New harddrive

Odal3 · « **on:** 22 May 2015, 02:44 am »

Anyone got a good recommendation for a RELIABLE hard drive? Was thinking of the Western Digital Red 3 or 4 TB drives and it will be a storage drive for music, pictures and maybe video. What I'm unsure of is the speed - I do some photo editing and video editing at times so I need to move a lot of data in and out. (primary HD is a solid state drive). The desktop PC will not be in audio room so super silent is not important.

*Scotty* · « **Reply #1 on:** 22 May 2015, 02:57 am »

A Hitachi Enterprise Hard-drive may still be the most reliable one available. Western Digital recently bought them and I don't know if the bean counters have ruined the product line yet or not.
With a desktop computer that takes a full size hard-drive, this would be the one I would choose for a high reliability installation.
Scotty

*Scotty* · « **Reply #2 on:** 22 May 2015, 03:08 am »

The company was known as Hitachi Global Storage Technologies before its purchase by Western Digital, it is now known as HGST. Hopefully they are still engaged in cutting edge digital storage research. The Helium gas containing hard-drives are currently cutting edge for HDs that have a rotating disk in them.
Scotty

kc8apf · « **Reply #3 on:** 22 May 2015, 03:11 am »

HGST and Seagate enterprise drives are quite reliable in heavy use scenarios. WD and Toshiba, not so much. These days, the motors and bearings have gotten so reliable that the heads wear our first. That's simply a function of how much reading and writing you do. Of course, it's a complicated topic. Leaving data untouched on a drive can cause it to be lost as well.

JohnR · « **Reply #4 on:** 22 May 2015, 03:18 am »

It's probably worth looking at the reviews on newegg for any drives you're interested in.

I wonder whether you can split up the storage though into SSD and HDD. SSD for current work, HDD for older archived work. I moved everything to SSDs (except for a NAS) and it was expensive but haven't regretted it.

Odal3 · « **Reply #5 on:** 22 May 2015, 03:46 am »

thank you - really appreciate all the input! Now I have a better idea what to look for.

John - that's a good idea, and will look into it as well. 100 percent ssd is a bit too expensive right now. Been tempted to go the nas/ server setup but haven't had a chance to researxh. Probably should since this will be the 4th drive in the box.

GentleBender · « **Reply #6 on:** 22 May 2015, 09:28 am »

You will get good results by putting the OS on an SSD and your data on a hitachi drive. Make sure your OS supports TRIM for the SSD.

whell · « **Reply #7 on:** 22 May 2015, 02:44 pm »

2 Western digital and 2 Seagate drives in use here and - knock on wood - not a bit of trouble with any of them. The oldest if over 5 years old now.

Odal3 · « **Reply #8 on:** 22 May 2015, 04:15 pm »

Thanks all for the input. Saw this on a different forum which shows some reliability numbers: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/hard-disk-reliability-examined-once-more-hgst-rules-seagate-is-alarming/

GentleBender · « **Reply #9 on:** 22 May 2015, 04:25 pm »

I've not had great results with Seagate drives, but have not purchased them in years. That hasn't kept HP or others from putting them in desktops/laptops and have found WD drives are sent as replacements when the OEM Seagates fail during warranty replacement.

Brad · « **Reply #10 on:** 22 May 2015, 05:10 pm »

Agreed on the HGST.

But any of the "NAS" class drives should be fine. They are rated for a higher duty level and have longer warranties as well.
I've always been partial to Seagate, but they have had their issues in the last few years.

I did just buy several 4GB Seagate NAS drives to refresh my server.
I had a backup drive fail and then realized that all of the drives in the server were 5+ years old.

mcgsxr · « **Reply #11 on:** 23 May 2015, 01:00 pm »

Strange to me to read about HD failure.

In my case my needs always outstrip the longevity of the drive.

Every couple of years I but 2 larger drives and back up the collection.

The older drives end up with the pvr or hanging off PC's for those etc.

Seagates are what I use.

JRace · « **Reply #12 on:** 23 May 2015, 04:02 pm »

I have used segates and wd for years, problems with both, no drive is safe.

I run
http://www.hdsentinel.com

Which will let you know if there are any drive errors.
Saved my ass once. Let me know drive was about to die, and i managed to back it up before it died.

kc8apf · « **Reply #13 on:** 23 May 2015, 05:17 pm »

Quote from: Odal3 on 22 May 2015, 04:15 pm

Thanks all for the input. Saw this on a different forum which shows some reliability numbers: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/hard-disk-reliability-examined-once-more-hgst-rules-seagate-is-alarming/

That's from Backblaze's report which is a bit misleading. They use desktop-class drives in a 24x7 server-class environment. Sometimes they get lucky (HGST desktop drives are basically the same as their server drives) and sometimes they don't (Seagate desktop drives are a completely different design from their server drives). Unless you are running Bittorrent 24x7, you are unlikely to see workloads anything like Backblaze. That said, if you buy a server drive, it is very unlikely to fail.

kc8apf · « **Reply #14 on:** 23 May 2015, 05:20 pm »

Quote from: JRace on 23 May 2015, 04:02 pm

I have used segates and wd for years, problems with both, no drive is safe.

I run
http://www.hdsentinel.com

Which will let you know if there are any drive errors.
Saved my ass once. Let me know drive was about to die, and i managed to back it up before it died.

Looks like that mostly monitors SMART. That's better than nothing but SMART failures do not correlate well with actual failures. At least, that's what my team found when developing hard drive diagnostics at Google.

Brad · « **Reply #15 on:** 23 May 2015, 05:24 pm »

I also want to mention a good, free tool, for the case when a drive dies or partially dies.
It's called "Recuva"

I've used it to retrieve data from a couple of drives that were on their last legs.

GentleBender · « **Reply #16 on:** 23 May 2015, 05:59 pm »

Quote from: Brad on 23 May 2015, 05:24 pm

I also want to mention a good, free tool, for the case when a drive dies or partially dies.
It's called "Recuva"

I've used it to retrieve data from a couple of drives that were on their last legs.

I second this, piriform.com makes great products. Just make sure you uncheck the adware boxes before install.

jpm · « **Reply #17 on:** 23 May 2015, 06:22 pm »

Unfortunately, in my opinion, this subject is rarely treated correctly. It's tough to resist the "once bitten" reactions we all experience after drive failures but drawing larger parallels from small subjective data sets will, at best, lend a false sense of pragmatism to decision making.

If cost is no object, buy the most expensive drives you can get. It won't automatically give you greater reliability, but you'll probably get a longer warranty at a minimum. This leads to the points that are most important:

- You must have a backup strategy (no, RAID is NOT the same as backup)
- What fault tolerance does your plan include?
- Be pro-active and check drive health regularly
- Drives don't last forever so plan to replace them. My timeline is ~4 years.

The difference between "highly aggravating" (having to recover / restore data) and "catastrophic" (start from scratch, all is lost) is what truly matters.

In my home environment I've been running dedicated storage severs with software then hardware RAID since the '90s. I switched to dedicated NAS in the mid 2000's. Personally, I would never spend the extra cash on expensive drives and I have several reasons:

For the extra $$$ you would spend on enterprise drives, you can put together a far more resilient solution. Put extra money into the NAS device itself and additional regular drives. Now, instead of RAID5 you can run RAID6 with two drive fault tolerance. You can host a second volume inside the NAS to function as an independent backup target. Keep a spare drive on hand to minimize run time in a vulnerable mode.

Finally, remember to use a UPS. Also, check the UPS regularly! I failed to do the latter last year and suffered two corrupted drives at the same time. Fortunately, one was the hot spare.

Be safe out there!

https://techreport.com/news/25643/reliability-study-tracks-25-000-hard-drives

http://www.prepressure.com/library/technology/raid

Odal3 · « **Reply #18 on:** 23 May 2015, 06:51 pm »

Good info here.

Since we are on the topic, what's then a good dedicated NAS solution. What makes a good one?

adydula · « **Reply #19 on:** 23 May 2015, 09:50 pm »

I have 7 hard drives all loaded and kept in synch with all my music and photos. These are spare hard drives that are not in a system... yes 7!

I have 5 other PC's, one a game system, one a PhotoShop system, one my wife's, a back up for my game system, a HTPC system... all have SSD's and secondary hard drives all have the music and photos on them as well... the chances ALL of these hard drives would fail or not spin up is very low to me....

Once a month I plug the drives in an external USB device, power them up and sync the music and photos if needed.

I also gave my two sons a copy of them in case of a catastrophic disaster....

So that's 12+ places or drives I can go to..... You can buy cheap drives now and have several backups..... really cheap, simple etc.

Alex