Want fast SATA HDD, recommendations?

[~misfit~]

Hi group.

I have a tower system that I basically use as storage and backup for my
laptop HDDs. It has four SATA trayless removable HDD 'docks' (for want of a
better word) that I use to facilitate transferring data and doing backups.
It works well.

(System is an Asus P5KE-WiFi/AP board with a QX9650 CPU and just 4GB of RAM
[running 32-bit XP])

I have a few 2TB HDDs that get moved between USB docks attached to laptops
and this machine. The USB docks are fine for writing moderate amounts of
data but are rather slow for large amounts. That's where the tower comes in.

Anyway, I want a new (mechanical) boot drives for it. The old Seagate 500.10
isn't the greatest these days and frankly I don't need 500GB for a boot
drive. However looking at new ones that seems to be the starting size.
Frankly all I need is ~100GB. I toyed with the idea of a 2.5" drive but
they're generally slower and would cost me more than a 3.5" 500GB drive
anyway.

I'm not rich but would like a fast, reliable drive. Single-platter would of
course be best, faster to spin up etc. I'm contemplating a Western Digital
Caviar Black WD5002AALX. WD don't seem to want to tell you how many platters
/ heads each of their drives has, unlike Seagate. You need to infer it from
the weight / ready time in the specs pdf that you can download.

I've Googled trying to find a review of smallish 7,200rpm desktop HDDs but,
from what I could see, all of the hardware sites are only interested in
benching SSDs these days.

So what say you? Is the Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX a good
choice? I can get a Seagate 500GB 7.2K HDD for about 3/4 of the cost of the
WD but the WD has a 5 year warranty and recently I've moved to WD drives as
the Seagate agents for New Zealand don't seem to be very aggressive or
competant or something, most stores seem to have lots of WD stock and little
Seagate stock.

Input appreciated. I want a small, fast and preferably cheap boot drive for
my tower / server / archive machine.

TIA,
--
Shaun.

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you." Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

 

[David W. Hodgins]

So what say you? Is the Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX a good

Anything recent from WD is garbage. Their "Advanced disk format" drives use
a 4KB physical sector size, but still use a 512 byte logical sector size.

Many of their drives lie to the os about the physical sector size, claiming
it's 512 bytes.

If you use one of the garbage drives, you must align all partitions, files,
meta data, etc, on 4k boundaries (which can be very difficult), or you will
have pathetic write performance.

My opinion, do not buy anything from WD, unless you know it doesn't use
their "advanced disk format".

Regards, Dave Hodgins

 

[John McGaw]

Hi group.

I have a tower system that I basically use as storage and backup for my
laptop HDDs. It has four SATA trayless removable HDD 'docks' (for want of a
better word) that I use to facilitate transferring data and doing backups.
It works well.

(System is an Asus P5KE-WiFi/AP board with a QX9650 CPU and just 4GB of RAM
[running 32-bit XP])

I have a few 2TB HDDs that get moved between USB docks attached to laptops
and this machine. The USB docks are fine for writing moderate amounts of
data but are rather slow for large amounts. That's where the tower comes in.

Anyway, I want a new (mechanical) boot drives for it. The old Seagate 500.10
isn't the greatest these days and frankly I don't need 500GB for a boot
drive. However looking at new ones that seems to be the starting size.
Frankly all I need is ~100GB. I toyed with the idea of a 2.5" drive but
they're generally slower and would cost me more than a 3.5" 500GB drive
anyway.

I'm not rich but would like a fast, reliable drive. Single-platter would of
course be best, faster to spin up etc. I'm contemplating a Western Digital
Caviar Black WD5002AALX. WD don't seem to want to tell you how many platters
/ heads each of their drives has, unlike Seagate. You need to infer it from
the weight / ready time in the specs pdf that you can download.

I've Googled trying to find a review of smallish 7,200rpm desktop HDDs but,
from what I could see, all of the hardware sites are only interested in
benching SSDs these days.

So what say you? Is the Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX a good
choice? I can get a Seagate 500GB 7.2K HDD for about 3/4 of the cost of the
WD but the WD has a 5 year warranty and recently I've moved to WD drives as
the Seagate agents for New Zealand don't seem to be very aggressive or
competant or something, most stores seem to have lots of WD stock and little
Seagate stock.

Input appreciated. I want a small, fast and preferably cheap boot drive for
my tower / server / archive machine.

TIA,

Seems pretty simple to me. If you want a fast boot drive then buy a small
SSD and use it for just the OS and minimal application. What would having a
spinning platter gain you over an SSD besides slower speed, more power
consumption, heat, and noise? I get along in my main i7 machine with an
80gB Intel drive and IIRC the actual OS installation along with all of my
high-priority applications, swap file, hibernation file, etc took up ~24gB.
The system has a 2tB data drive with three partitions but it doesn't need
to be all that fast so I get along fine with a 'green' drive there. In your
situation, I'd leave the 500gB drive right where it is and use it for data
and store images of the SSD on it for backup.

 

[John McGaw]

Anything recent from WD is garbage. Their "Advanced disk format" drives use
a 4KB physical sector size, but still use a 512 byte logical sector size.

Many of their drives lie to the os about the physical sector size, claiming
it's 512 bytes.

If you use one of the garbage drives, you must align all partitions, files,
meta data, etc, on 4k boundaries (which can be very difficult), or you will
have pathetic write performance.

My opinion, do not buy anything from WD, unless you know it doesn't use
their "advanced disk format".

Regards, Dave Hodgins

You can't really mean that can you? The WD disks work fine with any
operating system which understands them natively - in other words any
modern operating system. On more antiquated systems it takes all of ten
seconds to align the partitions using the free utility which WD provides.
The drives work perfectly well with XP and other old operating systems if
they have only one partition without running the utility by simply
installing a jumper which is the time they 'lie' to the OS. Oh, and I speak
from experience, having installed eight of the WD 2tB 'green' drives and
running them on a daily basis. There is nothing 'garbage' about them, just
people who aren't willing to accept the fact that we aren't living in the
olden days any more and 512K sectors are a relic of history. Standards
change and people need to change along with them otherwise we would all be
using audio cassettes to store data on our PCs and wishing that someday the
floppy disk would become cheap enough for mere mortals to afford.

 

[Paul]

Anything recent from WD is garbage. Their "Advanced disk format" drives
use
a 4KB physical sector size, but still use a 512 byte logical sector size.

Many of their drives lie to the os about the physical sector size, claiming
it's 512 bytes.

If you use one of the garbage drives, you must align all partitions, files,
meta data, etc, on 4k boundaries (which can be very difficult), or you will
have pathetic write performance.

My opinion, do not buy anything from WD, unless you know it doesn't use
their "advanced disk format".

Regards, Dave Hodgins

The bad news is, there was an announcement, that the "industry" as a whole
was switching to 4KB sector drives. So soon, you won't be able to escape them.

And with the consolidation, and the loss of Hitachi, Samsung, and the like,
there really won't be a lot to choose from. It'll be a "diet of garbage".

Paul

 

[David W. Hodgins]

You can't really mean that can you? The WD disks work fine with any
operating system which understands them natively - in other words any
modern operating system. On more antiquated systems it takes all of ten
seconds to align the partitions using the free utility which WD provides.
The drives work perfectly well with XP and other old operating systems if
they have only one partition without running the utility by simply
installing a jumper which is the time they 'lie' to the OS. Oh, and I speak
from experience, having installed eight of the WD 2tB 'green' drives and
running them on a daily basis. There is nothing 'garbage' about them, just
people who aren't willing to accept the fact that we aren't living in the
olden days any more and 512K sectors are a relic of history. Standards
change and people need to change along with them otherwise we would all be
using audio cassettes to store data on our PCs and wishing that someday the
floppy disk would become cheap enough for mere mortals to afford.

I ran into it with the 1.5TB drive model WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1.

From fdisk -l

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

There is no jumper on the drive, to control the reported physical
sector size. It was only by googling on the drive model number
trying to figure out why it was getting such poor write performance,
that I found out it was internally using a 4kb physical sector size.

Yes it's possible to force partitions to start on 4kb boundaries, once
you know it's needed.

You also have to ensure the filesystem metadata, journals, etc, all use
multiples of 4kb. Not difficult, but it's extra work, that if not done
leaves you with a system that is not usable for regular work.

If the drive used a 4kb logical sector size, it would be simple. By using
a 512 byte logical sector size, with a 4kb physical sector size (but lying
to the os about it), it forces a lot of extra work, to ensure everything
aligns on 4kb boundaries. I've done that for the two drives I purchased,
but won't be going through that again.

Yes they've provided a windows driver, that will do that, but they haven't
done that for other operating systems. I'm using linux.

I will never buy wd drives again, or recommend them.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

 

[David W. Hodgins]

The bad news is, there was an announcement, that the "industry" as a whole
was switching to 4KB sector drives. So soon, you won't be able to escape them.

I have no problem using a drive with a 4kb logical/physical sector size.

I had a problem with a wd drive that reported to the os that it was using
a 512 byte logical and physical sector size, but in reality, was using a
4 kb physical sector size. Drive model WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B.

Regards, Dave Hodgins

 

[larry moe 'n curly]

Anything recent from WD is garbage. Their "Advanced disk format" drives use
a 4KB physical sector size, but still use a 512 byte logical sector size.

Many of their drives lie to the os about the physical sector size, claiming
it's 512 bytes.

If you use one of the garbage drives, you must align all partitions, files,
meta data, etc, on 4k boundaries (which can be very difficult), or you will
have pathetic write performance.

I have Windows XP and created the aligned partitions with GParted, a
Linux program. It takes about few minutes, including the time to boot
from a CD. Once an aligned partition is created, all the files should
also be aligned, unless a nonstandard and unusually small allocation
size is chosen.

As for other aspects of WD drives, I've noticed when I run the MHDD
diagnostic, it reports that each sector can be read in less than 50ms,
but with other brands of 1TB - 2TB drives there are usually 1-2
sectors that need over 150ms, depending on temperature.

 

[larry moe 'n curly]

I have a few 2TB HDDs that get moved between USB docks attached to laptops
and this machine. The USB docks are fine for writing moderate amounts of
data but are rather slow for large amounts. That's where the tower comes in.

Anyway, I want a new (mechanical) boot drives for it. The old Seagate 500..10
isn't the greatest these days and frankly I don't need 500GB for a boot
drive. However looking at new ones that seems to be the starting size.
Frankly all I need is ~100GB. I toyed with the idea of a 2.5" drive but
they're generally slower and would cost me more than a 3.5" 500GB drive
anyway.

I'm not rich but would like a fast, reliable drive. Single-platter would of
course be best, faster to spin up etc. I'm contemplating a Western Digital
Caviar Black WD5002AALX. WD don't seem to want to tell you how many platters
/ heads each of their drives has, unlike Seagate. You need to infer it from
the weight / ready time in the specs pdf that you can download.

I've Googled trying to find a review of smallish 7,200rpm desktop HDDs but,
from what I could see, all of the hardware sites are only interested in
benching SSDs these days.

So what say you? Is the Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX a good
choice? I can get a Seagate 500GB 7.2K HDD for about 3/4 of the cost of the
WD but the WD has a 5 year warranty and recently I've moved to WD drives as
the Seagate agents for New Zealand don't seem to be very aggressive or
competant or something, most stores seem to have lots of WD stock and little
Seagate stock.

XbitLabs.com did comparative reviews of hard disks last February and
December, and they seem to test hardware better than anybody else
does.

I've had no problems with 4KB "advanced format" drives and simply used
a partition alignment tool (Gparted, downloadable with a self-booting
CD ROM image).

 

[~misfit~]

The bad news is, there was an announcement, that the "industry" as a
whole was switching to 4KB sector drives. So soon, you won't be able
to escape them.
And with the consolidation, and the loss of Hitachi, Samsung, and the
like, there really won't be a lot to choose from. It'll be a "diet of
garbage".

AF gives higher aureal density so greater drive capacity. Yes, it's the way
of the future for mechanical drives (I believe all SSDs are 'AF'?) but it's
still a PITA for XP users, especially when I had to find out about it the
hard way.

I'd read about AF, that it was 'coming' a long time ago but when I bought my
2TB 'EARS' WD HDDs there was no mention that they were AF on the site I
ordered them from. I had to dig deep into WD's PDFs to find it. (Other than
the tiny writing on the drive that I missed at first which said to use a
jumper if using with XP and single partition. I'd never use a single 2TB
partition anyway so ignored it when I saw it.)

However, for now it'd be nice to find a smallish fast non-AF HDD for my
tower boot drive.

Cheers Paul, great to see you still prolifically posting here. I often come
here just to read your posts.
--
Shaun.

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you." Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

 

[~misfit~]

Hi group.

I have a tower system that I basically use as storage and backup for
my laptop HDDs. It has four SATA trayless removable HDD 'docks' (for
want of a better word) that I use to facilitate transferring data
and doing backups. It works well.

(System is an Asus P5KE-WiFi/AP board with a QX9650 CPU and just 4GB
of RAM [running 32-bit XP])

I have a few 2TB HDDs that get moved between USB docks attached to
laptops and this machine. The USB docks are fine for writing
moderate amounts of data but are rather slow for large amounts.
That's where the tower comes in. Anyway, I want a new (mechanical) boot
drives for it. The old
Seagate 500.10 isn't the greatest these days and frankly I don't
need 500GB for a boot drive. However looking at new ones that seems
to be the starting size. Frankly all I need is ~100GB. I toyed with
the idea of a 2.5" drive but they're generally slower and would cost
me more than a 3.5" 500GB drive anyway.

I'm not rich but would like a fast, reliable drive. Single-platter
would of course be best, faster to spin up etc. I'm contemplating a
Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX. WD don't seem to want to
tell you how many platters / heads each of their drives has, unlike
Seagate. You need to infer it from the weight / ready time in the
specs pdf that you can download. I've Googled trying to find a review of
smallish 7,200rpm desktop
HDDs but, from what I could see, all of the hardware sites are only
interested in benching SSDs these days.

So what say you? Is the Western Digital Caviar Black WD5002AALX a
good choice? I can get a Seagate 500GB 7.2K HDD for about 3/4 of the
cost of the WD but the WD has a 5 year warranty and recently I've
moved to WD drives as the Seagate agents for New Zealand don't seem
to be very aggressive or competant or something, most stores seem to
have lots of WD stock and little Seagate stock.

Input appreciated. I want a small, fast and preferably cheap boot
drive for my tower / server / archive machine.

TIA,

Seems pretty simple to me. If you want a fast boot drive then buy a
small SSD and use it for just the OS and minimal application. What
would having a spinning platter gain you over an SSD besides slower
speed, more power consumption, heat, and noise? I get along in my
main i7 machine with an 80gB Intel drive and IIRC the actual OS
installation along with all of my high-priority applications, swap
file, hibernation file, etc took up ~24gB. The system has a 2tB data
drive with three partitions but it doesn't need to be all that fast
so I get along fine with a 'green' drive there. In your situation,
I'd leave the 500gB drive right where it is and use it for data and
store images of the SSD on it for backup.

Thanks John, I agree that, in a perfect world that's the way to go. Alas,
I'm an invalid on welfare since an accident in '95 left me with spinal
injuries. SSDs are still out of my price-range. <Ironic LOL> In fact this
drive I was planning on getting is off the menu for now. Times got a lot
tighter of late, I'm selling my collection of old ThinkPads, my only hobby,
machines that I bought cheaply and refurbished. Can't afford to drink,
smoke, socialise, go visiting (ergo have lost the frinds I had), eat decent
food. I gave up on TV a long time ago and now it seems my one hobby that
gives me pleasure has to go.

(I used to bould desktops, for myself and friends, and was a rabid
overclocker. However when electricity got so expensive I switched to working
with ThinkPads for my hardware fix.)

Sucks to be me right now. Middle of winter, unheated house, many layers of
(old) clothes, typing in fingerless gloves at 2pm, trying to decide which
ThinkPads will net me the best money and be the least loss.

Be well,
--
Shaun.

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you." Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

 

[~misfit~]

XbitLabs.com did comparative reviews of hard disks last February and
December, and they seem to test hardware better than anybody else
does.

I've had no problems with 4KB "advanced format" drives and simply used
a partition alignment tool (Gparted, downloadable with a self-booting
CD ROM image).

Thanks Stooges. See previous posts for my experience with AF. I checked Xbit
before I posted here but didn't find anything relevant. Must look again. I
agree, they're a good site, my first stop for tests, opinion etcetera.
--
Shaun.

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a
monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also
into you." Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche