Hitachi 3TB 7K3000 Drives: Any experiences?

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Patrick

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Looking to purchase a few 3TB drives and have had great experiences with the 2TB 7K2000 series. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
 

nitrobass24

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Dec 26, 2010
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Not worth the $$$. Basically cost 100% more for 50% more space.

2TB - $109/2048 = $0.053/GB
3TB - $229/3072 = $0.074/GB
 

odditory

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Dec 23, 2010
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These things just barely came into stock within the last week or so at least in U.S., so not a whole lot of people have this drive yet, or are going to have any meaningful experience. I'm not going to touch them until they get in the $175-$200 range myself, and if I do it will only be a few to play around with since I won't phase out my 2TB's until 4TB drives.

2TB drives combined with 24-bay norco cases and low cost HBA's kind of already have me at the 'diminishing returns' threshhold - I'm not hitting my 75% full status as often as I have in the past with smaller drives, which is my threshold for adding more drives.
 
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Patrick

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odditory: If you really wanted Fry's has an external Hitachi 3TB (USB 2.0) for $159.99. Could always crack those open, but then you have a 3TB drive with no warranty. Still with 2TB drives in the $80 range, I may wait until internal 3TB drives are under $140.
 

odditory

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looks like J&R has 7K3000 3TB for $179 with no tax and free ship. I had sworn to avoid 3TB and wait for 4TB, but these prices are starting to get interesting, since $175 was my magic pricepoint where I might buy some. External version of drive is $10 less, perhaps due to lower warranty or just less demand anticipated.

Before I buy any however I am going to wait and see what price on 5400RPM version ends up being, since I really just need more backup space at this point.
 
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odditory

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odditory: If you really wanted Fry's has an external Hitachi 3TB (USB 2.0) for $159.99. Could always crack those open, but then you have a 3TB drive with no warranty. Still with 2TB drives in the $80 range, I may wait until internal 3TB drives are under $140.
There is actually something to be said about the idea of buying a gross of external drives without warranty, if there's a significant cost savings, at least when it comes to Hitachi. The idea is with the money saved you buy spares. I say that because I have around 90 Hitachi drives that have outlived their 3yr warranties without ever being RMA'd. So if you're buying a bunch of drives that are likely to outlive their warranties anyway, AND you plan on keeping them long-term, there's an argument to be made for "why bother" with a warranty - again, when you're talking larger quantities with a significant cost savings over the warrantied SKU.

At the last co. I worked at we had a few hundred cellphones with verizon, all subscribed to insurance with a monthly fee of $7 or so per line. At one point I realized we were paying 6x more per month in combined "insurance" than the actual failure/loss rate of phones. So we dropped insurance from every line except the few execs known to be careless with their phones, and went back to buying full price replacements for exceptions. Cost savings were significant.
 
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Patrick

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odditory: that is exactly what large storage vendors do, purchasing drives (with a minimum AFR guarantee) and servicing the warranties themselves versus letting Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, and the SSD guys service them.

What makes it slightly better is that drive prices tend to fall drastically over time, so if you purchase 20x $200 drives with warranty, versus 20x $180 drives without warranty, the drives that fail late in year 1, and also in years 2 and 3 will likely cost less than $180 to procure. Case and point, 2TB Hitachi drives fell in price by well over 30% from this time last year and 1.5TB drives were expensive 18 months ago but are dirt cheap now.