Reliable hard drives for storage

How to choose hard drives least likely to fail in the long term?
> fewer platters?
> slower spinning?
> look up brand/model statistics (e.g. from backblaze)?
> anything else?
Thanks for your help.

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Just get whatever works
Those walmart drives just work for me, no need to spend a grand or more on some magnets to hold my 1s and 0s if you catch my drift

You don't. You can't know ahead of time which makes or models are likely to be good and which might be crap. You can only know in retrospect after the drives have been in service for years (this is what the Backblaze stats are). Furthermore, repeat after me: Any drive, from any manufacturer, of any model, can die at any time, with no warning. In other words, buy whatever's cheapest for the capacity you need, expect them to fail one day, and use redundancy (RAID) and make proper backups of anything you can't recreate.

all about luck

Regular backups are your god.

It's not worth spending twice as much for a little extra reliability when you should have backups anyway. Even the most reliable brands have nontrivial failure rates, and there are other ways to lose data.

Literally just buy the cheapest drive per GB. And get a second one for backup. Assuming you even care about losing data that can easily be redownloaded.

New 4TB drives go for like $70 on newegg. Approaching 1 cent per GB. It's ridiculous, it will take you years to download that much data on my internet connection.

90% of users can get by fine on an SSD which are also super cheap now.

If your worried about it make a raid 1 or 5 then replace them as they fail

>New
just buy used, it's usually half price, sometimes down even to quarter price.

last new drive I bought is from 2012. bought many more used ones and they usually have even smaller mileage than the last new one.

just avoid 3TB drives, they are notoriously more failure prone

Even the cheapest used drives on ebay aren't even half the price per GB of buying the cheapest new drives on newegg. And storage is one of the things I really distrust buying used. Unless I get a great discount.

If you want brand new available from most retailers I'd probably go with WD reds.

I bought a new hard drive recently from amazon. And received a heavily used drive with the previous owners data still on it. It looks like they just reset the SMART data to make the powered on hours 0. So buying new you may just get a used drive anyway.

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Avoid Seagate and you should be fine

Pretty much this.

>Any drive, from any manufacturer, of any model, can die at any time, with no warning.
If you don't believe this you are a retard and will loose data.

>Reliable HDD
None. Buy SSDs

Best standard used price is about $10/TB for 2-3TB 7.2k enterprise SAS drives, new 8TB Easystores are $16/TB and 10 TB $18/TB. The power savings alone make the new drives more economical after a year or two, and that's not even considering the extra hardware needed to run more smaller drives.

This right here, keeping your data comes from habits not hardware.

Yes, fewer platters is good.
More shit = more shit that can break
It's simple. 3 Platters are usually bad, with the exception of Gold/Enterprise stuff. So don't go beyond 2, which means don't go past 4TB atm.

>More shit = more shit that can break
Less shit = bigger problems when it does break.

>None. Buy SSDs
Amen. Less power. No noise. No vibration. Fast on. Shock-resistant - on or off. Higher speed (even the slowest SSD is many times faster than any HDD.)

Words of wisdom

That's not how it works.

Whats better for use with my pc that I am going to be using as a light desktop and as a plex server. WD Red Pro, or WD Blacks? They are about the same price and seem like the same. Anyone know the difference?

For the price of a single high capacity SSD I can setup a whole NAS with several times the capacity with mirroring backups.

no.

Raid is not static redundancy, ergo not a backup

Then how would you back up your drives?

>How to choose hard drives least likely to fail in the long term?
You don't. By the time this is know [usually "known" from somewhat dubious sources that don't match your use case], the respective drive is probably no longer economical to buy.

What you do instead is run more drives with more copies of your data. Typicallz RAID1, 6 or 5 or some good replication / erasure coding scheme with backups.

This video was just posted.

youtu.be/SH_XsrHezN4

You put your backup on a RAID, you weirdo

no RAID is used on your NAS drives

And on your backup

Do not buy Seagate and Western Digital
That's it

>Furthermore, repeat after me: Any drive, from any manufacturer, of any model, can die at any time, with no warning

Yeah that's true but that's not a good excuse for not making an informed purchase to minimize the likelihood of failure to the greatest extent you possibly can.

For true long term data back up, go with tape drives.

If you want that data more accessible at any moment, go with quantity over quality. Good enough disk drives set up in RAID 6.

RAID 1 or whatever it was or ZFS or whatever it was
Or get an SSD, when they croak, they just become read only

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You dont need to spend extra on nas rated drives. Just buy economical external USB drives and shuck them. Right now the best price/TB ratio is with 8TB drives.

2 things kill hard drives, heat in vibration in that order. Most people are pretty good about not letting their drives fall/bump around so its down to heat. Install a program like Hard Disk Sentinel and make sure the hard drive doesnt get above about 115F (45C). If you can keep it at 105 or less you're golden. If you're installing the hard drives in a PC have a front cooling fan spinning slowly over the hard drives and you'll never have an issue with heat death.

You should still buy 2x hard drives though, let one fill up and then copy its contents to the second one putting the 1st into a safe place. I currently have 4 8TB drives in my PC and haven't had any catastrophic failures with my last 15 or so HD's, what drives have failed have failed gracefully (corrupted sectors, i lost maybe 1-20 files).

Take it from an old-fag (31) whos been hording data since 2000. If you follow the above protocol you'll have few failures and enjoy your data for as long as you can stomach the psychological weight of it.

> Install a program like Hard Disk Sentinel and make sure the hard drive doesnt get above about 115F (45C)
My (admittedly unshucked) 8tb WD idles at that. Am I screwed?

No it's just an additional factor that can contribute to drive death.
Keeping external HDDs in their intended enviroment is a bad idea in my opinion. either you run them at very high temps or you keep turning them on and off all the time. both suck.
I've been doing the same as the oldfag, except I've switched to 10tb enterprise drives (warranty) as they're like 15% more expensive than external at my place,and I've only had a 250gb ages old maxtor just abruptly dying, other drives went slowly with increasing corruption of the sectors.

So a 50 dollar dongfengwang 8tb hard drive is just as good as a hitachi?

Its more about the max temperature and how long the higher temps were sustained. This data should be stored in the SMART data (well, max temp at least). If you feel the drive has routinely been above 115~ I'd ebay it asap. If you must have external drives get a non oem HD case that has a fan.They dont need to be loud or move too much air, just a little seems to be enough. Vastly better than the plastic sarcophagus that they come in.

If you read reviews on external drives that remain shucked they have horrific failure rates over many generations. Probably 1/5 or more. I have no idea why HD companies put up with the return rate that must give them. I guess a fair amount of people dont bother sending things back for warranty.

Who the hell even has presence here besides WD, Seagate, Toshiba, and HGST? And you can't trust dongfengwang to actually give you the capacity, so that's out of the question anyway.
So basically...
Just buy the cheapest from the Big 4 that isn't 3 TB or 5400 rpm (because that's gae). Blackblaze doesn't find advantage in "enterprise" drives.

(slightly off-topic blogposting)
feelsgoodman, enabled Hyper-V and verified Macrium backup image with viBoot

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>the Big 4 that isn't 3 TB or 5400 rpm (because that's gae)
I have 3TB WD Red 5400 rpm for storage, is that bad?

Who knows. WD30EFRX eventually got completely replaced in 2018 and it's not in the charts for 2017. Compared to everything else with more than 300k drive days, WD30EFRX fared the worst (still "only" 4%).
He's just shitting on 5400 rpm, is fine for NAS.

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failure rate is on a bell curve, based on storage size. at the ends are 1tb & 12tb platter drives, with the lowest rates of failure. 2 & 10 tb drives have higher rates of failure, with 4 & 8 tb drives higher still.
never never never buy a 6 tb drive, from any manufacturer.

First and foremost:
HOW MUCH DO YOU WANT TO STORE?
It is really important.

So I should get a 4TB or 8TB drive?

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If you want reliability get an ssd, 860 EVOs are cheap enough now for large storage.
With them you know exactly how many TBW you have and they hardly ever fail before that.

He is shitposting.

If you somehow find a 2 TB SSD for $240, at that point you can still get three HDDs, one for use, backup, and second backup.
If you know nothing could possibly ever habben to the SSD (act of god, theft, plain user error), and you don't need more than a 2 TB total, then yeah it's cheap ezpz.

Theres ton of bullshit information in this thread.

Most HDD are fine and have

So getting a 6tb should be fine? What do you recommend? I'm leaning towards a WD Red, it's for storage mainly movies and tv shows.

whatever media you use,

backup your shit

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get an SSD
yw.

12 TB in RAID6: 4 drives, a fuckton of money
6 TB in RAID6: 6 drives, 0.75*a fuckton of money
In the end, I don't care if I RMA them or there will be a cheap replacement when they die.

Man I want to fucking kill myself. Went 5 years, all so good, never kept up with current hardware world because I didn't need to. Recently bought a few drives, drives are cheaper, cool. A day after I got my shit and started using them, realize YOU CAN SHUCK external hard drives for cheaper.
>Q: Why are internal hard drives more expensive?
>A: Supply and demand ecks dee!

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>wd-blue-4t.jpg
>it's actually 6tb

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failure rate is time
arrivial to 1 year: most likely
1 year to 10 years: least likely
10 years to infinity: don't trust that shit
buy 2 different models if not 2 different brands of the same size
always have 2 copies
everything above 4tb seems to be helium now
is helium bad? who fucking knows

>all these answers
>no HGST or Hitachi

Is WD Purple a meme? is it true that it was a reflashed Blue? Can I use it as desktop hard disk? I saw lots of Purple drives in the marketplace.

8TB and more is helium, for Toshiba even 10TB isn't helium.
I've switched to only 10TB seagate exos enterprise drives. We'll see if helium is bad in a few years I guess.
>69365338
it's the same drive with different firmware. you can use it as a desktop drive, but you should just get a blue instead.

>Or get an SSD, when they croak, they just become read only
In theory. I had one SSD spontaneously lose all data stored, but it still seemed functional. I turned off my PC one night and the next day there was nothing on the SSD at all. It's actually still working now, years later. I had another SSD, some SanDisk 480GB MLC drive, spontaneously fail to the point where it didn't even appear connected anymore, it was just dead. I RMA'd that one and got a replacement, which is still fine now, also years later.

>one SSD, no mention of brand
>SanDisk
Buy Samsung goy it won't let you down like those other brands

First one was some OCZ from the SATA 2 days. I have a couple of Samsung SSDs too (850 EVOs), those have been fine so far, but I only store shit like games which can be easily downloaded again or programs which can be reinstalled on SSDs. The OS too of course, that one gets a periodic backup.