[Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

Gen2ly · 2009-10-20 14:40:45

Well, I'm taking the deep plunge. I've been fighting with disk space on my old computer for a long time now. I don't ever do full backups because I don't have the space, always find myself changing partitions sizes... so I decided to put up and get myself another drive so to put this behind me. Currently I'm looking at these three drives:

* SAMSUNG HD502HI 500GB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5
* Seagate Barracuda LP ST3500412AS 500GB 5900 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5
* Western Digital Caviar Blue WD2500AAJS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5

The Western Digital looks best to me because I need to save just about every penny I can right now. A couple questions though:

1) I currently got a 320MB drive. I'd like to do a full backup of all partitions to the new drive. I'd probably use the command:

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip --best > /mnt/disk2/backup.gz

I am currently only using 178GB on this drive with Windows partitioned for 116GB and Linux the rest. But if I filled it up do you think I could fit it on the 250GB drive. (I know this depends alot on what type of files I have on the drive, but what can I say... I'm... cheap ).

2) Anyone have any experience with these type of manufacturers and how well they run on Linux. The Samsung drive actually has a comment from someone that used it on a Linux server (doesn't really get into reliability/performance though).

3) All these drives say SATA but a couple comments mention SATA II. Not sure that my computer has SATA II:

lspci | grep -i sata
00:0e.0 SATA controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 7100/nForce 630i SATA (rev a2)

Will there be compatibility issues?

Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-11-26 16:03:29)

jlacroix · 2009-10-20 14:47:48

While I can't assist with all of your questions, I can say that for upgrading the drive I would probably use Clonezilla Live CD and the gParted Live CD. You can clone drive to drive with Clonezilla (make sure you choose the right source and target!!!) and then after it's done you should be able to expand the partition to fit the new drive with gParted.

As for hard drive recommendations, I got a 1.5TB Seagate for $115 and I love it. Believe it or not at my store the 500GB version is the same price! Go with whatever hard drive has the longest warranty. That's ultimately the most important thing.

You should be backing up your files. Hard drives go bad all the time. Even new ones.

Last edited by jlacroix (2009-10-20 14:48:18)

rusty99 · 2009-10-20 14:56:33

Pretty sure that all 3GB/s drives are SATAII, 1.5GB/s being SATA.
Something else you may want to check is warranty life, WD switched their blue/green drives to 2yrs and the blacks to 5yrs.

I'm currently using the barracuda (~2yrs old) you have listed along with a WD Caviar Black 1TB and not had any problems.

Gen2ly · 2009-10-20 19:01:41

jlacroix wrote:

... for upgrading the drive I would probably use Clonezilla Live CD and the gParted Live CD. You can clone drive to drive with Clonezilla (make sure you choose the right source and target!!!) and then after it's done you should be able to expand the partition to fit the new drive with gParted.

eh? Oh, I was thinking of using the new drive only for backup so I don't think that will be necessary. The drive I got now has 7200 rpm and says it's SATA so the differences between my current drive and these are probably not much different.

jlacroix wrote:

... Go with whatever hard drive has the longest warranty. That's ultimately the most important thing.
You should be backing up your files. Hard drives go bad all the time. Even new ones.

rusty99 wrote:

Pretty sure that all 3GB/s drives are SATAII, 1.5GB/s being SATA.
Something else you may want to check is warranty life, WD switched their blue/green drives to 2yrs and the blacks to 5yrs.

Good point. The Samsung and Seagate both mention 3 year warranties but no mention on Western Digital. I'm guessing it's probably two year too.

Another question that's come up is am I going to need any screws, other mounting equipment... I looked at the enclosure and it looks like it will go in there fine. There are two screws at the bottom of the original HD that look like they hold it in plus an additional bracket on the enclosure. Will the HD manufacturer provide thescrews and anything else I might need like a sata-cable?

Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-10-20 19:12:59)

rwd · 2009-10-20 20:08:46

Your question is a bit vague IMO, but for backups, I recommend a differential backup tool such as rdiff-backup or rsnapshot, instead of simple clone. That is because at some point you will find out *after* making the clone that you have deleted/messed up something important, and with differentials you can go back in time.

Last edited by rwd (2009-10-20 21:41:50)

Gen2ly · 2009-10-21 00:06:55

Thanks for the tip, rwd, rsync is not such a bad idea as it will do differential backups and be quicker to restore from a backup but I'm not that far yet. I was hoping people who had experience getting hard drives and had some tips/advice on what a good brand is, and how to install it.

Stay on topic

Edit: 's/such/not such/' eeck

Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-10-21 01:06:58)

graysky · 2009-10-21 00:30:02

@gen2ly - I'm very happy w/ my Seagate 7200.12 series hdd (1 gig). Currently newegg price is $80. I know you said you wanna save every penny, but that's my suggestion.

jasonwryan · 2009-10-21 00:57:08

I have three Seagate 1TB drives - and apart from the one that was an .11 series, which had firmware issues - they are a good unit.

And the 3 year warranty meant that when the .11 did die I had a replacement in 4 days (no data loss thanks to RAID).

Gen2ly · 2009-10-21 01:17:28

graysky wrote:

@gen2ly - I'm very happy w/ my Seagate 7200.12 series hdd (1 gig). Currently newegg price is $80. I know you said you wanna save every penny, but that's my suggestion.

Yeah, I was thinking about the Seagate drive but I just recalled that I thought that Seagate was dropping Linux support. I just Googled it though. . This is a great drive and 480GB is much better. Hmmm.

Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-10-21 01:18:00)

VirtualRider · 2009-10-21 11:24:38

I own two WD Caviar Black 640s and i won't buy a disk from another manufacturer than WD for a while i guess. Seagate had problems with failures in a specific series (ES-Series?) a short while ago, so i don't trust them currently.

The WDs are working good and i don't think that you will have compatibility problems with any of the manufacturers you listed.

cerbie · 2009-10-21 13:13:37

WD warranty:
http://support.wdc.com/warranty/policy.asp
They are three-year. Some externals appear to have gone from three to two, though.

2. Some of WD's notebook drives, and their current Green desktop drives, do lots of head parking, if their power saving is not turned off (hdparm -b 255). The time-out for parking the heads is shorter than the interval that Linux flushes buffers with, and it seems neither can be set as options (making that settable in /proc or /sys would be a nice fix, since WD isn't interested). The Blue and Black desktop drives don't seem to be affected, nor any other common desktop drives.
3. http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce_600i_features.html
The 630i looks to have hot-plug, TCQ, NCQ, and 3Gb/s (along with fakeRAID and what I'm guessing is a SMART monitor for Windows...but that's for Windows). You're good.

I personally don't have anything bad to say about any manufacturers except Toshiba. That said, if something does go wrong in warranty, WD's cross-shipping is a god-send (typically 2-4 days, with a hold on your credit/debit card acct until they get the drive). Seagate's RMA isn't bad, either. Samsung makes you hunt for it, and it's slow, in comparison.

Another question that's come up is am I going to need any screws, other mounting equipment... I looked at the enclosure and it looks like it will go in there fine. There are two screws at the bottom of the original HD that look like they hold it in plus an additional bracket on the enclosure. Will the HD manufacturer provide thescrews and anything else I might need like a sata-cable?

No. On an OEM drive, you're lucky to get a jumper. If you don't have cables, but need some, check out Monoprice. Their prices, even with shipping, are often less than adding them to a Newegg order, and always cheaper than brick and mortar. Generally, an external enclosure will come with sufficient mounting hardware and cables.

Last edited by cerbie (2009-10-21 22:55:39)

Gen2ly · 2009-10-21 18:01:34

Good details, cerbie. I've narrowed my decision down to either the Seagate or Samsung just because of the disk space. 250GB more storage space in the future will probably be something I very much like in the near future. @graysky, I thought about getting the 7200rpm version of the Seagate version but since I'll just be using it for data storage I don't mind using the 5400rpm version. I was leaning toward the Samsung because I was reading that it had parts to be able to attach to the enclosure but I'm glad you told me about the warranty cerbie that is something I hadn't heard about before. Oh and thanks for the specs on the 630i, I looked up my drive too and it's a 7200rpm SATA II so that means that the drive I'm going to buy will definitely be used for just data storage.

banshee28 · 2009-10-22 01:24:54

Without a doubt I would get the Seagate! The new 7200.12 or if you want the lower power 5900 rpms those are great to. For me I will get the 5900 rpm 1TB as my data drive on my new build, for under $80.

Gen2ly · 2009-10-22 18:48:22

Thanks for the advice guys. I actually went up going with the SAMSUNG HD502HI 500GB 5400 RPM (banshee, I actually got you comment just after I bought it:) ), because of all the reviews for it (76 - most of them five star). The seagate only had three reviews so I thought I'd be better off with the samsung - hopefully the warranty thing won't come and bit me in the butt. A number of reviews were from Linux users, it comes with the mounting screws which I didn't want to worry/pay for, supposedly is high density and can compare with some 7200rpm's (we'll see - not that important anyhow since it's a backup drive). I'll do some speed test's when I get it and tell what I think of it.

Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-10-22 18:50:30)

Gen2ly · 2009-11-05 03:19:57

Ok, I've had the drive now for a week, and it's a total... fail. Actually, I'm not too disappointed, better to do it now i'm thinking while the newegg warranty is still active. I tried a good number of things to get this drive to work but no luck. After quite a while tinkering with the Samsung drive it looks like there is an irq conflict between it and my video card. Partitioning with fdisk, cloning with clonezilla, installing windows will all cause the system to freeze (fan revs up, screen goes black, no responsiveness from anything). When the BIOS began getting artifacts and crashing, it wasn't too hard to diagnose. I took out the video card (used the on-board one) and had no problems. So this drive is going back to the manufacturer and I'm going to have to try another. I did get a speed test in though:

Computer pre-built drive - Western Digital Caviar Blue WD3200AAJS SATA II (3.0Gb/s) 320GB, 7200 RPM:

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   1576 MB in  2.00 seconds = 787.65 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  340 MB in  3.00 seconds = 113.28 MB/sec

And the SAMSUNG HD502HI SATA II (3.0Gb/s) 500GB 5400 RPM SATA

hdparm -tT /dev/sda

/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   1650 MB in  2.00 seconds = 824.63 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  342 MB in  3.01 seconds = 113.47 MB/sec

Some of the reviews talked about a single platter or something like that in that this disc would behave like alot of 7200 rpm drives but... wow! From what I've just been reading a lower rpm can actually a good thing too because it usually means a longer life span for the drive. A little disappointed I can't keep it. hmmm. Look like that Seagate drive was destined after all.

Gen2ly · 2009-11-26 16:02:00

I ended up going with the Western Digital Caviar Blue WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache for compatibility reasons. About the same drive I had before but with the 16MB cache (instead of the 8
on my WDC WD3200AAJS-22B4A0). It's running good but am disappointed about the performance:

Timing cached reads:   1688 MB in  2.00 seconds = 844.21 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads:  320 MB in  3.01 seconds = 106.35 MB/sec

When I cloned my hard drive it did at about 950MB/min instead of the 1100 or so I was seeing with the Samsung. Dam the Samsung was nice. It's just a backup drive so, meh.

Last edited by Gen2ly (2009-11-26 16:02:34)

.:B:. · 2009-11-26 16:11:24

rusty99 wrote:

Pretty sure that all 3GB/s drives are SATAII, 1.5GB/s being SATA.
Something else you may want to check is warranty life, WD switched their blue/green drives to 2yrs and the blacks to 5yrs.
I'm currently using the barracuda (~2yrs old) you have listed along with a WD Caviar Black 1TB and not had any problems.

There is no such thing as S-ATA I/II, it's just marketing. It's still S-ATA, but second generation (yet there isn't any I, II or III):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA … eration.29

@ Gen2ly: like someone mentioned above some WD Green editions do a lot of head parking, and that has caused some problems with Linux (there is a topic about that on this forum). I have three WD GP2 1 TB drives, but I am skipping WD next time. Some guy at WD support purportedly said they 'did not support Linux, only Mac OS X and Windows' for their hardware.

Edit: looks I'm to late with my anti-WD vendetta .

Arch Linux

#1 2009-10-20 14:40:45

[Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#2 2009-10-20 14:47:48

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#3 2009-10-20 14:56:33

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#4 2009-10-20 19:01:41

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#5 2009-10-20 20:08:46

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#6 2009-10-21 00:06:55

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#7 2009-10-21 00:30:02

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#8 2009-10-21 00:57:08

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#9 2009-10-21 01:17:28

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#10 2009-10-21 11:24:38

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#11 2009-10-21 13:13:37

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#12 2009-10-21 18:01:34

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#13 2009-10-22 01:24:54

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#14 2009-10-22 18:48:22

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#15 2009-11-05 03:19:57

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#16 2009-11-26 16:02:00

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

#17 2009-11-26 16:11:24

Re: [Solved] Buying a new hard drive: couple questions/suggestions?

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