How smart is SMART now?

CountMike said:

wotevfir said:

I have had trouble with the new 'green' drives failing, even brand new. Went on amazon and found a discussion as to which country they are assembled. So I ordered and returned, until I received the correct country and they are correct: testing software proved it. Some drives were half the speed of others: same name, from different country!

Well, there was that flood in Thailand few years ago.

True that but those HDDs should be long gone by now. I've had only two WD Greens fail on me so far: the first was one of the early Greens that had the excessive head parking issue (that has long since been corrected) that never should have been installed as a sole drive by a computer shop that should have known better (one of the two the main reasons I broke down and learned how to build and maintain my own machines) and one that started showing SMART errors (over 300 reallocated sectors) before the factory warranty ran out and WD promptly replaced. Right now, I have ten Greens, four of which I bought recently and I am now "torture" testing (running multiple wipes for a about a week each drive). I use my Greens only for backups.

For my internal drives, I prefer WD Blacks. They are noticeably snappier and come with the longer warranty (five years) so are more likely to be more durable than the Greens.

I prefer to buy my Greens from NewEgg since I can buy an additional three years of "warranty" (technically, it's a service plan) for a reasonable price, giving me a full five years of warranty. Blacks I can get from Amazon or NewEgg, depending on who sells them for less but prefer Amazon because if a drive shows up DOA (considering how poorly carriers handle them, it's surprising DOAs aren't any more frequent than they already are), I don't have to pay for return shipping.

Hi there

I'd switch to SSD's if I were you - they are getting to almost mainstream HDD price. It won't be too long before spinners are obsolete in domestic environments. Less power, less heat, less mnanufacturing materials etc. SSD's lifecycle is just as good as or even better than spinners now anyway.

I did see some stupid imbecilic person from "The Green Party" over here saying another reason you should avoid using standard HDD's is that they can cause "Cranial Magnetic Stimulation" in Humans. !!!!!

Well there's always some strange people around -- seriously though SSD's are so superior in performance it's worth it unless you are talking high storage volumes. Even the 1TB sizes are now beginning to reach mainstream level of affordability.

For decent warning of imminent HDD failures - forget SMART - simply use the Storage spaces feature - where you can aggregate a pool (i.e 2 or more) of volumes into a single storage space. The volumes can be of different sizes and you can specify a % of the space to be set aside for recovery and data integrity -- you shouldn't need more than 25% in an extreme case. Now if a volume starts to fail you can organise a recovery and REMOVE the failing volume from the pool. You can dynamically also ADD more volumes at any time. - Works MUCH MUCH better than RAID where the volumes need to be THE SAME SIZE and you are using 50% for mirroring.

Cheers
jimbo

Watch out for earlier SSD, had bad experience with OC a few years ago; worth reading hardware testing site reports, before purchase. Also nowhere near enough storage space, but love PC start, from off in 30 seconds, against 90, on a 3GB/s drive. That minute is irritating, especially on a laptop!

Amazon were still selling assembled in C HD's until recently. I managed to purchase assembled somewhere else ones, after several tries; they last for years...

wotevfir said:

Watch out for earlier SSD, had bad experience with OC a few years ago; worth reading hardware testing site reports, before purchase. Also nowhere near enough storage space, but love PC start, from off in 30 seconds, against 90, on a 3GB/s drive. That minute is irritating, especially on a laptop!

Amazon were still selling assembled in C HD's until recently. I managed to purchase assembled somewhere else ones, after several tries; they last for years...

Hi there

a few years ago is a geological age ago in computer technology. Today's SSD's outlast spinners in every way these days and are more reliable too. Long since GONE are the ist gen SSD's which DID have problems and limited read / write cycles.

The cost per byte is also falling rapidly -- a 1TB SSD is now extremely reasonably priced - Ideal for a laptop where you want to run one or two VM's and have a decent level of storage.

I run 4 VMs concurrently in a laptop with a 1 TB SSD - one of the VM's is a W7 with a SAP IDES test system installed -- not the lightest load on a system. It runs absolutely fine on the SSD as a VM with decent response time. Concurrently I also have a W8.1, an XP system and a W10 system. Totally impossible to run these concurrently decently with a spinner in a laptop. Laptop is HP envy sleekbook, 8 GB RAM with a decent 15 processor.

Cheers
jimbo

Agreed, I was pointing out that there are quite a few of those older SSD for sale, to an unsuspecting public.

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

I'd switch to SSD's if I were you - they are getting to almost mainstream HDD price. It won't be too long before spinners are obsolete in domestic environments. Less power, less heat, less mnanufacturing materials etc. SSD's lifecycle is just as good as or even better than spinners now anyway.

I did see some stupid imbecilic person from "The Green Party" over here saying another reason you should avoid using standard HDD's is that they can cause "Cranial Magnetic Stimulation" in Humans. !!!!!

Well there's always some strange people around -- seriously though SSD's are so superior in performance it's worth it unless you are talking high storage volumes. Even the 1TB sizes are now beginning to reach mainstream level of affordability.

For decent warning of imminent HDD failures - forget SMART - simply use the Storage spaces feature - where you can aggregate a pool (i.e 2 or more) of volumes into a single storage space. The volumes can be of different sizes and you can specify a % of the space to be set aside for recovery and data integrity -- you shouldn't need more than 25% in an extreme case. Now if a volume starts to fail you can organise a recovery and REMOVE the failing volume from the pool. You can dynamically also ADD more volumes at any time. - Works MUCH MUCH better than RAID where the volumes need to be THE SAME SIZE and you are using 50% for mirroring.

Cheers
jimbo

I'm talking high volumes: 2TB and 4TB (I'm not buying anymore HDDs smaller than 4TB now). For now, for that much storage, spinners are still the most cost effective. I am using an SSD for the boot drive in my desktop machine and 500GB SSDs for boot and storage in my little one drive notebooks.


I did see an article recently (MaximumPC) that said we could be seeing SSDs breaking the 1TB barrier soon due to the new 3D technology. According to the article, Intel is claiming we could be seeing 10TB SSDs in as little as two years. I'm not holding my breath but I am certainly looking forward to something like that! Just think; replacing heavy, bulky 3.5" drives with lightweight, compact 2.5" drives. I could replace the three 3.5" storage HDDs in my computer and the twelve 3.5" HDDs I use for backups with five 2.5" SSDs and gain an extra 2TB of storage! Much smaller, lighter computer cases can be used (extremely welcome ant my age!) and far less space will be needed to store backup drives.

Since I'm not planning on leaving Win 7 anytime soon (it's working just fine for me and I don't upgrade anything until I really need to; this is not to put down Win 10), Storages Spaces will not be available to me for a while.

Drives of any kind can fail without warning, no matter what one is using, so there is no point in worrying about getting a warning (I do check SMART about once a month but I don't depend on it). The only protection for that is a solid backup scheme. Mirroring will only protect from drive failure (to a degree). Data can also be lost due to other hardware failure (PSU shorting out), theft, natural disasters, user error (accidental, deletion, dropping a drive, etc.) malware, etc. no form of RAID will protect from any of those.