Need storage HDD quickly! HGST, 5K1500, users advice!

Hello guys. Currently i own an ASUS G73jh. I have years experience with different hard disks and i'm basically looking to replacing my ty Samsung HN-M101MBB which is about to completely fail. This has been the worse drive so far; after long troubleshooting i know it's a hardware fail with the drive. What basically happens is that accumulation of bad sectors has increased to much more than the spare sectors (i believe since current pending sector count is the only visible issue through SMART), so when the drive tries to read or write from specific sectors it will basically lock up the whole system requiring a full shut down. And for the last week this problem started getting a lot more common. Also the device stops communicating with the host controller and as a result no data can be collected from the drive at the time of the lock-up (also hdd light stays on..forever). Funnily i wanted a WD drive but it was when the factory flooded and it was out of stock).

I'm running a sandisk extreme II 480gb as a primary and this is the only brand i never had a product fail on me (sd cards, flash drives).
The stock seagate 500gb disks that came with my G73jh started developing problems over with time (current pending sector count, uncorrectable sector count) and one of them (the one with the most hours) has completely failed (and actually i had another failure prior to the complete failure where the mbr was completely wiped out while the system was running and i lost all my data - one of the worse moments of my life) - at 1.3 years working)
Other experiences:
-On my old pentium 3 computer, stock seagate 3.5" 10gb drive; unexpected head failure - samsung 320gb 3.5"; started showing problems, then completely failed (my best friend bought this drive also and it failed too)- WD 500gb 3.5"; still working after many years (although not much usage, but completely filled)
-External 3.5" 3tb drives through sata to my laptop for music production - WD green failed spectacularly with a loud boom and burnt electronics smell in ~5days - replaced by amazon with a Seagate one, still running with no SMART errors
-Stock PS3 60gb seagate drive; still works haven't checked SMART, replaced with a samsung 640gb still works but i barely use it; haven't checked SMART

And in addition anyone i know with a Samsung product of any type has experienced partial or full failure (examples: my family's CRT tv had the sound system fail after a couple of weeks, years later they bought a Samsung smart lcd tv..had the mobo replaced..all friends with galaxy phones failed..chargers failed too, + more). Thus i don't want to touch a Samsung product ever again. Even when i components with flash chips i always look that they are hynix, elpida or any other good brand - and certainly not Kingston - MMC card failure).

Either way let's get to the point. It's been over 2 years i bought the 1tb drive. I only need it for storage so speed is not so important. I have my trusty sandisk with 5 years warranty for that. I was expecting technology to advance more but everyone is working on SSDs. So here's what i'm between:
- HGST 5K1500: difficult to source now, it's not even on HGST website..every major retailer is out of stock. I found a guy in japan/ebay that has 2 in stock with proper price. However it seems manufacturing quality is not so good from customer reviews as it is a hit or miss if you will get a good drive..maybe that's why HGST is not stocking them anymore? are they discontinued? Also i can't find the EA model anywhere. It is supposed to have better reliability and yes i mostly run my system 24/7.
- Samsung spinpoint 2TB: More storage is tempting, but should i make the same mistake again??!? They are stating Load/unload cycles of over 600,000..they are joking right?
- HGST 5K1000/7K1000: In stock, don't know if the reliability matches their enterprise drives. Not even a MTFB value..Load/unload cycles is the same as most manufacturers: 600,000.
- WD 1tb RED: 3 years warranty, and a really solid drive for my case; but will it be more reliable than HSGT??
- WD 1tb+120gb ssd black2: Not suitable for my case since it's not a primary drive, a bit expensive but you get speed, 1.2tb with some hassle, and 5 years warranty
- Seagate SSHD 1tb or any other hybrid drive for that matter: i guess reliability will be like my seagate 500gb drives so no go?

Sorry for the lot's of mistakes, it's 6am and i need to catch my sleep. I'll need to order one by tomorrow since i don't guess this samsung drive will hold out any longer..Thanks in advance for the responses!

 

TnF, get Hitachi 5K 1TB-1.5TB or 2TB Seagate-Samsung M9T. Stay away from WD and <1TB drives.

 

Thanks for the advice. Do you have any personal experience with these 2 drives?

 

TnF, I have no personal experience with recent Hitachi drives, but many people here do and it's all positive. I have positive personal experience with all recent Seagate hybrid & Seagate-Samsung traditional drives, at the moment I'm using 2x 2TB M9T for storage (and 1TB M8 for OS as a temporary solution before I install SSD).

 

I would suggest the Hitachi 7K 1000 drive.. Its a 7200rpm drive and I have it and it's been great ... I personally wouldn't get a M9T because Samsung stuck is always like Samdung for me... They all break..

 

Thanks but i can bring myself to make the same mistake and buy a samsung product again. It might be a great drive but i'm really not willing to be their test bed again. They seem to implemented new technologies though.

Yeah 7200rpm is good, but since it's not a primary drive i prefer to go with more storage space instead. Any reason why hitachi doesn't show their 5k1500 drive on their website though?

 

TnF, there is absolutely no point in buying Samsung if Hitachi's capacity satisfies you. 5K1500 datasheet on HGST website. 1.5x more storage (vs 7K1000) is much better investment than very arguable performance gain from 7200rpm.

 

I am aware of the datasheet. I guess the 5k1500 is the only way to go. Just by comparing warranties 2 year is the standard for all ty drives, while premium products have 5 years (like sandisk, wd black) and 3 years is for reliable standard solutions (wd red, hitachi). Even 1 year more should be an increase in reliability more than 40% since the exponential increase of failure rate vs working hours of a drive. Also by comparing shock and noise data it is obvious that the samsung spinpoint m9t is more sensitive even than the spinpoint m8 which failed me and won't even come close to the data for wd red/hitachi. I believe this is due to the decrease of the track spacing since the m9t overlaps tracks to achieve higher density. In addition lower manufacturing tolerances should increase mechanical noise which is obvious again in samsung products compared to hitachi. Heat output is not significant to comparison as most heat output is due to reading/writing to the platers rather than mechanical friction or lower tolerances. Also the nearly identical WD red 2.5" and hitachi data makes perfect sense since wd developed the 2.5" red after buying hitachi (now HGST). I'm actually a mechanical engineer, so while i don't have specific inside knowledge with hard disk technologies, product reliability is something i know to identify. I'm off to buy the 5K1500 and see how it goes Thanks for the replies. If someone has negative experience with HGST drives let me know.

 

TnF, I don't care how much warranty a manufacturer offers on a storage medium. The warranty is not a measure of the quality of the drive in my experience. Not to mention that I have never taken advantage of a warranty on a drive after putting my or my client's data on one.

Agree that the Hitachi options are the best for HDD's even today - but choosing a 5400 RPM model (even for storage) is not gaining anything (re: battery life, reliability or even noise-wise) but the drop in performance vs. a 7200RPM HDD (again; even for simple storage) is huge (30% to 60% in my experience vs. 5400RPM models).

I would choose a 1TB, 7200RPM Hitachi model over a higher density but vastly slower option any day (slower not only because of the decrease in spindle speed; but also because of the higher error correction and head alignment accuracy needed for the denser platters (which slows down the drive even more).

Of course, my goal is to have the best balance of reliability, performance and capacity (in that order). If I need more capacity; external HDD's are cheaply available (I buy them two or more at a time... a single external (with a single copy of any of my data) is not something I have too much faith in...).

 

TnF, HDD warranty... only affects HDD price, and that's it. If drive fails within warranty period, they replace it, but that has no connection with retrieving lost data or compensating for its loss.

You'd better read what end-users write about their experience rather than compare close numbers in datasheets and make dramatic assumptions. E.g. you don't read about M9T's failing every day - but OK, it's a rare product. But on every hardware forum I visit, including this, people do complain about WD drives, their poor performance because its heads are parking very often etc, and particularly WD Green drives failing really fast and often... HDDs are cheap, data stored on them is usually much more expensive - unless you fill them up with torrent-downloaded p0rn - but even in that loosy scenario it may indeed be a terrible loss. =)

 

Warranty plays a major role in a product prone to failure. Unless they want their business to go busted. And yes a 7200rpm drive is generally better but the error correction factor is the same as both 7K1000 and 5K1500 use the 500gb platers. The difference is that the latter uses 3 platers instead. Also a 7200rpm theoretically should have a high probability of failure with everything else equal. Either way performance of the 5K1500 is pretty good for a 5K drive: HGST Travelstar 5K1500 1.5TB SATA III HDD Review

Plus storage and reliability was a much more important factor than anything else here. If any of the >1tb weren't worth it, i would go with the 7K1000 or wd red or black2 (if i wasn't concerned about the price). I was between samsung 2tb and hgst 1.5tb. I chose not to risk with samsung products again (even though it was cheaper) and went with the 5k1500. It is literally out of stock everywhere! I had to order from Japan and paid for EMS. Let's see how it goes.

 

Yeah, as already mentioned in the post above yours, warranty is included in the price. It doesn't mean or indicate anything about how reliable a product actually is in real world use.

The bottom line has already been accounted for by the manufacturer - the '1', '3', '5' or even '10' years they can put on the marketing materials are just for bragging rights and for people that think they know a warranty is worth it (it usually never is) for a specific component.

You obviously value a 'one shot' few gigs more, more than I value a > 25% greater performance jump each time I use the drive for the life of the system. Cool.

But when the additional capacity is used up, not only does the performance plummet further - the additional cost/headache of an external drive looms its head once more (and more quickly than most would admit to).

 

I owned 4x Samsung M9T and 2x Hitachi 5k1500, and all been perfect, if i were buying another, i would probably go with the samsung out of having higher capacity, but both are really good, its more a matter of preference.

 

I've been using my 5K1500 since March this year; it's been flawless. I use it as a secondary storage drive in my notebook's optical drive bay caddy.

 

Is the optical bay SATA2 or SATA3?

 

I don't know. Do you know of a software tool I can use to check?

 

HWinfo. www.Hwinfo.com Use the portable version though.

Use the side panel under drives. It will show you the rated bus interface of the drive as well as the actual bus interface it's attached to.

For instance, on one of my notebooks that has a SATA optical bay caddy, I have a SATA3 drive that's capped at SATA 1 given the chipset and optical bay's interface. Whereas the main SSD is SATA 3 but capped at SATA 2 given the Montevina's chipset limitations.

 

Thanks. I ran the software and it says for the Hitachi drive, 'Serial ATA 6Gb/s @ 3Gb/s'. My internal SSD also reports it's running at 3Gb/s.

 

Ouch. The HDD is okay to run at SATA2 speeds, but the SSD is limited too? It must be SATA2 native?

 

I believe charles is running a first gen i7 notebook if you see his sig so it will be limited to Sata 2 speeds...^^^

 

Correct. It mostly depends on your chipset. I also use a drive caddy and it limited to SATA 2 as all my drives.

 

:cry:

TnF is right. I did some research and found that SATA 6 Gb/s wasn't supported until the 2nd-gen "Sandy Bridge" platform. The CPU in my notebook is a first-gen Intel Core i5 which is unfortunately something less than a speed demon.

@tiller - the SSD I have is 3 Gb/s anyway: ARK | Intel® SSD 320 Series (120GB, 2.5in SATA 3Gb/s, 25nm, MLC)

@OP - I see what you mean about the lack of availability for the 5K1500; I've been unsuccessful locating a new one for sale. Makes me kind of nervous ...

 

Charles, imagine that i'm running 1st gen chipset and cpu! Even the 940XM i run overclocked is no par for latest gen cpu's..As for the sata interface, sata 2 to sata 3 is not much of a user experience difference. Usually you only see the sata 2 interface saturating when handling small amount on data on the flash buffer/cache part of the ssd. Unless you transfer big files every single day, or have RAID it is not a serious problem. Like i said the sandisk extreme II i'm using even on SATA 2 is so much faster than anything else..and more importantly consistent which affects more the user experience (unlike the EVO which is only good for benchmarks)..The extreme pro is even better..but really even like the worse ssd you can buy will improve your performance so much that you see how slow is your CPU (720QM at first, and even now with the 940XM overclocked it's not fast enough for me).

As for the 5K1500...i bought mine from here (Japan): HGST Travelstar 2.5" 1.5TB HTS541515A9E630 SATA III Hard Drive 9.5mm 6.0Gb/s 32M 9785415159635 | eBay for 178usd (18usd of which is EMS shipping because i want to get it fast). He/She had 2 available, and i bought one which has already been sent, but now the 2nd one is not available as the seller closed the listing (probably sold it off ebay). So you can only get used ones of ebay, or new from a guy in ebay that sells them really overpriced. However stocks are coming since a seller in Germany said he would have in about a weeks time.

 

The 5K1500 still appears to be available here in China. It is less than 100 USD shipped.

 

I paid $117 including shipping for mine from Amazon back in early March 2014.

If anyone finds info about why this drive is scarce, we'd be appreciative if you posted here.

 

It is no longer listed on HGST's website, so they probably stopped making it. No idea why. I doubt there is anything inherently wrong with the drive, because they still have the Z5K1000 on their website, which is presumably just a 2-platter 7mm tall version of the 5K1500.