Seagate Barracuda vs WD Blue: Which is best for a Linux home partition?

computersavvy · 12-02-2020, 03:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MirceaKitsune

Only slight annoyance is that just 3.6 TB out of the 4.0 announced by the drive are usable. Further more, the ext4 partition only offered 3.4 TB free space out of those once created... curious where 200 GB disappeared while the partition was empty, some kind of hidden cache I take it? But I'm well within this storage space so it's no real problem.

Marketing speak --> 4.0 TB
Computer speak --> 3.64 TiB
Those are the same values. 4.0 TeraBytes == 3.64 TebiBytes
3.64 TiB less the default 5% reserve --> ~3.45 TiB usable space.

Those are all very normal numbers. The problem is PEBCAC. (Problem Exists Between Chair And Computer) -- The person in the chair does not understand computer speak.

MirceaKitsune · 12-02-2020, 03:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by v00d00101

They are often more reliable and seek times are a bit faster. I have a couple of 320GB Black's bought somewhere around 2006 installed in a server that no longer runs 24/7, but they still work without issue. The server itself ran for 10 years providing game servers and some early NAS functionality. I've had many other WD Black drives and they've lasted a long long time.

Blue drives, i've had 2 DOA, 3 fail within a week and a handful that developed stupid numbers of errors within the first 3 months. Had a 500GB Green that developed a clicking head but still works ok. Got a couple of 1TB Blues that also have clicking heads and i think the cache has died or corrupted on them. A 2TB Blue that somehow ended up with misaligned sectors.

I've had too many Seagates that were DOA or died very quickly or went complete fail after a couple of months. Maxtors and IBM were other POS that broke a lot and had zero reliability. Toshiba and PNY SSD's are the same, exceptionally high fail rate. Also had a Toshiba HD laptop drive fail on my dads laptop some years back.

I like WD drives for HDD and Samsung/HyperX for SSD/M.2. Less time spent debugging problems.

But as ever its swings and roundabouts. The OP must have known he would get 1000 opposing opinions when starting such a loaded thread.

Sounds like I dodged a bullet by not buying the WD Blue drive. Also by not buying the Seagate Barracuda one... like I said most of what I've read indicates both WD and Seagate couldn't care less about PC users. I feel confident about the Ironwolf I got, especially after it passed all the default "badblocks" tests (write-read destructive mode).

masterclassic · 12-02-2020, 07:13 PM

About the 5% reserved ext4 space:
This is a default value. You can use another value by manually formatting the partition, using command line options.
From the man page:

Quote:

-m reserved-blocks-percentage
Specify the percentage of the filesystem blocks reserved for the super-user. This avoids fragmentation, and allows root-owned daemons, such as syslogd(8), to continue to function correctly after non-privileged processes are prevented from writing to the filesystem. The default percentage is 5%.

I don't remember where I found years ago) that this can take a max value of 7% and a min of 1%.

You can use the tune2fs command to get back some or all of this space. It seems that it is more important for system drives.

About the Green / Blue drives:
I've bought Green WD drives as data drives, mostly 2TB. I only had a failure, and this (hopefully) before even partitioning the drive (so I did change it and took a new one). I liked the fact that they were silent and didn't get too hot. I tried a few Toshiba DT01ACA200 that went too hotter than Greens. Now, I buy Blue 4TB drives for this use, connected to a Sandberg 2-bay docking station.

Nevertheless, a friend of mine had 2 (or more?) WD Green failed in a Synology NAS system (2 units of 5 drives connected as a 10-disk unit). Half of the drives were another type (higher quality, I guess special for NAS use) and the remaining were Green ones. The drives worked as a RAID 5 group, so 2 failing drives mean that the entire 10-disk group is failing. This NAS was running 24/7 as it was used by a web forum, media server and a web radio playing 24/7. Perhaps this use was too much for the Green models, mostly used for mid or lower end PCs.

computersavvy · 12-02-2020, 07:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by masterclassic

About the 5% reserved ext4 space:
This is a default value. You can use another value by manually formatting the partition, using command line options.
From the man page:

I don't remember where I found years ago) that this can take a max value of 7% and a min of 1%.

You can use the tune2fs command to get back some or all of this space. It seems that it is more important for system drives.

About the Green / Blue drives:
I've bought Green WD drives as data drives, mostly 2TB. I only had a failure, and this (hopefully) before even partitioning the drive (so I did change it and took a new one). I liked the fact that they were silent and didn't get too hot. I tried a few Toshiba DT01ACA200 that went too hotter than Greens. Now, I buy Blue 4TB drives for this use, connected to a Sandberg 2-bay docking station.

Nevertheless, a friend of mine had 2 (or more?) WD Green failed in a Synology NAS system (2 units of 5 drives connected as a 10-disk unit). Half of the drives were another type (higher quality, I guess special for NAS use) and the remaining were Green ones. The drives worked as a RAID 5 group, so 2 failing drives mean that the entire 10-disk group is failing. This NAS was running 24/7 as it was used by a web forum, media server and a web radio playing 24/7. Perhaps this use was too much for the Green models, mostly used for mid or lower end PCs.

When I built 2 new PCs in 2017 in one I installed as system disk a WD Blue and have had no problem as yet. In the other (my daily driver) I installed a WD Blue 3TB as system disk and 3 3TB blues in raid5 for data. During warranty I had 1 raid drive fail and WD replaced it. No data loss. Then, about 6 months ago a second raid drive failed. After replacing that one I replace my system disk with SSD and moved the WD Blue to add a 4th raid drive and upped the raid from raid5 to raid6 for for better fault tolerance. 2 of 7 WD Blue 2 TB drives failed in less than 4 years. Will be buying something else when I upgrade again.