Hard Disk Market Search

[Sanji Himura]

I am in the market for a new internal hard disk to supplement the, frankly speaking, *** poor 500 GB hard drive that I currently have installed for it. It turns out that I am loading videos on there that is filling the space up pretty quickly, and so I would need the additional space pretty soon. Money is pretty much a no object for me, but I don't want a solid state or a hybrid drive. Nothing against them, but I would be constantly writing to the drive as I will be removing all non-essential files (like my digital comic books, my Fan Fiction that I both write and saved from fanfiction.net, music, photos and the aforementioned videos) to the new drive. In case if anyone is wondering, here is what my current storage space is and how close to full it is:

Oh, one more requirement, unless it is a killer deal, I would rather prefer to deal with brick and mortar stores or factory direct. It is less of a headache for me that way.

 

[Tesla]

Western Digital black for the best performance and reliability IMO, Greens if you're just looking at storing media on them and other files that are reliant on load times.

 

[Grayfox]

If money is no object get a basic 2 bay raid storage device and put 2x4TBs in it.
You will have 7.6TiB.

I have 4x4TBs in my system totaling 10.9TiB 27% full.

 

[sesselpupser]

These videos, are they efficiently encoded? I've got a load of DVD rips I made a while ago that are ~2-3GB each, I'm going to use Handbrake when I can be bothered to re-encode them to see if I can get them down to about 700-800MB each instead, at a stream-friendly bitrate. When it comes to buying hard drives, I quite like Hitachi's Deskstars (I have two, maybe three right now), but the Seagate Barracuda 2TB I bought seems to be quite slow. It was cheap though (about the same price as a 1TB drive by other manufacturers) so I can't really complain. I've recently formatted a 1TB drive I had in my Mac to use with my PC so I'm up to 5TB of spinning storage and 256GB of solid state. I am getting to that point in the year, though, where I want to refresh my hard drives so I might consolidate two drives into one 4TB, or maybe I'll buy two 3TB drives instead. I have no idea what the prices are like though.

 

[Sanji Himura]

If money is no object get a basic 2 bay raid storage device and put 2x4TBs in it.
You will have 7.6TiB.

I have 4x4TBs in my system totaling 10.9TiB 27% full.
View attachment 215056

What would I need to support such a massive system? I can take a picture of my PC's internals if that will help you. I think that is the ultimate goal for my storage needs.

 

[Grayfox]

What would I need to support such a massive system? I can take a picture of my PC's internals if that will help you. I think that is the ultimate goal for my storage needs.

Well you can go either one of 2 ways.

Get 2 4TB HDDs and plug them into the SATA ports on your PC and set the SATA controller to RAID mode and combine them both with RAID 0(stripe) which will give you 7.6TiB in windows or set it to RAID 1(mirror) and you will get 3.8TiB in windows but if one drive fails you have a copy where as RAID 0(stripe) if one drive fails you lose everything.
or
Get a 2 Bay RAID enclosurer and plug the 2 drives in and set the RAID mode you want.

Look for something like this from a local store.
http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=210_177_287&products_id=25121

You can get them in LAN, eSATA, USB 2, USB 3, Firewire connections.
Just find the one you want and that suits your needs.

 

[BobK]

I am in the market for a new internal hard disk

That would pretty much rule out a 2 Bay RAID enclosurer[sic] or anything along those lines, regardless of whether it were USB3, eSATA, whatever. However, that's an option worth considering if you're willing to have an external box.

If the drive[s] is/are for long term, more or less permanent storage, then a RAID array does make sense. If you're going to watch a video just once or twice and just have a large queue of "to be watched" stuff, then the redundancy isn't as critical.

In any case, I'd certainly agree with @Tesla on the Western Digital Caviar Blacks; they're superb drives if a little pricey. Or perhaps they're pricey because they are superb drives.

 

[Sanji Himura]

I've reconsidered, @BobK. I think that I'll go with this little number for now, and once I get a few more things sorted in my personal life, then get a beefier solution. If things ultimately work, if I go with @Grayfox's solution, I would get a relatively healthy 11.6TiB if I have everything working together, maybe more depending on if the 5TiB drives come out between now and when I am ready to upgrade.

http://www.frys.com/product/7613187

 

[Grayfox]

if I go with @Grayfox's solution, I would get a relatively healthy 11.6TiB if I have everything working together, maybe more depending on if the 5TiB drives come out between now and when I am ready to upgrade.

http://www.frys.com/product/7613187

Even if 5TB drives come out it wont matter if the enclosurer doesn't support 5TB drives.

I run my enclosurer in RAID 5 which is striped on 3 drives with 1 parity so if one drive fails, my data is still there.

KB, MB, GB, TB, ect are all metric units of file sizes.
KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB, ect are all binary units of file sizes.

When you have a 1TB drive install in windows it will say it is 931GB, but it really should say 931GiB


If you really want to drool, get a 6TB drive it is only $800

http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=210_344&products_id=26780

 

[Sanji Himura]

Very tempting....

 

[Grayfox]

Also very likely to fail.

The platters are thin like laptop platters and you always read on normal HDDs do not cover breather hole.
So why does this not have a breather hole?

On normal HDDs it is to help reduce air pressure build up

Helium filed HDDs is like nitrogen filled tires.

A stupid bloody gimmick.

 

[Sanji Himura]

Also very likely to fail.

The platters are thin like laptop platters and you always read on normal HDDs do not cover breather hole.
So why does this not have a breather hole?

On normal HDDs it is to help reduce air pressure build up

Helium filed HDDs is like nitrogen filled tires.

A stupid bloody gimmick.

Hey, I agree with you. Practically speaking here, unreliable tech shouldn't be used unless the next one is as reliable as current tech. To quote a line that I read once, "I'll buy a semi-automatic when a semi-automatic is as reliable as a revolver." (a near impossibility)

That being said, I do know why the HE6 does not have a breather hole. It is to contain the helium that is in the drive. I mean, in the video in the link, I think they built a PC enclosed in a water container for crying out loud.

 

[Danoff]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

One my of seagate drives (on that list) failed recently and it is being replaced under warranty. Keep in mind that if you count on warranty you'll need to be able to live without the drive for a few weeks while waiting for it to be processed.

Also, keep in mind sample size when considering the backblaze recommendations. Not enough drives means not very good statistics. The profile is also very interesting. I like that the WD drives fail right away or not at all.

 

[Grayfox]

The bigger the drive the higher the failure rate on laptop drives, since you are packing more and more into a smaller space.

 

[Jump_Ace]

I had to buy a pair of the WD RED 6TB drives for my RAID 1 array. I've seen similar reports of Hitachi having the best drives when I was working for LaCie. They aren't the first to reach the highest capacity and it's for a good reason; reliability. But when you need 6TB, you need 6TB and a 3 year warranty is pretty good.


Jerome

 

[Tesla]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

One my of seagate drives (on that list) failed recently and it is being replaced under warranty. Keep in mind that if you count on warranty you'll need to be able to live without the drive for a few weeks while waiting for it to be processed.

Also, keep in mind sample size when considering the backblaze recommendations. Not enough drives means not very good statistics. The profile is also very interesting. I like that the WD drives fail right away or not at all.

Don't trust everything you see in a graph: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6...bility-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html

 

[Danoff]

Don't trust everything you see in a graph: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/6...bility-myth-the-real-story-covered/index.html

I'm not terribly impressed with that article. There are some very thin arguments in there that are described as gaping holes. Sure, the graph may indicate a higher percentage of annual failure than one would expect in a typical desktop computer, but the relative failure rate is still quite interesting. The article tries to impeach that as well, and in my opinion fails at it.

 

[BobK]

@Danoff and @Tesla, what I take away from those articles is that Backblaze's usage is far different from mine and their numbers aren't terribly relevant to what I do so I take them with a very large grain of salt.

Interesting pair of articles nonetheless.

 

[Danoff]

@Danoff and @Tesla, what I take away from those articles is that Backblaze's usage is far different from mine and their numbers aren't terribly relevant to what I do so I take them with a very large grain of salt.

Interesting pair of articles nonetheless.

Think of backblaze as a high stress environment.

 

[BobK]

Think of backblaze as a high stress environment.

Oh, absolutely. I cringed when I read this part:

These drives are designed to be energy-efficient, and spin down aggressively when not in use. In the Backblaze environment, they spin down frequently, and then spin right back up.

Synology specifically advised against using WD Intellipower and similar drives in their units with settings that would power down the drive after just a few seconds of non-use.

 

[Danoff]

Oh, absolutely. I cringed when I read this part:

Synology specifically advised against using WD Intellipower and similar drives in their units with settings that would power down the drive after just a few seconds of non-use.

I think that may be pure assumption on the part of the author rather than what backblaze is known to be doing. I might be wrong, but I doubt backblaze would configure their drives to spin-down.

 

[BobK]

I think that may be pure assumption on the part of the author rather than what backblaze is known to be doing. I might be wrong, but I doubt backblaze would configure their drives to spin-down.

That bit I quoted came from the Backblaze article itself, https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/; last para of the "Excluded Drives" section, just before the "Failure Rates" section. I was under the impression that article was by Backblaze themselves.

 

[Danoff]

That bit I quoted came from the Backblaze article itself, https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/; last para of the "Excluded Drives" section, just before the "Failure Rates" section. I was under the impression that article was by Backblaze themselves.

Bizarre...

I wouldn't why they wouldn't just prevent that.

 

[shmogt]

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

One my of seagate drives (on that list) failed recently and it is being replaced under warranty. Keep in mind that if you count on warranty you'll need to be able to live without the drive for a few weeks while waiting for it to be processed.

Also, keep in mind sample size when considering the backblaze recommendations. Not enough drives means not very good statistics. The profile is also very interesting. I like that the WD drives fail right away or not at all.

Don't know if this is true, but I have seen many test that show Seagate fails a lot more. Western Digital my book only had like 2% failure rate as all the other external drives in the same price range were more like 5% failure and up. I just bought the Western Digital one to replace my old Western Digital drive and so far so good. It's about 150 for read and write which is pretty good. So far can't say anything bad about them as they have all been fine for me.

 

[Grayfox]

I have also heard of seagate being called sea crates due to them being crap.

 

[BobK]

You don't have to go very far to hear scare stories about how crappy Seagate drives are. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who had a Seagate drive fail on them, taking with it their term paper, book report,college thesis, current resume/CV, etc, etc. Yes. they fail. I've seen them fail.

But so do Western Digital, Hitachi, Maxtor, whatever. Everybody also knows somebody who knows somebody who also had a WD/Maxtor/whatever drive fail as well, and how crappy they are too. Nobody's entire line is 100% reliable.

The point is, this is all anecdotal and does not reflect how the majority of drives will fare. If Seagate's (or WD's, whoever) drives were really as bad as some say they are the company would have been out of business ages ago.

Along which lines, my Shugart worked pretty well.