What Big Drives are you buying now

[Clocker]

My 3x 3TB Seagates are getting old and with Win 10 here, it is time for a storage system upgrade.. One Seagate had to be replaced for warranty. They other two have hit 300,000 load cycles. So, I would like to replace them. Most likely with 2x 4TB drives.

I do not use RAID, but I do duplicate data between the two drives. What drives are you guys buying these days? Hitachi (HGST) seems to be the obvious choice based on the BackBlaze reports but there seems to be a significant price premium for that brand. Do you guys think it is worth it?

Thanks,
CxP

 

[Mercutio]

I buy Seagates and HGST drives. Most of my bulk data is on Seagate drives but every once in a while I'll get lucky and score an HGST drive at a comparable price.
I'm also fully willing to de-shell an external drive and lose out on the crappy warranty. The 5TB Seagates perform like ass but I can buy two of them for what a proper 6TB drive costs. You don't use them in RAID but I'll also note that they do sort-of behave when used that way.

I'd actually like comment from resident WD expert Buck about exactly which of their drives are supposed to suck less. Last time it was brought up, he was pretty dismissive of WD Blacks.

I do still think of 3 and 4TB drives as "big." My psychological threshold seems to be whether or not I'd feel I'd use it for everyday storage tasks in a server or if I'd want it dedicated to backups or large disk arrays.

 

[Handruin]

I've had good luck with HGST 4TB NAS drives. I have 14 of them running 24x7 and no issues with them so far. I wait until they go on sale at newegg before buying them. edit: I also want to note that any of the ones I've ever purchased have always come in the full retail packaging rather than bare drive. This could help survivability from UPS/etc.

edit 2: I also have a single 6TB HGST NAS drive. So far it's been fine but it's not the most cost effective from a GB/$. Some reports claim it to be noisier but I don't really hear it.

 

[mubs]

A few months ago I bought 2 x 3TB HGST NAS drives to replace the aging drives in my machine. Locally, there was not much of a price premium, and AFAIK, they suck a lot less than other brands.

 

[ddrueding]

I have 8x 4TB and 5x 6TB HGST NAS drives at home, and 36x 4TB Seagate NAS at work. For home I went with the most reliable, at work there is enough redundancy that I went with cheapest.

 

[LunarMist]

I have 8x 4TB and 5x 6TB HGST NAS drives at home, and 36x 4TB Seagate NAS at work. For home I went with the most reliable, at work there is enough redundancy that I went with cheapest.

I've also been happy with the 6TB NADS, though they are not in RAID. I have a bunch of the old Seagate 6TB drives as well, but they have missing or non-standard mounting holes.

 

[jtr1962]

I'm personally holding off any purchases of large drives (to me that's anything 2TB and over) for a few years until large SSDs get close to price parity with mechanical disks. My 2TB drive isn't even half full yet. Moreover, given the tiny size of the magnetic bits needed to reach these huge drive sizes nowadays, I frankly don't consider anything out there reliable, particularly anything 7200RPM. Right now based on Samsung's retail pricing of its new 2TB SSD it appears SSDs are within a factor of eight of mechanical drives. With plans to increase the number of layers in 3D NAND by a factor of 4 or 8 by 2017, we'll probably get close to price parity by then. I'll even pay 50% more for a huge SSD knowing my data are likely less prone to loss.

In the end I suspect it may not just be price parity which kills mechanical drives but also the fact they get less reliable as they get denser.


Given the fact "small" SSDs are already affordable, I can probably safely say I purchased my last mechanical hard drive in 2011.

 

[jtr1962]

This is worth a read: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/10/kryders_law_of_ever_cheaper_storage_disproven/