark" Head Parking which parks it's head every 8 seconds resulting in High Load Cycle Count(killing the drive)

These WD Green drives are the new 4K Advanced format drives. Along with that, WD thought it would be a great feature to build a timer in their firmware to autopark the heads after 8 seconds so to reduce energy. For many that use these drives in a NAS, other external USB storage or even a desktop, this was not such a great idea. The continual autoparking of the heads greatly reduces the lifetime of these drives to the point where 3 months with the 8 second autopark timer is equivalent to ~3 years of use.

To remedy the situation, you can adjust the autopark timer from the default 8 sec up to a maximum of 300 seconds (5 minutes).

1. create a bootable MS-DOS USB thumb drive. Make sure to choose FAT as the format.

2. Download/extract the WDidle3.zip file from Western Digital's website and save the wdidle3.exe file to the thumb drive.
wdidle3_1_05.zip

3. Shutdown your PC, remove all other hard drives except the WD Green drive that you want to change the wdidle timer on.

4. Restart your PC and go into your PC's BIOS and make sure you turn AHCI off otherwise your flash drive will not be recognized. Also make sure that the thumb drive is set as the first bootable drive. Save your BIOS settings.

5. Restart your PC, it should hopefully see the thumb drive and boot from it into MS-DOS.

6. Once in MS-DOS, type "wdidle3.exe" without the quotes and press enter. The wdidle3.exe utility should run. From there, you can use the following commands:

wdidle3.exe /r
-this will provide you info on the drive including the current timeout. Factory default is 8 seconds.

wdidle3.exe /s 300
-this will change the autopark timer to 300 seconds (5 minutes) which is the maximum allowed.

You can also do another wdidle3.exe /r after you make the change to see that the drive has accepted the new timer.

**DO NOT USE** the wdidle3.exe /d command. This turns the timer off however many people have reported that the drives eventually slow down to a crawl and/or generate errors using this command. The best is to change the timer to 300 seconds.

Once done, shut your PC off and repeat step-6 for each WD Green drive 4K drive.

One you are finished, plug your hard drives back in, go back into your BIOS and turn AHCI on, change your boot order, etc. and reboot back into Windows.

Drink a beer.

 

What a pain in the arse !
Why couldn't they implement it as a software feature, not firmware ?

The last 2 Seagates I bought (external desktop storages) can modify their idle spin-down timer with a software app/tool.

I'm need to put a NAS together, either an off the shelf brand or self build with FreeNAS or other.
What are the differences between Red, Green & Black ???

Thanks.

 

Verkiciousknid, in my experience Lacie is a bit like Seagate: good for backup and storage. What I've also found is that they heat up very quickly if spun too hard; for this reason, they're better as external drives.

Also, I second the recommendation of using HD Sentinel or similar. Using those diagnostics are useful to know such drive is lacking and pushing your system down.

Pereira, if using external, I'd recommend to get a USB3 HD drive; if your computer doesn't have any USB3 ports, you can buy one for a little bit of money. They're really easy to install.

Anyway, my two cents. Good luck!!

 

Funnily enough the oldest still running on my setup happens to be a Seagate, still spinning away faultlessly after 12 years.
WD I like the most as its quiter and I couldn't name a problem drive from the array I have installed which includes a Hitachi amongst more WD's and Seagate's
LACIE just suck, the WD drive inside the external I had, I needed to mount in the case after less than 4 months when the circuits gave up, exceptionally poor

 

Never go with Seagate, always Western Digital though I must say they are going down the tubes lately too particularly when it comes to external drives.

Stay away from WD Greens because they rotate at around 5,4000 RPM and you're going to want a nice 7,2000 RPM drive for music production. Sure they consume less power but I think in this case you want the extra added performance benefit.

WD Red is for people planning on using it in a NAS. Also Hitachi is good too.

Dalmation
See above.

 

Thanks a lot for the appreciated suggestions: not so difficult to take a decision, seems there is a WD Black global appreciacion.

So, let's go
Western Digital WD1003FZEX Caviar Black HardDisk, about 75 € here

The only problem is that I have to substitute other two Seagate Barracuda: fortunatly, they are 12 serie, not like the horrible broken serie 11 (I knew it, I knew it...... )


Saint HD Sentinel, help me


Lacie is very rare here...as well as Hitachi, expansive also, but seems a good reliable peace of HW, I agree

 

Hi again Pereira, I just sent you a PM with a link to download HD Sentinel, if you still want it.