Toshiba vs. Western Digital External Drives 5 and 6 TB reviews...

[Magical Penguin]

Are there any reviews of 3.5" external drives in the 5 to 6TB range? I'm particularly interested in the performance characteristics of the drives.

I know the Toshiba Canvio drives seem to be 7200RPM with large caches, while the Western Digital are 5400 RPM drives. But I'm wondering if this makes any difference in the real world when using it as an external drive via USB 3.0. (I'll be using both for backups, and for more regular use, so performance is important).

Am I also correct in thinking that all Seagate/Samsung 5TB and larger external drives are SMR drives and should be avoided for anything but backups? Or is that an incorrect assumption?

 

[Diavuno]

Very few drive use SMR right now. As far as I know it's only the seagate 8TB

 

[neo]

As far as I'm aware, there are no specific external hard drives. Usually you got a lower end drive when you a buy a "external hard drive". Personally, what I do when I need an external hard drive is buy a nice external case that I like then purchase an enterprise grade hard drive for it.

 

[Chuckleb]

I think a fan in the enclosure helps the life of a hard drive the most if you are building your own. I have seen way too many failures!

 

[neo]

I think a fan in the enclosure helps the life of a hard drive the most if you are building your own. I have seen way too many failures!

I agree. Lately I have been starting to favor passively cooled enclosures of solid aluminum that act as a heatsink. But what is also another leading factor in external hard drive failures is users handling the drive when it's powered on. If you need a reliable external drive, an SSD might make more sense.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Most of the build-your-own enclosures I've used have had considerably more room for air circulation in them than many of the ones the HDD vendors provide... think there was a series of seagate externals a few years back that had a very close fitting and poorly ventilated shell so you'd often get ambient temps of 50 or more.

However from my experience temperature has very little in the way of a positive correlation with failure rates - I'm still running a bunch of 2TB drives that got cooked (stacked them on top of each other to re-assemble a RAID array for five minutes to get a single file off... powered back down... cat stepped on the keyboard and triggered power up) to 70-80° that have so far been some of the most reliably drives I've ever seen. And giving the way I've seen most people treat external drives both when they're powered on and powered off I'd be inclined to say that shock was a far bigger factor than temperature.

I've also been using an mSATA SSD in a caddy for most uses and only use platter-based drives when they're not going to be carted around by someone else.

As far as I'm aware, there are no specific external hard drives.

Yes and no - after drive "shucking" became commonplace back during the Thailand floods, at least seagate and WD started using different controller PCBs on their external drives - namely only with a USB connector rather than a SATA connector. Same drive internals as the regular SATA drives but impossible to use with regular SATA connectors. Imagine they're still doing this today since it'll mean less in the way of intermediary parts.

 

[neo]

Yes and no - after drive "shucking" became commonplace back during the Thailand floods, at least seagate and WD started using different controller PCBs on their external drives - namely only with a USB connector rather than a SATA connector.

I personally haven't came across any of these drives yet, care to share any model numbers? Just curious to look into it.

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Not bought any myself (as above - make most of my own external drives) and not sure if they're still around but blackblaze did a post about them (can't find that from work though sadly).

Here's an example I found of one with a custom logic board via image search: http://i.imgur.com/CkS47sp.jpg

 

[neo]

Here's an example I found of one with a custom logic board via image search: http://i.imgur.com/CkS47sp.jpg

Ah, okay. That looks like a 2.5" drive found in those "WD My Passport" drives. I hardly consider them hard drives if it isn't 3.5".

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

Well I've seen three or four 3.5" discs over the years that have had the USB controller on the HDD logic board... anyway can't help feeling I've helped derail the topic.

Performance of external discs, especially if they use USB, is surely going to be more dependant on the USB controller present in the enclosure than anything else - if performance is really the number one consideration you'd do well to look for eSATA-based drives and connectors, they'll typically go as fast as the HDDs will allow, USB3 connectors have IMHO much more variance - especially when it comes to random IO. If all you're doing is backing up BAFs this probably won't be a concern and you'll be fine with USB. Likewise if you're not doing much random IO there's little reason to pick a 7200 drive over a 5x00 drive.

SMR drives should be avoided for anything where data might be written randomly; it only deals well with data being written in biq sequential chunks.