Hard Drive Recommendations

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Will Rickards

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My 4TB drives are nearing capacity and I'm looking at larger drives.
What drives are you guys using?

I see this amazon sale on a seagate 8TB 5400RPM drive for 109 but seems it is shingled and not very good.
 
The WD Ultrastar Datacenter drives are my favorites. The Seagate EXOS are a bit cheaper but noisy.
I do not suggest the consumer drives as many have only 10^-14 UBER and lower workload ratings.
 
I have more Seagate drives than anything else, but all of my 14TB+ drives are system pulls from enterprise product lines and I'm not picky about what I get given what I pay for them. The Seagate enterprise (Exos / Ironwolf) are a little louder but I have to be less than six feet from my file server to tell that.
 
Make sure you get the SATA version of the Ultrastar or EXOS drives. Maybe you were looking at SAS drives?
 
I've also used both the Ultrastar DC HC560 20TB SATA and Seagate Exos X16 SATA. I ended up selling the 16TB's to a friend just because they weren't the right fit for what I was planning but there was nothing wrong with them. The Ultrastar HDDs have been fine so far. I get mine through B&H photo so that the warranty is valid through WD or Seagate for the 5 years. Prices are cheaper on Amazon but the warranty is often served through a no-name reseller because they're sold as OEM drives.
 
I feel a little pedestrian with my 3xWD Blue setup but it's been reliable and it's more space than I really plan to use for a very long time. I think I'm sitting at ~5TB used on the array, total? And thats with a backup of my steam games thrown on there so I don't have to waste my data cap downloading them again.
 
In the enterprise drive category I have 8x18TB WD DC, 8x18TB & 4x20TB Seagate EXOS plus older 8x10TB Seagates Enterprise/EXOS. The old Seagates were some of the first they had with Heliums, but they are quiet and refuse to die. It's not that the newer EXOS are terrible, but not what I want in a NAS near me when I'm watching the TV or working. The NAS is actually farther away from than the computer.
 
sedrosken said:
I feel a little pedestrian with my 3xWD Blue setup but it's been reliable and it's more space than I really plan to use for a very long time. I think I'm sitting at ~5TB used on the array, total? And thats with a backup of my steam games thrown on there so I don't have to waste my data cap downloading them again.
Click to expand...
I have numerous WD Red and Elemental pulled drives of 8/10/14TB capacity, but they are for backup NAS and archives.
 
www.tomshardware.com

Toshiba X300 14TB HDD Review: A Swing and a Miss

More capacity, but not more performance.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com
I would be buying at least their NAS drives if I bought Toshiba, but it depends on the usage. I might use X300s for archives or something.
When I want cheap drives I get the WD Elements/Easystore 14-18TB on sale and remove the drives.
My EXOS and WD Ultrastar DC drives are all still doing well. I also have a few Ironwolf Pros scattered in various places.
Lately HDD prices are relatively high compared to many other computer parts that have dropped.
 
My issue with Toshiba drives in general is that its warranty service is trash. Kind of the opposite of WD, where the drives are born trash and die trash, but at least they make it easy to replace their garbage-hardware. Toshiba drives are a black hole where you send something out and never get anything back. I haven't had larger than 10TB drive Toshiba drive die. I'm not expecting that it's any better now though.
 
Do you really have problems with good drives like the Ultrastar DC or is it just the history of the old single digit TB drives from years ago?
 
I'm under the impression that anything with *Star in its name is carrying the IBM/Hitachi legacy forward, but I still prefer not to deal with WD.
My relationship to WD has been marred since the days when drives were measured in the 10s of megabytes.
 
I thought most used those giant Seagate MFM drives in the olden PC days. :LOL:
My fist experience with WD was with a Bowmar Brain, IIRC MX70 ~1973. They didn't make hard drives for many years later.
Maybe I'm just just lucky, but have had minimal issues with the WD HDDs. I never put GREEN drives in a RAID though.
The worst was a new 4TB mobile drive about 7 years ago when they first arrived. Even though I fully encrpted it and did a full scan test, there were all kinds of SMART errors before it was a week in the field.
 

HGST WD Ultrastar DC HC530 14TB SATA 6Gb/s 3.5-Inch Data Center HDD - WUH721414ALE604 0F31152 (Renewed)​

128.00 !!!!
Also have

​

 
Storage is the one item that, aside from a couple exceptions now and again for low-capacity memory cards for specialty devices, I refuse to buy used or open box or really any condition other than brand new. I'll take bulk packaging, but they do need to be new for me to be interested.
 
I am perfectly willing to buy used drives, but nothing I store only exists in only one place for more than maybe a single day.
 
Handruin said:
Renewed hdds always make me pause, especially newer ones that are helium sealed.
Click to expand...
Honestly, even new HDDs give me pause these days. The bit density has gotten way too high. If any one part of the drive fails, you lose data. I trust stored bits on a chip, instead of bits of rust spinning at thousands of times per minute, a lot more. The last HDD I purchased was a 2TB, 5400 RPM Samsung c. 2010. It's still in my system but I only use it for non-critical backups. When SSD prices drop again, I'll replace it permanently with a 4 or 8 TB SSD. Other than this drive, I haven't used an HDD in many years. Once SSD prices fell under about $200/TB, I considered HDDs obsolete. My price point for new drives was always around $100. So long as I could get the amount of storage I needed for that price, all was well. When my needs reached around 500 GB, that was roughly when SSDs of that size hit $100. For me that was the crossover point. Last year you could find 2TB SSDs for about $100. My drive needs haven't even reached that threshold yet.
 
SSDs lately are worse than ever and HDDs also fail occasionally. If you don't have failures it's because you don't have enough data.
Hopefully I'll be over a petabyte in total experience by 2025, but a few hundred TB are discarded and slower old drives. SSDs are now a bit less than 100TB, but expected to increase. Ideally I'd have about 200TB of SSDs and 800TB of HDDS in 2026. By then I will eliminate all the 8TB-12TB drives as all under 8TB have already been eliminated. I also want to eliminate all the SSDs under 4TB.

Going all SSD is just too expensive. For example four of the 30.72TB Micron 6500 U.3 SSDs and a controller card are pushing $20K. At that rate it would be over $100K just to move my existing HDDs to SSDs. There is no logic to do this just for personal use.
 
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I think it depends on what you get. The very fast SSDs get hot. Heat is the enemy of all electronics. For me even the slowest SSD is worlds faster than any HDD.

The thing here is HDDs are one bump away from data loss. Maybe I accidentally bump into my PC case. Now I'm looking at replacing the HDDs while hoping I backed up all my data. That's my reliability concern. The smaller the bits get, the more easily the whole thing is rendered useless by a little bump or vibration.

Then there's power consumption. The 5400 RPM HDDs are around 5 watts, which means 7 or 8 from the wall. The 7200 RPM ones are probably north of 10 watts at the socket. With as much storage as you, I might be looking at a few hundred watts just for the HDDs alone. Heat aside, I couldn't afford the electricity. Current rates are around $0.35/kW-hr but we'll be over a buck a kW-hr if ConEd gets its proposed rate increase approved. Even at current rates, the power bill would be like $750 to $1,000 annually just for the HDDs. That's not counting the power use of the PCs they're in.

SSD is cost effective if your personal use is in line with most users. I couldn't imagine what I'd fill up hundreds of TB with. Save every movie ever made? Download the entire Internet? I have well under a TB of unique data. What exactly do you do that uses so much space?
 
I have significantly less storage need than Lunar but I can tell you that raw captures for video in any codec at a sufficiently high bitrate and raw photos take up obscene amounts of storage. Just, gobs upon gobs upon gobs of it. I only capture video very occasionally but my scratch folder for that is well over 300GB in and of itself. Someone like Lunar I'd totally buy uses that much storage on media.

Me personally, I have a software archive of all kinds of things, from game install media to tools to operating system images, stuff that'll disappear from the face of the web if you look at it funny (a few things have, apart from my copies) and stuff that's generally just getting harder and harder to find that I know I'll need again, and usually do a couple times a year. That's about a terabyte and a half by itself. I'm starting to archive my steam games both for greater speed and ease of installation and just in case it disappears from my library some day. That's well over 900GB and growing all the time -- games these days are considered small if they're under 70GB, and I haven't even gotten a tenth of my steam library copied over. My movies and TV shows are comparatively a small part of my storage needs at "only" 800GB, my music library is a "paltry" 100GB or so, and I have about 7-10GB of just books in ePub, PDF and audio form. I make backups to my server from my client machines by just copying over whole disk images, and I currently have about 2TB sitting in that folder. I have a 16TB array and damn if I'm not eyeing up another upgrade sometime in the coming years. I'm already using close to 6TB of it.

That said, I get where you're coming from. When I was fifteen -- i.e., when I had already been on this forum for two years -- my entire life lived on a single 250GB hard drive with free space. All of my data, all of my installed software, my operating system. Everything. I had no idea how to fill the rest of it.
 
jtr1962 said:
I think it depends on what you get. The very fast SSDs get hot. Heat is the enemy of all electronics. For me even the slowest SSD is worlds faster than any HDD.

The thing here is HDDs are one bump away from data loss. Maybe I accidentally bump into my PC case. Now I'm looking at replacing the HDDs while hoping I backed up all my data. That's my reliability concern. The smaller the bits get, the more easily the whole thing is rendered useless by a little bump or vibration.

Then there's power consumption. The 5400 RPM HDDs are around 5 watts, which means 7 or 8 from the wall. The 7200 RPM ones are probably north of 10 watts at the socket. With as much storage as you, I might be looking at a few hundred watts just for the HDDs alone. Heat aside, I couldn't afford the electricity. Current rates are around $0.35/kW-hr but we'll be over a buck a kW-hr if ConEd gets its proposed rate increase approved. Even at current rates, the power bill would be like $750 to $1,000 annually just for the HDDs. That's not counting the power use of the PCs they're in.

SSD is cost effective if your personal use is in line with most users. I couldn't imagine what I'd fill up hundreds of TB with. Save every movie ever made? Download the entire Internet? I have well under a TB of unique data. What exactly do you do that uses so much space?
Click to expand...
If you have very little data then drives are of almost no significance. Just get a 2TB SK Hynix Platinum P41 or something like that.

Of course SSDS are faster HDDs, but rather expensive to scale. I'm not running most HDDs more than 1/3rd of the time and many are on less than 1/10th of the time. Even my primary NAS has the drives set to spin down after a while, so 24,000 hours on the drives is probably less than 10,000 spinning. It's not like I'm running a server farm or IPS with drives churning 24/365. :LOL: I am looking to expand into high-end digital video, where the files are quite large (not that I don't have a substantial amount of stills already). I'm disgusting by R5c, so will probably go with a cine only form factor and rent most of it. My strategy for about a decade has been to have a smaller amount of SSDs as a wsorking space and NAS for bulk storage.

One of the reasons to replace the older HDDs is for power efficiency and physical space. The newer drives use far less power than the old ones for the much higher capacity and fewer units of rack space. I noticed a huge power/heat difference when going from the atmospherically charged 6TB drives to the 10TB and 8TB He filled drives around 2016. Now we have 24TB HDDs and larger when the HAMR finally arrives in volume.
 
We will be receiving some kind of replacement for the dying Ironwood pro. How much and with what tools would you test that drive before storing data on it?
 
I usually run Seatools long generic drive tests through 5 - 10 cycles when I first get a new mechanical drive.
Seatools is kind of nice for letting these tests run in parallel, which is one of the reasons I like using it that way.
 
Mercutio said:
I usually run Seatools long generic drive tests through 5 - 10 cycles when I first get a new mechanical drive.
Seatools is kind of nice for letting these tests run in parallel, which is one of the reasons I like using it that way.
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Wouldn't parallel testing just thrash the drive and slow down the test process terribly?
 
So you are running tests on separate drives with one instance? Somehow I though your were running multiple instances and directing that all to beat up one drive. :(
 
It seems that the drive is being shipped into the US through SFO in a small box 9*6*3 inches and 0.81kg, like the kind individual drives are packed in. Is Seagate shipping both new and used drives from the Thailands? I wonder if they are repairable or not.
 
I can't believe I'm shucking external drives again, but I already ran out of space on the little 4 bay N150 NAS box I have running Plex. 48TB was not enough TBs.

I was able to get 4x 26TB external drives for $1200 by buying Seagate external drives that are by all indication the same damn thing as Exos/Ironwolf enterprise drives, about 20% less than what I would've paid to get even renewed bare drives. Hopefully, the extra 30TB of usable space on that system will make it worthwhile for me.

The drives I got are mostly labeled as Barracuda, although one still has Exos branding. They do all appear to be 7200 rpm drives (~200MB/sec reads) and they're all a bit noisier than I might appreciate if I had to sit next to them, but fortunately they're going to go live in a PC that's sitting in a climate-controlled closet instead.
 
How can you seriously ask a question like that?

Sadly, HDD prices are shooting through the roof right now as well, so I do think that the only deals to be had at the moment are on the external drives that you can shuck and install internally. They're perfectly normal SATA drives for all practical purposes; they're 7200rpm models although as I mentioned in my last post in this thread, most of them are badged as Barracuda (consumer) products rather than the Exos models I think we'd all rather get.
 
Mercutio said:
I can't believe I'm shucking external drives again, but I already ran out of space on the little 4 bay N150 NAS box I have running Plex. 48TB was not enough TBs.

I was able to get 4x 26TB external drives for $1200 by buying Seagate external drives that are by all indication the same damn thing as Exos/Ironwolf enterprise drives, about 20% less than what I would've paid to get even renewed bare drives. Hopefully, the extra 30TB of usable space on that system will make it worthwhile for me.

The drives I got are mostly labeled as Barracuda, although one still has Exos branding. They do all appear to be 7200 rpm drives (~200MB/sec reads) and they're all a bit noisier than I might appreciate if I had to sit next to them, but fortunately they're going to go live in a PC that's sitting in a climate-controlled closet instead.
Click to expand...
HMMM. Where did you get the external drives????
 
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