Seagate SV35 3TB as a regular storage drive?

[Luc2k]

I'm currently looking for a 3TB storage drive for my home PC and the ST3000VX000 seems like the ideal drive for my needs. It is (hopefully) more reliable than a regular consumer drive and comes with a 3 year warranty while being only 10-15% more expensive (price has been a bit unstable lately).

I intend to use it to store and/or download anything really. My PC is on daily for 16 hours on average.

The only thing I'm uncertain about is the fact that it's a "surveillance-optimised" drive. I've read that these types of drives usually have worse error correction since that can be detrimental when recording several video streams, however the SV35 series seems to have the same rate as Barracuda drives. Are there any reasons against getting this instead of a 2 year warranty consumer drive?

 

SV35 Series Data Sheet

[UseLess]

I am not exactly sure what specifically makes them "AV" drives, but they're designed for constant read/write (i.e. recording of video surveillance). Did you mean replacing of dead sectors with spares when you said error correction? (I am not aware of any ECC for HDDs) I wouldn't suspect that they would have any performance/feature negatives compared to a consumer drive, as consumer drives tend to be the "base line" and the more expensive drives build on these. Regardless of the reliability of the drives (i.e. even if you were using an enterprise drive) if you have no backup/redundancy of your data then the reliability of the drive provides a false sense of security. There is no one backup solution for everyone, but everyone should have one backup solution.

 

Is the SV35 a good drive? Yep! Is it likely more reliable than a standard consumer drive? Yep! (statistically speaking =P). Is it the right drive? Hard to say.

 

On a side note:

Anyone feel free to disagree with me here. Most drives you buy for general consumer use will last for many, many years (most MTBFs are well in excess of 500,000 hours if you like statistics). The main reason a drive will fail is if you have a "dud" and will commonly die quite fast (especially if you're writing to it a lot). This said, I don't really find a warranty to be overly helpful - I would obviously prefer a 5 year warranty over a 2 year warranty however I prefer a drive that has the right features for me - my drives are used for mass storage and are on 24-7 so I want low power consumption, and low noise. I love WD Greens for these reasons. I keep one drive (of 7) acting as a snap-shot RAID just in case something does fail.

[thomastmc]

I don't trust Seagate...

 

I went with WD for several years and then tried my luck with a 1TB Barracuda. It died 1.5 years later due to bad sectors. It just started creating them one day and never stopped.

 

I know someone has probably had the same experience with WD, but it's just never been my experience. I've still got a 250 GB WD that's somewhere around almost 10 years old, and get's really extensive use.

[Luc2k]

I am not exactly sure what specifically makes them "AV" drives, but they're designed for constant read/write (i.e. recording of video surveillance). Did you mean replacing of dead sectors with spares when you said error correction? (I am not aware of any ECC for HDDs) I wouldn't suspect that they would have any performance/feature negatives compared to a consumer drive, as consumer drives tend to be the "base line" and the more expensive drives build on these. Regardless of the reliability of the drives (i.e. even if you were using an enterprise drive) if you have no backup/redundancy of your data then the reliability of the drive provides a false sense of security. There is no one backup solution for everyone, but everyone should have one backup solution.

This is the part that refers to the "non-recoverable read errors per bits read, max". While I'm not exactly sure what this does, apparently a drive that has a worse value like the WD equivalent AV-GP series is more likely to leave you with corrupted data. For surveillance, an artifact is less critical than the drive going back and fixing the error and possibly losing frames. This info is very likely bad or misunderstood so anyone with actual knowledge is more than welcome for input.

 

Unfortunately I'm not yet at a point where I could afford full backup, but if this works out well, I'll probably sell some of my smaller drives to set something up within a year.

 

Is the SV35 a good drive? Yep! Is it likely more reliable than a standard consumer drive? Yep! (statistically speaking =P). Is it the right drive? Hard to say.

 

On a side note:

Anyone feel free to disagree with me here. Most drives you buy for general consumer use will last for many, many years (most MTBFs are well in excess of 500,000 hours if you like statistics). The main reason a drive will fail is if you have a "dud" and will commonly die quite fast (especially if you're writing to it a lot). This said, I don't really find a warranty to be overly helpful - I would obviously prefer a 5 year warranty over a 2 year warranty however I prefer a drive that has the right features for me - my drives are used for mass storage and are on 24-7 so I want low power consumption, and low noise. I love WD Greens for these reasons. I keep one drive (of 7) acting as a snap-shot RAID just in case something does fail.

I know the first year of a drive is the critical part and the longer warranty is mostly me hoping it has a better build quality, therefore reliability, but I can't help myself. Until I have actual backup, I'm aiming for the middle ground. As for other features, low noise is the only one that would be worth anything to me after reliability.   

 

I don't trust Seagate...

 

I went with WD for several years and then tried my luck with a 1TB Barracuda. It died 1.5 years later due to bad sectors. It just started creating them one day and never stopped.

 

I know someone has probably had the same experience with WD, but it's just never been my experience. I've still got a 250 GB WD that's somewhere around almost 10 years old, and get's really extensive use.

I've only had 2 drives fail on me, an old 80GB Maxtor and a 640GB WD:

 

The Maxtor was probably going bad at the time as Windows would completely freeze if I tried to do anything in the first five minutes after logging on. My impatience put the final nail in that coffin and it hit me hard as it was the only drive I had at the time.

 

The 640 WD, just died without any warning in the first 6 months. I was copying some stuff at a friend's house so I left the room for a while (using it as an external usb drive). When I returned the drive was just clicking. The replacement is running fine ~3 years later.

 

I currently have a 2TB WD Green, which has developed some bad (3) and weak (3) sectors after some electrical issues (short version). I can't fix the weak sectors without formating and I can't format without a drive to move my data on. I don't have anything against WD in spite of my previous experiences since I know HDDs can go ###### up at any moment, but the reason I'm looking at Seagate for the next one is because of 1TB/platter (potential reliability again basically) which the Greens don't have as far as I'm aware.

[+Fahim S. MVC]

From what I have read (per GB pricing increases as you work down the list)

:

Desktop (5400) -> Long error correction cycles, medium risk of sector errors, low performance, low reliability, short warranty

NAS (5900) -> Short/No error correction cycle, low/medium risk of sector errors, low-medium performance, medium reliability, medium warranty

AV (5900) -> Short/No error correction cycle, high risk of sector errors, low performance, high reliability, high warranty

Desktop (7200) -> Long error correction cycles, medium risk of sector errors, medium performance, low reliability, short warranty

Server (7200) -> Short/No error correction cycle, low risk of sector errors, high performance, high reliability, long warranty

 

Personally I don't think an AV drive would be smart choice as reliable storage - it's just not built for that use-case.

[_dandy_]

I don't use "Seagate" and "reliable" in the same sentence.  I've bought maybe 50 drives (I mean personally, for myself) over the decades and of the few Seagate drives I've had, I have exactly none left, whereas I still have a small pile of 40/80/100/160GB drives from various other manufacturers that still work fine, but no longer use only because their size makes it hardly worth it.  The Seagates all had to be replaced before getting past their useful life.  I realize I'm just one guy and thus statistically insignificant, but if you had a 100% failure rate with one brand, I think you'd do the same and stay away.

 

If I had to buy Seagate again, I'd either put it in a system I don't care about (its data being constantly backed up elsewhere), or I'd buy in sets of 2 or 3 for backup sets only.

[+PeterUK MVC]

Seems odd you would look at a HDD for surveillance and not one more sited for your needs like a Desktop HDD or NAS/Enterprise HDD. The ST3000DM001 , ST3000NM0033 , ST33000650NS are the ones you want to look at.

 

The only way to insure that the drive can be reliable enough is to run your own tests on it.

[Luc2k]

From what I have read (per GB pricing increases as you work down the list)

:

Desktop (5400) -> Long error correction cycles, medium risk of sector errors, low performance, low reliability, short warranty

NAS (5900) -> Short/No error correction cycle, low/medium risk of sector errors, low-medium performance, medium reliability, medium warranty

AV (5900) -> Short/No error correction cycle, high risk of sector errors, low performance, high reliability, high warranty

Desktop (7200) -> Long error correction cycles, medium risk of sector errors, medium performance, low reliability, short warranty

Server (7200) -> Short/No error correction cycle, low risk of sector errors, high performance, high reliability, long warranty

 

Personally I don't think an AV drive would be smart choice as reliable storage - it's just not built for that use-case.

Unfortunately, it's not as clear cut as that. At the shop I'm intending to buy this from it's something like this, with the price being 150$ for the cheapest and 168$ for the most expensive:

Desktop (Seagate Barracuda 7200)

Desktop (Toshiba 7200)

AV (Seagate Pipeline 5900)

NAS/AV (Toshiba 5900)

SV (Seagate SV35 7200)

 

The Seagate drives have the same value for error correction regardless of purpose and the SV35 has the performance of a desktop drive with the possible reliability of a server drive. I've read recommendations against using the WD AV drives for storage since those do have worse value for error correction but nothing as clear against the Seagate SV35.

 

I don't use "Seagate" and "reliable" in the same sentence.  I've bought maybe 50 drives (I mean personally, for myself) over the decades and of the few Seagate drives I've had, I have exactly none left, whereas I still have a small pile of 40/80/100/160GB drives from various other manufacturers that still work fine, but no longer use only because their size makes it hardly worth it.  The Seagates all had to be replaced before getting past their useful life.  I realize I'm just one guy and thus statistically insignificant, but if you had a 100% failure rate with one brand, I think you'd do the same and stay away.

 

If I had to buy Seagate again, I'd either put it in a system I don't care about (its data being constantly backed up elsewhere), or I'd buy in sets of 2 or 3 for backup sets only.

I'm not really interested in experiences going that far back when it comes to hard drives anything can go wrong. I'd probably have second thoughts if I were in your position, but ultimately the tech inside the drive is more important here. I'm not looking at WD since they use 4/8 platters/heads as opposed to Seagate's 3/6.

 

Seems odd you would look at a HDD for surveillance and not one more sited for your needs like a Desktop HDD or NAS/Enterprise HDD. The ST3000DM001 , ST3000NM0033 , ST33000650NS are the ones you want to look at.

 

The only way to insure that the drive can be reliable enough is to run your own tests on it.

It's not that odd really as all the desktop drives have one year less of warranty and are rated for fewer hours and the other two are double in price.

 

Anyway, guess I'll make the jump and see for myself since nobody is quite sure about this.

[+PeterUK MVC]

Warranty is not going to get your data back just a new drive.

[Luc2k]

Warranty is not going to get your data back just a new drive.

Of course not, so I'm not going to put anything on it that I can't afford to lose until I have backup set. It does help not having to pay for a new drive in case it happens to break in that 3rd year, maybe even get my money back and buy something better if the model is discontinued by then, which is very likely (had something like this happen with a GPU that had a broken ventilator).