That was Windows 7 running on an SSD, so the Windows installer deliberately aligned it on a 4K boundary. According to msinfo32 -- which does exist in Windows 7 -- on my desktop PC with normal disks, it's done the same thing: the first partition starts at 1MB.

If I'm not mistaken, this is the way Windows 7 aligns partitions with every disk, not only SSD's. So that's normal behaviour.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that 2.5" laptop drives are more reliable overall than 3.5" desktop drives.

Is this the case in peoples experience here?

I'm sure that's true if the drives moves a lot. Otherwise, no.

Yeah, I've had laptop and desktop drives fail pretty equally. The difference between the two is that laptop drives will tend to tolerate mobile environments (G, thermal) a little better. That doesn't make them less susceptible to other kinds of failures.

Continuing to eat my own medicine here.. today I picked up another WD Green drive -- the 2TB/64MB model.

This replaces the 1.5TB drive currently in the MythTV box. The 1.5TB then becomes the backup disk for that same box, freeing up the 1TB Black drive formerly used for backup.

And the 1TB Black is now the WinXP-Pro drive for our sole Windows box.

Did I mention that I _like_ the current Black and Green models from WD ?
Apart from having to run WDIDLE3.EXE from a diskette once per drive, that is.

Knock on wood, so far I have had good luck with the 2TB WD EARS (green) drive in my Windows 7 system (primary recording drive) and a pair of Seagate 2TB drives in my ReadyNAS. The WD is running with an idle timer of 2:30 and with the factory jumper set to compatibility mode.

Uhhh... yeah. What he said, except I'm running Vista and not Win-7. WDidle3 timer is set to 30 seconds, but I could have left it at default, since the only time those drives are accessed is to read or write 10 GB or larger chunks of data.

tanstaafl.

So, if you were looking for reliable 2TB HDD (to be used in RAID 1 for a home server, and possibly stay up and running for years until they become too small), what would you guys recommend? Most likely recommendations on this thread are perfectly good when looking for reliability, but I've been looking in particular to these ones:

Western Digital Caviar RE4 2TB 64MB SATA-II
Western Digital Caviar RE4-GP 2TB 64MB SATA-II
Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB 64MB SATA

I'll be happy with performances, but that would have no priority over reliability and long MTBF. I am looking for the differences in tech spec, but maybe somebody here already knows? I ranked them by decreasing price on my usual shop.

For years I've purchased IBM/Hitachi HDD, but can't easily find any. Also, I recently had really bad experiences with Seagate, and I'd rather stay away from those in this particular instance. So, it really seems to me that WD is the only alternative left.

I would get exactly the same drive I just bought: WD20EARS
That's the non-RAID, regular edition.
Especially if reliability is the concern.

The whole idea of the RAID edition drives, is to sacrifice error-recovery (aka. "reliability") for guaranteed response time in error situations.

Fast error response times are important for high-throughput transaction rates (eg. credit card processing), but 100% irrelevant and harmful for a home server.

And in non-error situations, the regular unit is one fast drive by any relevant measures.

I want the drive to try harder to read partially corrupted data. Don't you?

Cheers

So for me, the choice would be between the Black (7200rpm) and the Green (5400rpm) models. Since the Green runs cooler, it'll probably outlast a Black in the same situation, so I'd choose the Green one.

Sure, the Black is (slightly) faster. It seeks faster, which is great for a busy server. But in a home server situation, the difference will be negligible. And the cooler, lower power consumption of the Green wins.

That's my view, anyway.

Ok, I must be going crazy. I was positive I read the whole thread and instead I probably skipped the entire first page, which on the other hand I did know was there! It really must be work, which keeps interfering with my hobbies and prevents me from properly concentrate on what's important. So sorry for asking useless questons.

Mark, it makes perfect sense for me as well. Actually, very useful information. I did assume the RE versione had better - in whatever way - materials and were designed to better cope with an always-on environmente.

So, given all the info I got from this thread, I guess I'll go with WD20EARS as well, which can be found for € 100 here (usual 1:1 €/$ conversion, which is killer for us in EU most times).

So, would completely disabling the head park timeout be advisable to extend drive life, for example, or for whatever other reason? Again, these disks will be used in a home server, and kept on at all times possibly for years, so obviously I am not at all interested in having the disks enter power saving mode at all.

For the vendor-proprietary "WD IDLE3 timeout", I would do as I have done here, and set it to perhaps 30 seconds. That way, during long idle periods, the drive will save power/heat, and not be unloading the heads too often during busy periods. The default of 8 seconds is just insanity, though.

The wdidle3.exe (1.05) utility works well for that.

There's another utility out there to convert a "regular" drive into a "Raid Edition", and vice-versa. Dunno if it still works on the latest firmwares, though.

Cheers

Dragging this thread slightly askew: I need an external HD enclosure that can do Firewire 800, and will thus play nicely with my various Mac gear. Any preferences?

Hi,

Another supporter of the 2TB WD Green Drives purchased from a local retailer - BestBuy, (to avoid a DOA due to poor shipping/packing advice I heard here). Got 'em for $139.95 each - they matched their website price.

I have them in my Windows 7 Ultimate system i7 Simulation System. Easy to Install, they're working fine.

Ross

Mark,

I've bought the WD Green 2TB drive, and, while I'm relatively happy with it, there's one thing that bugs me:

When I want to open up some maps in Windows 7, especially maps with large volumes of files and sub maps in them, the drive takes a few seconds to show me what's in the map. Up to five seconds, maybe even more. This is annoying, especially when the rest of my system is blazingly fast with my Intel SSD as a boot drive. This never happened to me with my Samsung F1 7200 RPM drive, which held the exact same data (using Windows XP back then)
Is this because of the 'slower' 5400 rpm green drive (is this a setting? - I've already disabled all the harddisk power saving settings in Windows). Would a WD black drive fix this issue? Or could this be Windows related? (does this happen in Linux too?)

All of my mechanical drives here seem sluggish, now that our primary systems all boot/run from SSDs.

Even the 1TB Black, and the 750GB Hitachi. SSDs really raise expectations.

Cheers

But I never had this problem with my Samsung F1 series. The data from the F1 drive was copied to the WD green, so it's identical. (granted, I used XP then)

I've noticed on Win7 it looks like it is scanning the whole folder many times when you enter a folder or if you're trying to copy something. You'll see this by the progress bar in the address field.

Stig

Anybody I know who runs either Vista or Win7, has a continuously active hard drive. No clue what the heck it's doing all of the time, but.. what a way to live.

Cheers

Strange. I've just sat and watched the hard drive light on my Win7 machine for 60 seconds. In that time it flicked on a couple of times briefly.

I've got 120 processes running, including Skype and several other background services. I'm running two email clients, three browsers, a couple of instances of Visual Studio, iTunes (spit). There is even a copy of WinXP chugging away in the background somewhere in VMWare !

My Vista box is a little more chatty, but then it is running my webserver, hosting torrents, hosting a couple of Ubuntu installs under VMWare and running my Squeezebox servers.

I'm not denying that Windows doesn't hit the disk more often, it comes out of the box with a load of background services that most people don't need most of the time. But none of the Windows machines I run have even close to continuously active drives.

I suspect that you typically come in contact with Windows machines that are shall we say, in need of attention

And again, I'm not claiming that Windows isn't more skilled at getting into that state than Linux, because it is (with a little help from the user).

What Andy said. The W7 machine I'm in front of right now has a mostly idle hard disk.

If your Win7/WinVista box has an idle disk, it just means that your search indexer is taking a breather. :-)

This is exactly what I'm experiencing. Ok, so it isn't the fault of the harddrive then, but a Windows problem.
I should have known...

You may either let it finish the indexing, or just disable it. We've lived without it for years and I did not even need it at all, personally.
Once first indexing was done, I forget search even exists until I have to use it. Rarely.

I don't see this problem with multiple 2TB drives in my Simulation system.

Ross

Western Digital today released their 3TB and 2.5TB Green models, $240 and $190 respectively. It's about time - hopefully we'll see other manufacturers follow suit "real soon now."

Seagate has had their 3TB out (in some markets) for several weeks now.
NOT recommended (seagate).

I believe Seagate is currently only shipping its drive in an external enclosure for USB use. WD was doing the same thing until today.

Holy hefty price premium Batman! $240 is a lot of money for one third more capacity. Most 2TB drives for consumers can now be found well below $100! The prices will lower here as well, no doubt, but why start this high?