Hitachi 2TB Harddrive Owner's Thread

Yes, it depends on the cost delta; right now its only around 10-20$ so you have to buy around 8-16 drives to obtain an additional "self RMA" drive at no cost. But if you're willing to go warranty-less, it's certainly an option if there's a good sale going on.
 
alamone said:
Yes, it depends on the cost delta; right now its only around 10-20$ so you have to buy around 8-16 drives to obtain an additional "self RMA" drive at no cost. But if you're willing to go warranty-less, it's certainly an option if there's a good sale going on.
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If you want the spreadsheet let me know, but I did the cost break down of a $160 3TB external no warranty and a $200 3TB w/ 3 year warranty when filling a 24 bay 4U case. (see warranty versus no warranty)

Turns out if you get halfway reliable drives (<5% AFR) that $40 initial purchase differential makes it way cheaper to purchase external drives now. Also, remember that drives you purchase in years 2 and 3 under the self-RMA option are going to cost a lot less than $160.
 
Anyone used the 5K3000 drives yet?

Looking at adding to a Linux box - LSI controller - software raid 6.
 
I've ordered a bunch of 5K3000's, I don't expect any problems and many other forums report positively about them. Hard to go wrong with a drive that spins slower, runs cooler, has less platters and performs higher than its 7K2000 predecessor at least in sequential data storage usage. For data archiving (write once, read infrequently) I think the 5K3000 is absolutely the sweet spot right now from a cost perspective, especially at the $80 and below mark.
 
Yea i bought 5 of them from Newegg yesterday. Should be here tomorrow.
 
Hmm does that $20 coupon stack for 5 drives (so each is 80 a piece)? I suppose I could mix and match 'em in with my ST32000542ASs (I need 6 more for another vdev). These are 4K, yeah?
 
Last day for the $20 coupon (up to 5). Today they also added a $10MIR for the first drive.
 
One thing somewhat interesting about the 5K3000 from benchmarks posted, is it seems to have a 19ms response rate in HDTune Pro 4.6 and others, but a 16ms response rate in the old HDTune 2.55. Maybe it has something to do with CoolSpin changing the rpm dynamically.

Another thing I noticed is it appears that Hitachi may have gone with 4 platter drives for their 2TB 7K3000 Ultrastar (360Gb/in^2), considering it has a reduced platter density from the 2TB 7K3000 Deskstar (411Gb/in^2).
 
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Interesting to see how these new drives behave in hardware RAID (only time will tell). Hopefully Hitachi is not following WD marketing guys :eek:.
 
5K3000 2TB NewEgg Shell Shocker today for $60 after $10 rebate. :eek:

Odditory, to confirm, as far as you know, these are ok to mix/match with the previous version Hitachi 2TB in the same RAID array? If so, I'm going to be stocking up today. ;)
 
Of course the week after i order 5 @$80 they go to $60. FML
 
Ok, so to answer my own question to odditory with a post from him on STH Forums:

odditory said:
Like Patrick said, not best practice generally speaking, but if there's any exception to that rule it would probably be with the Hitachi's, especially considering the 5K3000's push even higher sequential I/O than the 7K2000's, whereas historically speaking 5400RPM drives haven't performed up to the level of their 7200RPM counterparts.

I figured this was going to be a fairly common question, and one we'll continue to hear about, with all the people that bought into the 7K2000's and now want to expand but are finding the 7K2000's hard to get for a good price. I'm going to mix my 8 x 5K3000's into one of my backup arrays and see if it doesn't break anything.

It would be a good idea to get Hitachi 7K2000's firmware updated to latest 3MA, I'll be posting a dedicated thread on that this week.
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For $60 / drive, I think it's worth taking a chance and doing some testing and I look forward to hearing what odditory's testing results in as well. Worst case, I might just start a new RAID vs mixing with my primary. $60 is an amazing deal on these, and the rebate even allows you to submit 2 per household.
 
ordered 4 5K3000's yesterday too from the egg...all i can afford at the moment..lol...hope it all goes well...first set of hitachi drives for me
 
I just bought 4 yesterday...ugh!....will be applying the rebates to these...i guess 1 more won't hurt at that price! :D
 
Bought another 5k3000 2TB today... $70- $10 rebate on Shell Shocker was good enough for me!

Drives thus far seem to be holding up well.
 
They are sold out now.

You American's get so cheap drives!

I bet they will be $100-$120 when they drop down here in Australia.
 
d00dz said:
They are sold out now.

You American's get so cheap drives!

I bet they will be $100-$120 when they drop down here in Australia.
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Don't they have loss leaders in Australia? I doubt newegg was making a profit on those drives at that price, but they figured getting people to come to their site, and maybe buy other stuff, was worth it.
 
john4200 said:
Don't they have loss leaders in Australia? I doubt newegg was making a profit on those drives at that price, but they figured getting people to come to their site, and maybe buy other stuff, was worth it.
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Not for hard drives. Usually they are cheap crap laptops, and only done with large computer shops (which over inflat their prices anyways) similar to bestbuy.

When I was in USA everything was so much cheaper than in Australia.
 
In the midst of replacing 4 1TB WD Caviar Black drives in my Thecus N4100Pro NAS with 4 2TB Hitachi 7K3000. One is done and seems to be working just fine. Another is in the midst of rebuilding now. I'm really glad they work in RAID arrays without any mods.
 
Not 2TB, but still a very interesting find as the same thing probably is on the 2TBs...
According to our methodology, we measure the power consumption 10 minutes after we stop all disk requests. But when we left our HDDs on the testbed for a longer time, we saw very interesting numbers:

Yes, every HDD is consuming from the 5V line only, and a very modest amount of power at that. What does it mean? It means that they have parked their heads and turned off the spindles. They have switched into a deep sleep mode. The numbers you can see in the diagram are the power consumption of the electronics waiting for a command to wake up. Each of the three HDDs falls asleep after 20 minutes of being idle.
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http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/3tb-hdd_10.html
 
What does S.M.A.R.T. say? Nothing?
Run it through the Hitachi DFT extended media scan. If it detects bad sectors it can repair them if it's just corrupted ECC data.
(This takes a long time, since DFT scans all sectors of the drive twice. Once to detect bad sectors and a second time to repair them.)

If your within 30 days, it's up to you if you want to return to Newegg or not.
 
Hitachi DFT finds bad sectors and locks my PC when attempting to fix them. This is the 15th Hitachi 2tb drive i've bought and its the first bad one i've had. Coincidentally its the second bad HDD i've ordered from new egg.. Its third drive i've ever ordered from new egg too. Bubble wrap, a thin carboard box and the paper fill stuff looked like it was packed well.. till i realized it was at the bottom of the box...

yay Newegg.. I guess I'll stick to buying these from frys from now on.
 
Cyberbeing said:
One thing somewhat interesting about the 5K3000 from benchmarks posted, is it seems to have a 19ms response rate in HDTune Pro 4.6 and others, but a 16ms response rate in the old HDTune 2.55. Maybe it has something to do with CoolSpin changing the rpm dynamically.

Another thing I noticed is it appears that Hitachi may have gone with 4 platter drives for their 2TB 7K3000 Ultrastar (360Gb/in^2), considering it has a reduced platter density from the 2TB 7K3000 Deskstar (411Gb/in^2).
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I'm interested in picking up the Hitach 2TB 5K3000 drives as well. I like the fact that it runs cooler, but because it has a slower rotational speed, how will the access speed be like when it's RAIDed? I intend to buy at least 4 and then run it in either RAID 5 or 6 with a hardware controller. Of course if I have the 7200 RPM versions, it'll be fast, but I'm wondering how access time and transfer speed will be like in a RAID 5 or 6 environment.
 
Formatting my new 2tb 5K3000 now. It sure takes a long time to do a normal non-quick format on 2tb.
 
pjkenned said:
Ask and you shall receive. Hitachi 5K3000 pictures and benchmarks.
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To the last question re: performance and RAID, there was a review posted a couple of pages back. I think it's the best info available at this point. Since they're so new, I don't think there is a lot more specific RAID performance info available, but given the data in that review, I don't see anything that would keep me from giving it a try.

Depending on how patient you are, I have two 5400 RPM drives coming from newegg and one of the original 7200 RPM disks in spare as well that I intend to throw into a test 3-disk RAID 5 within the next few weeks. Odditory is running some tests as well.
 
myrison said:
To the last question re: performance and RAID, there was a review posted a couple of pages back. I think it's the best info available at this point. Since they're so new, I don't think there is a lot more specific RAID performance info available, but given the data in that review, I don't see anything that would keep me from giving it a try.

Depending on how patient you are, I have two 5400 RPM drives coming from newegg and one of the original 7200 RPM disks in spare as well that I intend to throw into a test 3-disk RAID 5 within the next few weeks. Odditory is running some tests as well.
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I've used 5400RPM hard drives in the past before and there is a noticeable performance decrease compared to 7200 RPM hard drives. I think the most noticeable difference is the access time. Now, I want to buy 4 of these hard drives, whether it's the 5400 RPM ones or the 7200 RPM ones, I need to know whether putting 4 of them in a RAID 5 or 6 configuration will have any impact on its access time. If 4 of these 5400 RPM drives are to be RAIDed, will its transfer speed and access time be enhanced?
 
Sgt_Strider said:
I've used 5400RPM hard drives in the past before and there is a noticeable performance decrease compared to 7200 RPM hard drives. I think the most noticeable difference is the access time. Now, I want to buy 4 of these hard drives, whether it's the 5400 RPM ones or the 7200 RPM ones, I need to know whether putting 4 of them in a RAID 5 or 6 configuration will have any impact on its access time. If 4 of these 5400 RPM drives are to be RAIDed, will its transfer speed and access time be enhanced?
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I think the answer to this is dependent on how you do your RAID. Do you have your RAID through a pre-built box like me? Is it a hardware RAID through a card like an Areca? Or is it like a FreeNAS software RAID? My understanding is that the pre-built boxes like the one I have typically hit a wall right around 80-90mb/s read, and about half that for write, but it depends on the box. WIth a nice hardware RAID setup, I'd think the speed difference would definitely be noticeable. I've seen people hit 250-300mb/s read speeds with a RAID-5 setup using an Areca card. I'm not sure about custom software RAID like what FreeNAS would offer, but I'd guess the performance would be somewhere in between but you'd still be able to notice the difference between a 5400rpm and 7200rpm drive.
 
Fangs404 said:
I think the answer to this is dependent on how you do your RAID. Do you have your RAID through a pre-built box like me? Is it a hardware RAID through a card like an Areca? Or is it like a FreeNAS software RAID? My understanding is that the pre-built boxes like the one I have typically hit a wall right around 80-90mb/s read, and about half that for write, but it depends on the box. WIth a nice hardware RAID setup, I'd think the speed difference would definitely be noticeable. I've seen people hit 250-300mb/s read speeds with a RAID-5 setup using an Areca card. I'm not sure about custom software RAID like what FreeNAS would offer, but I'd guess the performance would be somewhere in between but you'd still be able to notice the difference between a 5400rpm and 7200rpm drive.
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It'll either be a hardware RAID solution and or a pre-built box. Although these are 5400RPM drives, once they're RAIDed, how will the access time be like? Will computers connected to the network experience any noticeable delays and or slowdown when trying to send and or download files from the server?
 
Sgt_Strider said:
It'll either be a hardware RAID solution and or a pre-built box. Although these are 5400RPM drives, once they're RAIDed, how will the access time be like? Will computers connected to the network experience any noticeable delays and or slowdown when trying to send and or download files from the server?
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I wouldn't think so. Technically, there are probably access time differences, but we're talking on the order of milliseconds. What's more important with a RAID system (especially one used for large files) is bandwidth, and you probably won't notice a big difference in a pre-built box, but in a custom hardware RAID setup, there would definitely be a noticeable bandwidth drop with 5400rpm drives.

So basically, if you end up going pre-built (I've been very happy with mine overall), you can probably get away with 5400rpm drives without any real drop in performance. With a custom hardware RAID, though, get 7200rpm drives.

And keep your eye out for solid deals. I got my 7K3000 drives for $99 a pop last week. The 5K3000 drives may be cheaper, but if you can find a great deal on the 7200rpm drive, it may be better to pick them up even if you might not get a big performance bump.
 
Fangs404 said:
I wouldn't think so. Technically, there are probably access time differences, but we're talking on the order of milliseconds. What's more important with a RAID system (especially one used for large files) is bandwidth, and you probably won't notice a big difference in a pre-built box, but in a custom hardware RAID setup, there would definitely be a noticeable bandwidth drop with 5400rpm drives.

So basically, if you end up going pre-built (I've been very happy with mine overall), you can probably get away with 5400rpm drives without any real drop in performance. With a custom hardware RAID, though, get 7200rpm drives.

And keep your eye out for solid deals. I got my 7K3000 drives for $99 a pop last week. The 5K3000 drives may be cheaper, but if you can find a great deal on the 7200rpm drive, it may be better to pick them up even if you might not get a big performance bump.
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Why is prebuilt going to be faster than a custom hardware setup? If I go custom, I'll be getting a hardware RAID card.
 
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