Hard drive opinions please

[tvmaster2]

Looking at changing out two, 2TB drives for two 4TB drives.
I've had great success with WD Red drives in all my other machines, so that's what I'm leaning towards for this swap. The current version of WD 4TB Red drives is 5400rpm - anyone have a problem with that?

https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-NAS-H...5674007&sr=8-2

Also, I've heard good things about these Toshiba drives - anyone tried them yet? Opinions if so?

https://www.microcenter.com/product/...nal-hard-drive

Thanks

PS - NO Seagate drives ever again. So save your breath

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

Looking at changing out two, 2TB drives for two 4TB drives.
I've had great success with WD Red drives in all my other machines, so that's what I'm leaning towards for this swap. The current version of WD 4TB Red drives is 5400rpm - anyone have a problem with that?

https://www.amazon.com/Red-4TB-NAS-H...5674007&sr=8-2

Also, I've heard good things about these Toshiba drives - anyone tried them yet? Opinions if so?

https://www.microcenter.com/product/...nal-hard-drive

Thanks

PS - NO Seagate drives ever again. So save your breath

Those WD drives are great those are what I use on all my Nas's. Great buy too. Speed of a drive I find not be significant on a DVR as you are not writing lots of data in a small amount of time as you would in copying.

[checkbin]

I've been using many WD 4TB Reds and love them. I've only had 2 failures of WD drives over many years, and surprisingly one was a WD Black. The Red ran quite few years before it finally quit one day. Highly recommend them.

I've used Toshiba drives with great success too, but not recently. I agree with you on Seagates. After way too many failures, I stay away from them at all costs. I wouldn't trust my data to them now matter how cheap I could get one for.

[wayner]

I always check the Backblaze reports. See the Q3 2019 report here: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backb...stats-q3-2019/

[KryptoNyte]

Did Backblaze just completely give up on Western Digital?

Ah, the HGST is a WD company. I wonder if there is still a difference in quality between them.

[wayner]

Here is what it says from their Q2 report:

Goodbye Western Digital
In Q2 2019, the last of the Western Digital 6 TB drives were retired from service. The average age of the drives was 50 months. These were the last of our Western Digital branded data drives. When Backblaze was first starting out, the first data drives we deployed en masse were Western Digital Green 1 TB drives. So, it is with a bit of sadness to see our Western Digital data drive count go to zero. We hope to see them again in the future.

WD Ultrastar 14 TB DC HC530

Hello “Western Digital”
While the Western Digital brand is gone, the HGST brand (owned by Western Digital) is going strong as we still have plenty of the HGST branded drives, about 20 percent of our farm, ranging in size from 4 to 12 TB. In fact, we added over 4,700 HGST 12 TB drives in this quarter.

This just in; rumor has it there are twenty 14 TB Western Digital Ultrastar drives getting readied for deployment and testing in one of our data centers. It appears Western Digital has returned: stay tuned.

[jhkoenig]

I have a number of HGST 4T and 6T hard drives in my Sage server. They have been the most reliable, long-lasting drives that I have used. The average in-service time on these drives is over 3 years of continuous use, with two 4T drives now spinning continuously for 5 years. I would definitely recommend. It is such a pain when a drive starts to fail that a few bucks either way is negligible at purchase time.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by jhkoenig

I have a number of HGST 4T and 6T hard drives in my Sage server. They have been the most reliable, long-lasting drives that I have used. The average in-service time on these drives is over 3 years of continuous use, with two 4T drives now spinning continuously for 5 years. I would definitely recommend. It is such a pain when a drive starts to fail that a few bucks either way is negligible at purchase time.

Thanks, that’s what’s in my system now, two, 2tb HGST drives. And they still show good, maybe three years in? But I’ve been getting lots of system errors, lockup’s, crashes, and I’d hate to lose all the programs I’ve built up, so maybe it’s time to start switching over to new drives. I didn’t think to mention HGST because I didn’t think many people use them There’s a slim possibility my SSD system drive may be having trouble, so I’m looking into that as well.

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

But I’ve been getting lots of system errors, lockup’s, crashes, and I’d hate to lose all the programs I’ve built up, so maybe it’s time to start switching over to new drives.

Maybe (or maybe not). But one simple way to get indication that those problems are due to a failing disk is to install a program that runs as a service and periodically queries the S.M.A.R.T status of the disks. Its one of the best ways to see if the drive is encountering bad spots, and doing re-tries. These programs are capable of giving alerts, often well before you'd otherwise notice. For Windows, typical favorites are Crystal Disk Info (free) or Hard Disk Sentinel.

In addition to the above, a good interactive diagnostic tool is Seagate's SeaTools. It does a pretty through surface analysis of most any disk (including non-Seagate models). I hate Seagate drives too, but find SeaTools invaluable. WD offers its own surface analysis tool (Data Lifeguard Diagnostic), but I'm less familiar with it.

Although I enjoy shiny new hardware, I'd advise running the above before throwing money at disk replacement.

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

But I’ve been getting lots of system errors, lockup’s, crashes, and I’d hate to lose all the programs I’ve built up, so maybe it’s time to start switching over to new drives.

I have all my drives' SMART monitoring enabled and as soon as a drive's stats start showing degradation I order a new one and start transferring data. Haven't lost any data yet. (fingers crossed)

--John

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by jpwegas

I have all my drives' SMART monitoring enabled and as soon as a drive's stats start showing degradation I order a new one and start transferring data. Haven't lost any data yet. (fingers crossed)

--John

using which app?

[stuckless]

10TB of WD Reds is what I have in my server (unRAID). I've lost many drives over the years (seagates, mainly), but so far WD reds are hanging in there.

[ThePaladinTech]

I've got a couple toshiba 3tb never had an issue with them. but I stopped buying hard drives a while ago. I now buy WD USB drives and shuck them and save a bundle in the proccess. I'm running 7-8tb and 1-10tb drive. I've got a few old 3tb drives that I've swapped out (still good). https://youtu.be/24bS7a6rPoQ <-- video about shucking drives

10tb - $179 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easy...?skuId=6278208

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by ThePaladinTech

I now buy WD USB drives and shuck them and save a bundle in the proccess.

I run several 8TB, 10TB and 14TB drives that have been shucked, but they're used for backup purposes, not as a primary data store. These drives really aren't designed/intended to be spinning 24/7/365. Although the mechanics and platters might be very similar to "desktop" drives, their firmware has a number of significant behavioral differences.

In particular, the TLER (time-limited error recovery) parameter is 7 seconds (similar to NAS disks) rather than the much higher (~ 25 seconds?) of desktop disks. So drives with a lower TLER don't (re)try as hard to return good data when the disk degrades.

Maybe of more significance in a Sage environment: the firmware on disks used in those USB enclosures is much more aggressive about spinning down when not in use. This results in more spinning circles in Sage when the disk has to spin back up again.

[NetworkGuy]

I have 2 1TB WD Blue drives in the SageTV server that are about 5 years old. (I have 4TG REDs in my NAS.)

I was thinking of replacing them with Crucial 1TB Sata SSD drives. You can get them for less than $100 now.

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

using which app?

I'm on Linux, so I'm using the smartmontools package.

Since you are on Windows, I would look into the options JustFred mentioned.

--John

[jpwegas]

Originally Posted by NetworkGuy

I was thinking of replacing them with Crucial 1TB Sata SSD drives. You can get them for less than $100 now.

Also thinking about going the SSD route, but worried about the failure cases.

Anyone have any experience with SSD failures? I have heard anecdotal stories that when they fail they tend to fail quickly and completely (making it hard to recover any data), but I have not had any experience in this area.

--John

[wayner]

I have had a few SSD failures of the system drive in my previous SageTV system. I am not sure if they fail quickly or slowly but I had backups to allow me to get back up and running.

[KryptoNyte]

I've never had a single SSD failure, after purchasing somewhere between 50 and 70 between 2009 and today, starting with the OCZ Vertex 30GB drives where I had (3) of them in RAID 0 for over 4 years. It takes a little cash, though, if you want to use them as storage drives.

[NetworkGuy]

Originally Posted by KryptoNyte

I've never had a single SSD failure, after purchasing somewhere between 50 and 70 between 2009 and today, starting with the OCZ Vertex 30GB drives where I had (3) of them in RAID 0 for over 4 years. It takes a little cash, though, if you want to use them as storage drives.

SSD usually degrade over time instead of a hard fail. You can run a program Crystaldiskinfo which tells you the state of your SSD.

All of my drives on all of my systems are backed up nightly to my NAS.