Amateur HDD question

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chenw

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Hey all,

Sorry for asking such an amateur question, but is there any appreciable difference in reliability when one uses high-end HDD (Enterprise class) or Desktop grade HDD's for backups and Archiving as opposed to using Archive HDD's?

I have always been under the impression that archive HDD's are of the lowest grade in quality, and thus cheapest and ideal for backups, but, except for Enterprise drives (which are too expensive for my use), I am willing to spend extra for a higher grade HDD if it means my data will be safer.

The main use would be backing up, so writes to them will not be often, and will do some reading off them (archiving ripped movies etc).

I have access to Toshiba, WD and Seagate drives, with a HGST NAS drives on the side.

Thanks!
 
I would just stick with consumer-grade drives for backups—but make sure to do a full read/write test on them first.
 
Any difference in reliability between the "Desktop" line and the "Archive" line from Seagate?
 
Nobody here has reliability data from thousands of drives to give you. Personal anecdotes about a few drives are worthless.

I'd stay away from the archive drives. SMR drives are very, very slow to write. The performance trade off isn't worth it unless you desperately need cheap capacity. Stick with regular consumer desktop drives.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Nobody here has reliability data from thousands of drives to give you. Personal anecdotes about a few drives are worthless.

I'd stay away from the archive drives. SMR drives are very, very slow to write. The performance trade off isn't worth it unless you desperately need cheap capacity. Stick with regular consumer desktop drives.
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That's what I am thinking, I will probably get ST8000DM002.

Are the current WD blues considered archival grade or desktop grade?
 
chenw said:
That's what I am thinking, I will probably get ST8000DM002.

Are the current WD blues considered archival grade or desktop grade?
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Desktop, though the WD Blues are 5400 RPM drives. You trade some performance for lower power consumption/lower temps. I'm using 4 of the 4TB blues myself.

The main thing is to avoid drives that use 'SMR' (Shingled Magnetic Recording) unless you're planning on writing stuff once and forgetting about it. Lots of people hate Seagate because they had a bad run of 3TB drives a while back, but I've had good luck with their 7200RPM desktop drives myself (12x 3TBs). The ST8000DM002 seems like a good buy to me.
 
REAL Enterprise drives are designed to be stored in a chassis with dozens of other drives and have extra shock proofing. Although this is also now debatable.. But the companies say there is a difference because they cost twice as much.. I know in the 70's enterprise cost hundred times as much and could withstand a small nuclear blast.. Archive drives are the rejects from the desktops but also have limited firmware issues. "Depending" the drives can only be used as backup drives are generally much slower.. But I saw the review where WDC8TB backup drive was actually a HGST helium enterprise drive which cost 3 times as much.. So if you are lucky... I got a Toshiba 5TB drive which was similar to the desktop drive in speeds, performance and cost less.. But the sound was higher.. others also complained about the whining.. their real desktop drives were much quieter.. So dont know if those were rejected because they made too much noise.. For the last 8 or so years every seagate drive I got for backup were desktop rejects with modified firmware.

Unlike the WDC backup drives which are usually the green drives.. Not sure if the greens are rejects of other drives like the reds with firmware changes.. But for me, as long as they dont use limiting firmware lke seagate does to degrade performance I am fine with it. A few years back backblaze got backup drives because they could not get desktop drives and pretty much all of them failed in 3 years and I dont see those models used by them now. Now at that time I dont think the drives they got had limiting firmware.. This is just luck.. depending, they may or may not change the firmware.. WDC now also mates their USB bridge to the drive so you can not use another drive with it other than the drive that came with it. This could be a feature of the encryption option as the drive shows up as 2 drives, one encrypted and one not and you select which one you want to format. So for safety they made sure only th drive that came with it would work with it. The 4TB drives are the same price for both desktop and backup..

So I would just get the desktop since it has an year of extra warranty.. also the 4TB's are far more reliable than any other drives now. Well they did have like 3 years to test and perfect it as new models did not come out for a couple of years there.. I also saw that the seagate/samsung 4TB portable drive going for under $120.. Dont know the reliability of it but generally samsung was trying to reach Japanese reliability and compared to like goldstar/LG matches like other japanese companies for quality. HGST/IBM being the one to compare for quality and reliability even if their death star was a major issue.. WDC 4TB drives are not HGST rebranded drives.. Only the 8TB drive is.. But that cost $250.. Which is a modified HGST 8TB enterprise drive..
 
AlienTech said:
Might be more interesting if you post the fix..
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I assumed this is not the place for it, as the OP was asking a different question and my 7200.11 fix remark was just a heads-up.
I followed this guide: Fixing a Seagate 7200.11 Hard Drive (for some reason the pictures don't load for me). This is for the "LBA 0" error or the one where the drive is not detected and unresponsive.
 
jordan12 said:
Oh it is vetted and proven. Time to simply move on.
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yes 1 year sample of select drives is totally a realiable history. The are showing a positive trend but its not proven to be a consistent thing. Maybe for a drive or two but not company wide
 
michalrz said:
I assumed this is not the place for it, as the OP was asking a different question and my 7200.11 fix remark was just a heads-up.
I followed this guide: Fixing a Seagate 7200.11 Hard Drive (for some reason the pictures don't load for me). This is for the "LBA 0" error or the one where the drive is not detected and unresponsive.
Click to expand...

The interesting thing for me is (at work and at home) I had 50+ RMAs of 7200.X drives and not a single one had this symptom.
 
drescherjm said:
The interesting thing for me is (at work and at home) I had 50+ RMAs of 7200.X drives and not a single one had this symptom.
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There was a particularly evil firmware version for the 7200.11 series that produced a failed firmware boot when certain SMART parameters were at a certain value.
Some OEMs had the updated batches, some not.
 
I don't have any hard numbers or facts, but I can tell you from my days of working Desktop Support at a company of 5000 employees (10,000 "ish" machines), we saw a lot more failed WD blue drives than we did the Black. I almost never saw WD Black drives fail. But it seemed like every time the power went out 2-3 calls would come in that ended up bing failed WD Blue drives.

now, are the Black drives "Enterprise"?, IDK, some said "Enterprise Storage" on them some did not. They all had the exact same frame, cover and boards. Even firmware in most cases. These were all OEM form Dell. We only order SSD's now, and Dell is currently shipping Samsung pro drives.

For me personally, I will not use the "cheap" drives. (except for Reds in my NAS with RAID)
 
Here is the list of drives that are available to me. All archival or desktop grade, NAS and enterprise drives are also available, I just haven't looked very deeply into them:

The prices are all in NT$, which roughly, US$1 = NT$32.5, so I am listing them for comparative purposes.

MD04ACA6000 (128MB/7200RPM) $6800 (Toshiba 6TB)
ST6000AS0002 (128MB/5900RPM) $6900 (Seagate Archive 6TB)
ST8000AS0002 (128MB/5900RPM) $9490 (Seagate Archive 8TB)
ST6000DM001 (128MB/7200RPM) $8190 (Seagate Desktop 6TB)
ST8000DM002 (256MB/7200RPM) $10890 (Seagate Desktop 8TB)
60EZRZ (64MB/5400RPM) $7490 (Caviar Blue)
6001FZWX (128MB/7200RPM) $9590 (Caviar Black)
HDN726060ALE610 (128MB/7200RPM) $9388 (HGST Deskstar NAS)


I am somewhat leaning towards Caviar black, since it's the only drive out of the listed that has 5 year warranty, whereas every other drive only has 3 years (without actual reliability metric, I am currently using Warranty as the sole indication of the respective company's confidence in their reliability), but the cost fo the actual drive, especially comparing to Toshiba's 6TB offering, seems a tad high.

For the record, I am using Toshiba DT01ACA300 and HGST Deskstar NAS 3TB in my main rig, with Toshiba's drive taking brunt of my HDD usage (I installed that drive first, so everything is currently set to that drive), plus a plethora of 2.5 Externals.

I plan to make the next drive an external drive, but wanting to avoid actual external drives due to the way they are made now (controller now basically part of the HDD itself) to reduce the mode of failures.
 
If you are really after maximum data safety then redundancy beats reliability.

Multiple backup sources are more safe then chasing that one super reliable source.
 
limitedaccess said:
If you are really after maximum data safety then redundancy beats reliability.

Multiple backup sources are more safe then chasing that one super reliable source.
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This is actually me looking for that redundancy, my main Backup method is BD-R's, I am looking for a HDD as an alternative and for ease of access.
 
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