Current 8TB drive recommendations

Z

zorobabel

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 25, 2008
Messages
193
I want to buy a new 8TB drive, it will be installed in a removable caddy and used for large backups in a Windows machine; single drive, no raid.
So far I see:
Toshiba X300 HDWF180XZSTA for $178
Seagate BarraCuda ST8000DM004 for $150
WD Red WD80EFAX for $219

I'm trying to avoid a junk drive, looking for good drive suggestions.
 
The best valve drives right now would be the WD Easystore and Elements 8 TB and/or 10 TB external hard drives. They go on sale quite often for $130-150 range. You just take them out of the enclosure and pop them into your PC. I have 5 of them in my unRAID server and had no issues. I've gotten 2 WD Reds out of the 5, I purchased. However I think they are all white labels now.
 
Krazyxazn said:
The best valve drives right now would be the WD Easystore and Elements 8 TB and/or 10 TB external hard drives. They go on sale quite often for $130-150 range. You just take them out of the enclosure and pop them into your PC. I have 5 of them in my unRAID server and had no issues. I've gotten 2 WD Reds out of the 5, I purchased. However I think they are all white labels now.
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Thanks. I knew some of the WD externals didn't work without the right usb controller. I'm guessing the models you pointed out don't do that.
 
Krazyxazn said:
The best valve drives right now would be the WD Easystore and Elements 8 TB and/or 10 TB external hard drives. They go on sale quite often for $130-150 range.
Click to expand...

So I'm a complete doofus when it comes to spotting "deals." Can you suggest some places and times. I am also in the market for an 8 TB drive for my Year 2020 backups. And I can't buy HGST drives any longer. :grumpy: :sour: :depressed:
 
x509 said:
So I'm a complete doofus when it comes to spotting "deals." Can you suggest some places and times. I am also in the market for an 8 TB drive for my Year 2020 backups. And I can't buy HGST drives any longer. :grumpy: :sour: :depressed:
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It generally gets posted on slickdeals, /r/buildapcsales, and /r/DataHoarder.
 
I just got a WD MyBook 10TB - needed to replace a failing drive immediately, so it wasn't on sale, but it wasn't a horrible deal. Just went through Amazon.

I tried very hard to get a non-aftermarket/server scalped bare drive. Amazon and Newegg both were full of third party sellers for this size, but nearly all of them seemed to be just that, third party sales of what was either pulled out of other systems, or people shucking themselves and the warranty was questionable. I couldn't find one that wasn't twice the price of the external (even non-sale) in this size range.

Anyway, ended up getting the 10TB - it's a white label, it needs the molex->sata supply, which I happened to have one laying about (odd though, because it will spin up without it, but won't get detected). Was just careful shucking and saved the case, if it has issues I can drop it back in the enclosure and get some warranty support on it at least.
 
Shoganai said:
Seagate continues to be hot garbage, I see.
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I wouldn't say that. Based on the AFR numbers for 8TB drives like the OP is looking for, the difference between the HGST and the Seagates is .15% for the one model and .3% for the other. Statistically, almost the same despite having 24X's the amount of Seagate drives compared to HGST.

But shucking a WD 8TB or 10TB drive is definitely the cheapest route to that size drive. 10TB's are regularly $159.
 
I got one of the 8TB WD Elements. It had a white box drive inside, which works fine with the caddy I'm using.
Thanks Krazyxazn!
 
kirbyrj said:
I wouldn't say that. Based on the AFR numbers for 8TB drives like the OP is looking for, the difference between the HGST and the Seagates is .15% for the one model and .3% for the other. Statistically, almost the same despite having 24X's the amount of Seagate drives compared to HGST.
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Whether or not the Seagate and the WD results are statistically the same depends in part on the range of values, the sigma in statistical terms, around the mean value, which is the reported error rate.

I would also go by the fact that over a large range of WD and Seagate models, Seagate models have a higher failure rate.
 
x509 said:
Whether or not the Seagate and the WD results are statistically the same depends in part on the range of values, the sigma in statistical terms, around the mean value, which is the reported error rate.

I would also go by the fact that over a large range of WD and Seagate models, Seagate models have a higher failure rate.
Click to expand...
Keep in mind that BackBlaze regularly just buys the cheapest models they can get their hands on. While the failure rate always seemed higher for their brand, it was partially due to their abundance of a models with known issues. There have been/are similar issues with models from the other manufacturers, Backblaze just didn't have any/many of those particular models.

In-short, backblaze is interesting data to look at, but doesn't really represent any useful testing outside of their own company or similar companies that use consumer equipment in an enterprise environment. I don't look at their data anymore because by the time they had issues with any particular model, the issues or the model had already been revised. What data I WISH they listed was what caused the failure. My guess is, cramming 40 or so consumer drives into a single chassis in an always-on situation might have something to do with it, even the early deaths. Harmonics from neighboring drives is a killer, and that's been proven. Heat, also a major killer.

The point is, Drive A might last longer in a highly abusive environment, but drive B might last longer in a more realistic occasional-use environment. Maybe the parts that fail first in Drive A don't care as much about vibration/harmonics or heat, but there are parts that do fail in Drive B that fail under those extreme conditions. But under normal conditions, the Drive B will actually last longer than Drive A.... Or maybe Drive B does fine with the heat, but not the harmonics, or vise-versa... We don't know, we only know what happens to the particular drives that Backblaze happens to buy and use in their specific environment. Again, it's interesting data, but not really useful to most people.

For that reason, Backblaze should be considered anecdotal. Granted, it's a very LARGE anecdotal sample, but their use of the drives and the variables introduced makes it not-so-useful. An extreme analogy would be testing drives in a water-filled aquarium, and Seagate lasted 45 seconds when WD died in 30 seconds... It's interesting, but nobody is going to use them that way, so the data doesn't matter.... Unless you plan on stacking 40 consumer drives in a 5U chassis with almost no vibration mitigation and running them 24/7, the data isn't that useful... AND EVEN IF YOU ARE, the data is only useful for models they bought 6 months to a couple years prior to writing the report, and you likely won't get the same model or revision.

The last time I looked at their data, if you got rid of a couple old specific Seagate models that were known to be bad, the numbers equaled out, or actually out-performed WD and Hitachi. The funny part was, they still had more Seagate Drives than Hitachi (and I think WD) drives in their systems, even after you subtract the known-dud models (I think they were 1.5TB and 3TB drives)... If Backblaze really thought Seagate pushed garbage out the door as a whole, they would stop buying them. Backblaze themselves have more invested in understanding and using their own data than anyone, not Joe-Shmoes like us filling home NAS setups... If THEY still use Seagate, why do people think their data somehow says "Seagate is Garbage"
 
Nside said:
Keep in mind that BackBlaze regularly just buys the cheapest models they can get their hands on. While the failure rate always seemed higher for their brand, it was partially due to their abundance of a models with known issues. There have been/are similar issues with models from the other manufacturers, Backblaze just didn't have any/many of those particular models.

In-short, backblaze is interesting data to look at, but doesn't really represent any useful testing outside of their own company or similar companies that use consumer equipment in an enterprise environment. I don't look at their data anymore because by the time they had issues with any particular model, the issues or the model had already been revised. What data I WISH they listed was what caused the failure. My guess is, cramming 40 or so consumer drives into a single chassis in an always-on situation might have something to do with it, even the early deaths. Harmonics from neighboring drives is a killer, and that's been proven. Heat, also a major killer.

The point is, Drive A might last longer in a highly abusive environment, but drive B might last longer in a more realistic occasional-use environment. Maybe the parts that fail first in Drive A don't care as much about vibration/harmonics or heat, but there are parts that do fail in Drive B that fail under those extreme conditions. But under normal conditions, the Drive B will actually last longer than Drive A.... Or maybe Drive B does fine with the heat, but not the harmonics, or vise-versa... We don't know, we only know what happens to the particular drives that Backblaze happens to buy and use in their specific environment. Again, it's interesting data, but not really useful to most people.

For that reason, Backblaze should be considered anecdotal. Granted, it's a very LARGE anecdotal sample, but their use of the drives and the variables introduced makes it not-so-useful. An extreme analogy would be testing drives in a water-filled aquarium, and Seagate lasted 45 seconds when WD died in 30 seconds... It's interesting, but nobody is going to use them that way, so the data doesn't matter.... Unless you plan on stacking 40 consumer drives in a 5U chassis with almost no vibration mitigation and running them 24/7, the data isn't that useful... AND EVEN IF YOU ARE, the data is only useful for models they bought 6 months to a couple years prior to writing the report, and you likely won't get the same model or revision.

The last time I looked at their data, if you got rid of a couple old specific Seagate models that were known to be bad, the numbers equaled out, or actually out-performed WD and Hitachi. The funny part was, they still had more Seagate Drives than Hitachi (and I think WD) drives in their systems, even after you subtract the known-dud models (I think they were 1.5TB and 3TB drives)... If Backblaze really thought Seagate pushed garbage out the door as a whole, they would stop buying them. Backblaze themselves have more invested in understanding and using their own data than anyone, not Joe-Shmoes like us filling home NAS setups... If THEY still use Seagate, why do people think their data somehow says "Seagate is Garbage"
Click to expand...
Very good, and I have LIKEd this post because it is so informative.

That said, are there any other sources of drive failure rate available. I'm going to guess that the NSA has also compiled such data, but they aren't sharing it with anyone. :D
 
Whatever you choose, make damn sure it’s not a drive that uses “shingle” SMR technology. I have a Seagate 6TB SMR drive that I took out of a USB enclosure. The write speed on anything bigger than maybe 30-50GB is horrible. The drive nearly becomes unresponsive when trying to writes a couple hundred gigabytes. Got it for a great price, but I had to be creative in making it work in practical backup scenarios.
 
x509 said:
Very good, and I have LIKEd this post because it is so informative.

That said, are there any other sources of drive failure rate available. I'm going to guess that the NSA has also compiled such data, but they aren't sharing it with anyone. :D
Click to expand...

For NSA, you will want to look at Amazon AWS reports......
 
So I never heard of this "shingle" technology until westrock2000 mentioned it in his post, so I did some searching. Read this and for sure don't buy one of these drives if you value system performance.+1 to what he said.

 
I recommend a new old stock (NOS) Helium HGST drive for speed, reliability and price.
You may find the same drives inside some WD external drives currently on sale. They are white label (Enterprise) which means the power connector must not have the 3V pin live or it wont power up.

I have He8 8TB and He10 8TB drives.
They are similar performance, the He10 is perhaps 10% faster "peak", both exceeding 200MB/s.
The main difference being the He10 runs very cool even without a fan, is cooler than the He8 with a fan.
The He8 runs hotter than my normal 4TB and 6TB HGST drives such that it needs a fan blowing directly at it to keep within 11C of ambient.
 
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