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WD Blue Drives 3TB

276 views 10 replies 4 participants last post by  MightyMiroWD 
#1 ·
Link to drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822235012

I'm thinking about buying two of the 3TB drives and one will be used to mirror the the other (weekly/monthly backups) and the other will be used as my write drive to save my SSD's life. I don't think 5400rpm would cause that much of an issue for extraction/downloading/writes purposes, would it? I will run both drives for a month powered on to make sure there is nothing wrong before unplugging the second drive.

Just wanting a second opinion on the drive in case there is something better out there that would serve my needs better. Thank you.
 
#2 ·
I would stay away from all 3TB HDDs, no matter what brand or where you get them. For some odd reason (I have a theory why but no proof), 3TB HDDs overall tend to get poorer customer reviews than other sizes. If you need 3TB of space, I recommend getting a 4TB drive instead.
 
#3 ·
What is your theory that would make you believe they are all defective in some way?
 
#4 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeneO View Post

What is your theory that would make you believe they are all defective in some way?
First, I never said they are all defective, only they have a higher failure rate than other sizes based on user reviews.

Two, it's only a theory with nothing to actually back it up. Someone in another thread said that he had read that the Seagate 3TB drives were actually 4TB drives that failed inspection and had the bad portions blocked, cutting capacity to 3TB. IF (a mighty big if) that was true, it might explain why all 3TB drives get poorer reviews, assuming other manufacturers did the same thing.

One thing that may shoot down that theory is I have noticed the same issue with 5TB drives.
 
#5 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald View Post

First, I never said they are all defective, only they have a higher failure rate than other sizes based on user reviews.
That would be "defective in some way" in my book.
biggrin.gif

Quote:
Two, it's only a theory with nothing to actually back it up. Someone in another thread said that he had read that the Seagate 3TB drives were actually 4TB drives that failed inspection and had the bad portions blocked, cutting capacity to 3TB. IF (a mighty big if) that was true, it might explain why all 3TB drives get poorer reviews, assuming other manufacturers did the same thing.
I just would assume they are a 3x 1 TB platter drives vs 1, 2, or 4 platter drive.. Otherwise 1 TB drives might be 2 TB drives that failed inspection etc. Maybe someone should take one apart.

The only user reviews that I can single out 3 TB drives (Amazon lumps them all together e.g.) are newegg, and I wouldn't trust their failures are manufacturer failures.
 
#6 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeneO View Post

...The only user reviews that I can single out 3 TB drives (Amazon lumps them all together e.g.) are newegg, and I wouldn't trust their failures are manufacturer failures.
The percentage of failures due to user ignorance would be the same for all drives. I actually read the reviews, not go by the number of stars, goose eggs, or kumquats to determine the quality of a product.

I've about had it with Amazon's practice of lumping reviews together like they do now and I'm considering initiating legal action against them for fraud. I already went round and round with them over a vendor that posted an inaccurate picture of a product and, so far, Amazon has done nothing to correct it.
 
#7 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald View Post

The percentage of failures due to user ignorance would be the same for all drives. I actually read the reviews, not go by the number of stars, goose eggs, or kumquats to determine the quality of a product.

I've about had it with Amazon's practice of lumping reviews together like they do now and I'm considering initiating legal action against them for fraud. I already went round and round with them over a vendor that posted an inaccurate picture of a product and, so far, Amazon has done nothing to correct it.
Yeah, well I read them too? You misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn't questioning the usefulness of the reviews to user ignorance, but to the sellers practices. Many negative reviews are DOA etc., which can be a result of delivery practices or return policies.

I agree with you about Amazon lumping together reviews, but they more than make up for it in return policy.

.
 
#8 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeneO View Post

Quote:
Originally Posted by Lady Fitzgerald View Post

The percentage of failures due to user ignorance would be the same for all drives. I actually read the reviews, not go by the number of stars, goose eggs, or kumquats to determine the quality of a product.

I've about had it with Amazon's practice of lumping reviews together like they do now and I'm considering initiating legal action against them for fraud. I already went round and round with them over a vendor that posted an inaccurate picture of a product and, so far, Amazon has done nothing to correct it.
Yeah, well I read them too? You misunderstood what I was saying. I wasn't questioning the usefulness of the reviews to user ignorance, but to the sellers practices. Many negative reviews are DOA etc., which can be a result of delivery practices or return policies.

I agree with you about Amazon lumping together reviews, but they more than make up for it in return policy.

.
I merely said I read the reviews; I never intended to say that you didn't read them. I apologize if that was the way it came across.

And my assumption that you were referring to user ignorance was wrong; I had based the assumption on the unfortunately common belief that most reviewer issues stem from ignorance, such as not knowing drives 3TB and up have to be formatted GPT instead of MBR, etc. Again, I apologize.

However, whether it is user ignorance, DOA issues that could be attributed to poor shipping and handling, etc., the same would apply to all drives and not cause a particular size drive to fair worse than the others in the 3TB and up category. The aforementioned issues being equal, the fact that 3TB drives get poor reviews, percentagewise, than the larger ones strongly suggest that something is amiss with them, the reason for which still remains elusive (despite my half baked theory).

I personally do not feel that Amazon's generous return policy makes up for the aggregated reviews, which is essentially consumer fraud (though probably not intentional). It's like comparing apples and kumquats.
 
#10 ·
None in the same price range that are any good. The 4TB WD Blue would be a good one as long as it is for storage only although I personally prefer the WD Blacks. The HGSTs also have a good reputation. Stay away from Seagate.
 
#11 ·
Hi @Twist86!

Since your going to mirror your storage configuration you can go with two Blue drives and they should work just fine, but when it comes to RAID I would prefer WD Red because designed specifically for RAID environments and has the specific build-in features for such usage.

http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=kVMgxW

For instance, it has TLER, which stops the hard drive from entering into a deep recovery cycle. For example, a desktop drive will try, try and try again to get your data back if a sector's not reading properly and this will result in timeouts, etc. A NAS not be dropped from a RAID array since it will enter in deep recovery cycle to attempt to repair the error, recover the data from the problematic area, and then reallocate a dedicated area to replace the problematic area.

As for the 3TB drives in general, I don't have such observation over their failure rate. As far as I know there are no lab results confirming that they have bigger failure rates, so I can't say for sure if that's a fact or not,

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Cheers!
smile.gif
 
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