Help to choose HD

I run 7200RPM HDD on all my Thinkpads as they have rubber rails on the chassis as part of their system and am used to how they run as far as execution of commands to bring up programs and such.

I was running a Hitachi 100GB HDD and switched one to a WD Scorpio Black 250GB HDD. After I got it set up with FreeBSD installed I did something and started to turn to another and it shocked me how much faster it was than the old HDD. I have WD Blue HDD but this seemed much faster.

I'd go with this one, a 2TB WD Black:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD2003FZEX/
 
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I'm running older hardware and I find SSDs still provide a big improvement. For example I have one machine with a mechanical disk and it takes much longer to do installs. So there's still some advantage to be had. I've been buying SanDisk "SSD Plus" drives, they're fairly inexpensive as far as SSDs go. I did have a little trouble with the SanDisk brand in an older laptop computer. On that one I used a Pny disk. It had some booting irregularity with the SanDisk drives I have.
 
I have had a Kingston 128G SSD on one system for testing, now I have a mirror of 2x240G ScanDisk for my current computer. If you have no need to store videos which requires more disk space, you will enjoy the speed - and you will also enjoy the silence.
 
Yeah that's another thing about SSDs. You don't realize how much noise mechanical drives make until you have a machine without them. The silence ~is~ golden.
 
I assume that a Mac would have room for two drives. An SSD for system files is a good idea. Definitely will add some snap. It can be quite small, and therefor cheap. As for your other choices, I'd definitely go for Western Digital.
 
Yeah that's another thing about SSDs. You don't realize how much noise mechanical drives make until you have a machine without them. The silence ~is~ golden.

No doubt they are more quiet than a mechanical HDD, and I have had HDD that did that clicking thingy, but can put my ear to the palmrest of the one I'm on now and can't hear it.

I have 3 running within hand reach, my X61 .mp3 player a few feet away and can't hear any of them.
 
...can put my ear to the palmrest of the one I'm on now and can't hear it.
With so little sensual feedback, I find it a bit annoying if I want to find out whether the disk actually spins and the heads move.
This is one of the reasons I love disks like the Seagate Cheetahs. They give very good sensual feedback. If I place them loosely outside of the computer, and let them work hard (say, build kernel/world), the drives actually move, only restrained by the cables.
 
I'm getting ready in insert a Hitachi TravelStar 7K100 PATA HDD in my new Thinkpad T43 and start work on it. :p

That has a lengthy review that goes into some detail about HDD specifics and the methods they used to test it.
 
I have 3 running within hand reach, my X61 .mp3 player a few feet away and can't hear any of them.

On my laptop I never could hear the mechanical drive that one had. Though the performance was like night and day when I changed it out for an SSD. The mechanical drive that laptop came with was a really slow one. Now on my desktop computers, the way the chassis is and the fact they sit on the desk next to me, the noise from the drives is quite pronounced. The one I mainly use has SDDs. The other one I don't use as much has a mechanical drive and I can hear that one pretty distinctly.
 
Keep in mind that WD has color codes: blue, green, red, black and gold (maybe more). IMO blues and greens are waste of money: won't last long. Blacks and golds is the way to go.

In 2012 I put together a raidz2 system that initially had six WD greens. One died within first year, second after three years and third drive was replaced after five years. Three of the original drives are still running without errors after almost 6 years of spinning (~52000 Power-On Hours).

Cheap consumer grade drives can still be used when you are protected against disk failures by redundancy. Especially when disabling APM to reduce load/unload cycles and adjusting sysctl() kern.cam.da.default_timeout and kern.cam.da.retry_count to mimic TLER behavior.
 
... WD greens... Three of the original drives are still running without errors after almost 6 years of spinning
The problem with the greens is that they park after a few seconds of inactivity. (don't remember how much exactly. 8 seconds? 12 seconds?)
This is why I retired the only WD green I ever bought after I noticed the park count far exceeded the lifetime specification after only a few months of use.
There is a firmware patch from WD to turn off that behavior. If you didn't apply that, I'd be really curious about the SMART data of the surviving drives :)
 
The first thing I did with the greens was to disable that "Intellipark" feature (I'm glad I read about it beforehand). So the load cycle count attribute is about the same as power cycle count. That value with those drives is less than 100.

I have noticed that newer consumer drives from Seagate also have this head parking syndrome, but you can stop that behavior by disabling APM.
 
By default the timeout is set to 30 seconds and retry count to 4. Reducing these values allows a redundant pool to continue delivering data without hiccups when a desktop drive without TLER is failing.

/etc/sysctl.conf
Code:
# mimic TLER behavior
# note: error recovery is useful in cases where you lost your redundancy!
kern.cam.da.default_timeout=7
kern.cam.da.retry_count=1
kern.cam.ada.default_timeout=7
kern.cam.ada.retry_count=1
This link has some additional information about TLER and desktop drives
 
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FYI, I can hear that Hitachi TravelStar in my T43.

I've had tinnitus half my life but it does not effect my ability to hear well.
 

Warning: The hard drive failure rates, as reported by Backblaze, apply to those drives in their environment and with their workload. They should not be extrapolated without a detailed understanding of the failure mechanism and the general operation of disk drives.
For example, just because the worst few drives reported by them are Seagate doesn't mean that all Seagate models are bad, nor that all Seagate drives are individually bad. They report on models that are typically obsolete by the time they have gathered good statistics. One also has to see their failure rates in perspective of the system size: for a person who has 1 or 2 drives, the difference between an annual failure rate of 1% and 2% is not relevant in a single year, as either makes failures very improbable, but doesn't help with the effects of a disk failure.


Warning: While Henry Newman is an expert on HPC, his analysis (or rather rebuttal) of the Backblaze is spotty and incomplete.

The important lesson is: Since you can't predict failures, and can't even very well predict the failure rates of drive models, you need redundancy to survive. Independent of whether you believe Backblaze or Henry Newman, you have to be prepared for disk failures. And with today's disk sizes and failure probabilities, if you want good data reliability, you better prepare for double faults (finding a second fault in the surviving drives when repairing a disk failure).
 
Keep in mind that WD has color codes: blue, green, red, black and gold (maybe more). IMO blues and greens are waste of money: won't last long. Blacks and golds is the way to go.

I agree.

Mt WD green drive died so fast I was mad, but it was my own ignorance then, but it was light-duty home use so I think my madness was still justified. I have since been buying WD Red drives for my FreeBSD NAS servers (yes I have more than one) and so far so good. If I was in desperate need and red was not on the shelf I would buy black or gold but I think gold would be a waste of money for home NAS use.
 
I have WD blues from when they started making them, and they still work. In fact I've got blues running 24/7 that are some years old.

We all seem to have anecdotal reports on HDD life spans. For me it's that in the last 20 years or so, all my WD drives still work, and all the Segates have died, although there's only a few of those. It seems to be a personal thing and if I was to take a scientific approach to making a choice I'd say ask an astrologer. :)
 
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