Trying out new Hitachi 2TB "Deskstar" drive

[Shooshie]

As the title says, I'm trying out a new Hitachi drive, 2TB SATA, 7200 rpm. It's a Deskstar drive, and I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the old IBM deskstars of which several failed for me and for people I knew. Hopefully the Hitachi versions are nothing like the old IBM versions.

Naturally, if anyone has negative experience with this particular drive (the 2TB HItachi Deskstar), I'd like to know what went wrong. Positive experiences, too, of course.

Shooshie

[nk_e]

Hi Shoosh.

Just picked one up last week myself after my fourth (or fifth) Seagate failed on me in the last year. Good backup strategies are a must.

"Hilariously" at least 2 of the seagate failed drives were back up drives, but when they failed the original drives were still good so I could "re-back" them up to new drives.

This all happened in a staggered fashion, the drives were from different lots, housed in different well ventilated seagate and non-seagate enclosures and they were not all from the "problem" drives Seagate put out a while back. Totally weird, but enough to put me in the ABS (Anything But Seagate) Camp....

Anyway, so far so good with the Hitachi, but given experiences above I only mount it once a week for backing up my samples and soundware. The price was great ($149) at the local MicroCenter.

[newrigel]

Were they time machine BU drives? TM really overworks the drives IMO, so I just CCC my drive to a 160 GB and keep it in a safe place with silica gel dessicant packs and in antistatic bags etc.. my other drives (my personal Kontakt patches) have hard copy BD backups of them... everything else (samples) have DVD installers so no problem there if a drive dies. One thing about huge drives... you have to back them up so if they get too big what are you going to use to back them up? I've found that 600-750 GB is about as big as I'd like to go because I have a 1 TB to back those up in case they take a dump... but you can't beat the $$ per GB on those 1 TB+ drives but there are trade offs.

[BobK]

I don't have the 2TB drive, but last year I installed a 1TB Hitachi Deskstar as a second internal drive in my G5, and it has worked fine so far. I had bought a couple of Seagate drives, and I returned one or both of them. I don't remember exactly the sequence of events: I think one of them needed the firmware update...I think I did the update, but still had problems with the drive. Or maybe it was the non-updated drive that had the problem. I just don't remember. But the experience was enough to make me want to avoid Seagate entirely.

I hope Hitachis are reliable, because I don't know where I'd turn next...Samsungs (I noticed OWC sells 'em)? I've heard enough bad news about Western Digital that I won't even consider them.

I don't know if Hitachi Desktars have any relation to IBM Deskstars (which I've seen referred to as 'Deathstars') - I hope not.

[kgdrum]

switched from Seagates(no problems just wanted bigger drives)to Hitachi's(7200 32 mb cache Enterprise class) last May(750 gig and 1 terabyte)they seem fine but are a bit noisy.

[FutureLegends]

I've only had 2 drives die on me ever. Both were in external housings. Coincidence?

[newrigel]

I've only had 2 drives die on me ever. Both were in external housings. Coincidence?

Could be because of the voltage fluctuations and that the drive gets it's power from a port...
And I'm with you here... I have only had 1 drive actually fail. I still have drives that are 8 years old that I can plug in and they work... they are western digital drives by the way.

[Frodo]

As the title says, I'm trying out a new Hitachi drive, 2TB SATA, 7200 rpm. It's a Deskstar drive, and I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the old IBM deskstars of which several failed for me and for people I knew. Hopefully the Hitachi versions are nothing like the old IBM versions.

Naturally, if anyone has negative experience with this particular drive (the 2TB HItachi Deskstar), I'd like to know what went wrong. Positive experiences, too, of course.

Shooshie

Yo, Shoosh:

Curious here in the shire....

You recently installed a fifth internal thanks to the "unpublished Mac manual". I've not known you to be a firewire sort of guy, but vaguely recall your having concerns about one of your internals within the past month or so. Am I correct?

A few months ago, I bought a Seagate 1.5TB with the intention of getting it installed in the fifth "secret" slot on my MacPro (same as yours), but I've been so snowed under with tons of other work that I've not had 60 consecutive seconds to take on the task since I bought the Seagate.

So, now you're onto Hitachi-- and I must assume that this is a *replacement* and not an *addition*.

Should I be concerned with my unopened Seagate? It's too late to return it.

[n2mpujack]

Were they time machine BU drives? TM really overworks the drives IMO, so I just CCC my drive to a 160 GB and keep it in a safe place with silica gel dessicant packs and in antistatic bags etc.. my other drives (my personal Kontakt patches) have hard copy BD backups of them... everything else (samples) have DVD installers so no problem there if a drive dies. One thing about huge drives... you have to back them up so if they get too big what are you going to use to back them up? I've found that 600-750 GB is about as big as I'd like to go because I have a 1 TB to back those up in case they take a dump... but you can't beat the $$ per GB on those 1 TB+ drives but there are trade offs.

That's the pyrrhic victory with drives nowadays. They're getting cheaper & bigger as time goes on, but the backups are scary. I guess you could back them up to another drive of the same size (or larger) and lock away that drive, but wouldn't that get a bit expensive? I do that with the drives I have now, but then again I currently don't have anything over 500 gig drives. Individual songs/projects I backup to cd/dvd/dual layer dvd. That way I can drop it into any machine that will read them and don't have to futz around hooking up external drives. Yeah, optical drives are slower but I can live with that for now.

[labman]

After being seagate uses for decade or so, we have recently been researching the Samsung SPinpont F3 series. One is up so far which is blinding fast. I noted in our research that video guys have been using these drives. So they also may be an alternative folks.

(Seagte may have their woes under control, but our rigs are 24/7, and it makes me feel 'antsy'.)