Hard Drive Recommendations

[Will Rickards]

My 4TB drives are nearing capacity and I'm looking at larger drives.
What drives are you guys using?

I see this amazon sale on a seagate 8TB 5400RPM drive for 109 but seems it is shingled and not very good.

 

[LunarMist]

The WD Ultrastar Datacenter drives are my favorites. The Seagate EXOS are a bit cheaper but noisy.
I do not suggest the consumer drives as many have only 10^-14 UBER and lower workload ratings.

 

[Mercutio]

I have more Seagate drives than anything else, but all of my 14TB+ drives are system pulls from enterprise product lines and I'm not picky about what I get given what I pay for them. The Seagate enterprise (Exos / Ironwolf) are a little louder but I have to be less than six feet from my file server to tell that.

 

[Will Rickards]

With those WD Ultrastar drives seems some have some power adaptor and some don't. Any ideas which ones to look for?

 

[LunarMist]

Make sure you get the SATA version of the Ultrastar or EXOS drives. Maybe you were looking at SAS drives?

 

[Handruin]

I've also used both the Ultrastar DC HC560 20TB SATA and Seagate Exos X16 SATA. I ended up selling the 16TB's to a friend just because they weren't the right fit for what I was planning but there was nothing wrong with them. The Ultrastar HDDs have been fine so far. I get mine through B&H photo so that the warranty is valid through WD or Seagate for the 5 years. Prices are cheaper on Amazon but the warranty is often served through a no-name reseller because they're sold as OEM drives.

 

[sedrosken]

I feel a little pedestrian with my 3xWD Blue setup but it's been reliable and it's more space than I really plan to use for a very long time. I think I'm sitting at ~5TB used on the array, total? And thats with a backup of my steam games thrown on there so I don't have to waste my data cap downloading them again.

 

[LunarMist]

In the enterprise drive category I have 8x18TB WD DC, 8x18TB & 4x20TB Seagate EXOS plus older 8x10TB Seagates Enterprise/EXOS. The old Seagates were some of the first they had with Heliums, but they are quiet and refuse to die. It's not that the newer EXOS are terrible, but not what I want in a NAS near me when I'm watching the TV or working. The NAS is actually farther away from than the computer.

 

[LunarMist]

I feel a little pedestrian with my 3xWD Blue setup but it's been reliable and it's more space than I really plan to use for a very long time. I think I'm sitting at ~5TB used on the array, total? And thats with a backup of my steam games thrown on there so I don't have to waste my data cap downloading them again.

I have numerous WD Red and Elemental pulled drives of 8/10/14TB capacity, but they are for backup NAS and archives.

 

[Will Rickards]

Thoughts on the Toshiba X300 drives? There was a sale on them but I missed it.

 

[LunarMist]

Toshiba X300 14TB HDD Review: A Swing and a Miss

More capacity, but not more performance.

www.tomshardware.com

I would be buying at least their NAS drives if I bought Toshiba, but it depends on the usage. I might use X300s for archives or something.
When I want cheap drives I get the WD Elements/Easystore 14-18TB on sale and remove the drives.
My EXOS and WD Ultrastar DC drives are all still doing well. I also have a few Ironwolf Pros scattered in various places.
Lately HDD prices are relatively high compared to many other computer parts that have dropped.

 

[Mercutio]

My issue with Toshiba drives in general is that its warranty service is trash. Kind of the opposite of WD, where the drives are born trash and die trash, but at least they make it easy to replace their garbage-hardware. Toshiba drives are a black hole where you send something out and never get anything back. I haven't had larger than 10TB drive Toshiba drive die. I'm not expecting that it's any better now though.

 

[LunarMist]

Do you really have problems with good drives like the Ultrastar DC or is it just the history of the old single digit TB drives from years ago?

 

[Mercutio]

I'm under the impression that anything with *Star in its name is carrying the IBM/Hitachi legacy forward, but I still prefer not to deal with WD.
My relationship to WD has been marred since the days when drives were measured in the 10s of megabytes.

 

[LunarMist]

I thought most used those giant Seagate MFM drives in the olden PC days.
My fist experience with WD was with a Bowmar Brain, IIRC MX70 ~1973. They didn't make hard drives for many years later.
Maybe I'm just just lucky, but have had minimal issues with the WD HDDs. I never put GREEN drives in a RAID though.
The worst was a new 4TB mobile drive about 7 years ago when they first arrived. Even though I fully encrpted it and did a full scan test, there were all kinds of SMART errors before it was a week in the field.