discussion 3TB Drive for Home Server

[frontier204]

Hi all,

I'm looking to replace a WD Green 1.5TB drive with a 3TB drive, for a home server. I don't care about performance because it'll be for backups only, although I do want it to be decently quiet.

Would either of these drives work, or should I look for something else?
WD Red 3TB: http://www.ncix.com/detail/western-digital-red-3tb-sata3-a0-74269-1065.htm
Seagate NAS 3TB: http://www.ncix.com/detail/seagate-st3000vn000-3tb-64mb-sata-5c-85197.htm

The old WD Green somehow vibrated my case (Antec P180) enough to be heard over a GTX 600 series blower fan... It was especially bad if I either put two WD Greens in my case, or a WD Green + a WD Black. My Seagate ST2000DM001 didn't do any of that despite being a 7200 RPM drive, which is why I'm considering the Seagate version as well as the WD Red.

Backstory - why I'm replacing the drive:

smartd[542]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], 10 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors
smartd[542]: Device: /dev/sda [SAT], 7 Offline uncorrectable sectors

I've had the drive since 2010, so I think it's time for new gear rather than trying to debug

Thanks!

 

[Shadowarez]

Wd Reds are good just make sure register em with Wd I got 2 in my old htpc I need 6TB now as there filling up fast only have 120Gb left on both 3 Tb drives. The green I had died a horrible noisy death awhile back.

 

[stlouis1]

+1 for the WD reds. I've got 12 of them in my fileserver. not sure how long they've been there, but they run 24/7 and haven't given me any hint of a problem.

 

[MARSTG]

They are both NAS drives so it really doesn't matter.

 

[Chyme]

Spend a little more and get 4TB drives. Supposedly more reliable. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/

 

[frontier204]

Ok thanks for the advice. I assume since there's no noise issues from any of you running multiple disks, either WD has fixed the issue when moving to the 1 TB platters, or the NAS drives never had the issue to begin with, which would make sense because you wouldn't want your HDDs entering into resonance. (For some reason my Seagates from the 500-750GB platter generation were always quieter than my WDs.)

@Chyme - Thanks for reminding me about that article, although now that I got to examine it further, it looks really strange.
If you look at the model numbers of the drives, they're using the desktop versions of the Seagates with the 2 year warranty, but the WDs are NAS drives with the 3 year warranty. The Hitachi is even weirder: they have desktop drives and Enterprise drives.

I know that the probability of my drive (or anything attached to the drive, or even any software writing to the drive) failing is never going to be 0, and I plan for it by having backups. For my archive stuff, my backup plan is that there's always a drive storing a backup that isn't plugged in. That way if the drives can get fried due to power surge or the computer gets h4x0r3d, I'll still have at the very least an older version of the data.
My plan is a little more iffy for the case of the whole house being destroyed and the drives lost with it, or the more advanced ransomware does seamless encryption of the drive for 2 months (long enough for me to have cycled my secondary backup), and then gets you by removing your copy of the encryption key. ...but there's only so much paranoia I can go through before officially becoming a doomsday prepper