New PC build

clam1952 said:

Ever get caught out by that bad batch of Fujitsu 20 GB drives with the faulty controllers...........?

I always google everything I buy to see if there are any major problems, much safer.

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That's a great idea and will do this in the future myself. I too used to go with what was working great and had a great reputation. However, since the cheapening of manufacturing quality as the drive makers drive the bottom line lower and lower with competition, we see more and more quality issues as a result. With this problem, checking the current stats is the way to go for new parts.

nicky9499 said:

Off topic but interesting discussion anyway; I did data recovery for about 2 years and most customers leave unrecoverable dead drives with me. I have a stack of them in storage and probably 80% of them are Seagates. Worst batch Seagate ever put out would be the 7200.11.

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I had the same issue in my office and for myself. All of my old 7200.11s have been replaced now, however, with newer Seagates at the time under warranty, which will get replaced very soon when my budget allows. I've been burned by data loss before and it's awful heart sickening to hear nothing but clicking on a hard drive that worked previously. It's a good thing I had done a full backup the day before because that saved me. I learned the hard way in the past.

John

nicky wrote
stay away from Seagate like the plague.

I have to agree with Nicky , seagates are trouble.
i have also found the buffalo external usb 3 drives to be excellent . for SSD's the Samsung 850 evo is a great drive and is only marginally slower than the pro version, but considerably cheaper.
i've generally done well with western digitals , although one or two externals have given up the ghost in the past decade .

Just had a WD Blue series 1TB die on me after only 3 months, the green and black series all fine just hearing some problems with short life blue series

KTOutlaw said:

Just had a WD Blue series 1TB die on me after only 3 months, the green and black series all fine just hearing some problems with short life blue series

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Not good. What is the blue series, I've only used their black drives.

John

JCitron said:

Not good. What is the blue series, I've only used their black drives.

John

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Basically a toned down Black. Shorter warranty, lower available capacities, lower performance, all for a lower cost.

And the lower price really is not worth the lower quality. Spend the few extra for the Black series

LNERlover5 said:

Basically a toned down Black. Shorter warranty, lower available capacities, lower performance, all for a lower cost.

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You can get the higher capacities as well though, blues usually only have a 16mb cache and a two year warranty, blacks have a 64mb cache and 5 year warranty, greens 64mb cache and 2 year warranty and slower spindle speed.
Blues and greens are similar prices in the UK and cheaper than blacks although if you shop around there is not a lot in it.
I get higher transfer rates on a WD 1TB Green than a WD 500GB Blue, I have two and both are slower, all SATA 3 drives and in reality it's not enough difference to worry about.
Blacks are obviously the best bet just shop around.

clam1952 said:

You can get the higher capacities as well though, blues usually only have a 16mb cache and a two year warranty, blacks have a 64mb cache and 5 year warranty, greens 64mb cache and 2 year warranty and slower spindle speed.
Blues and greens are similar prices in the UK and cheaper than blacks although if you shop around there is not a lot in it.
I get higher transfer rates on a WD 1TB Green than a WD 500GB Blue, I have two and both are slower, all SATA 3 drives and in reality it's not enough difference to worry about.
Blacks are obviously the best bet just shop around.

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On Western Digitals spec sheets, blues are only available in up to 1Tb capacities with varying cache totals, while blacks are available in up to 4Tb capacities, all with 64Mb of cache.

If capacity and speed are a concern then blacks are the best bet. If speed is not a factor then greens in up to 6Tb capacities should be considered. Alternatives include red and purple class drives, however they're intended for different uses altogether.

LNERlover5 said:

On Western Digitals spec sheets, blues are only available in up to 1Tb capacities with varying cache totals, while blacks are available in up to 4Tb capacities, all with 64Mb of cache.

If capacity and speed are a concern then blacks are the best bet. If speed is not a factor then greens in up to 6Tb capacities should be considered. Alternatives include red and purple class drives, however they're intended for different uses altogether.

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I stand corrected. However adverts with labels like this on Amazon are not helping

Western Digital WD20EARS - WD 2TB 5400RPM 64MB CAVIAR BLUE

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Yes it's actually a Green Drive.

Can I just point out that Purple drives are specifically designed for surveillance systems with constant sequential write workloads, not regular consumer workloads like random read/write. For the best long term reliability just grab AV-GP or Reds, whichever you can lay your hands on.

Back to those 970s in SLI. Does any application automatically use SLI when it is available or does it need some setup, otherwise only a single card is used?