Big storage recommendation

margrave

margrave

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 15, 2018
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Years ago on a desktop with a 40 GB drive, I had a 250 GB D:\ drive to back it up, and also to backup two other computers in the home. Just rsync-driven file-level backups.

Later I moved to a desktop with a 1.5 TB drive, and I had a 500 GB D:\ drive to do backups.

Now I have a desktop with 512 SSD and 2 TB D:\ ... and a third Q:\ drive for backup, a 2 TB HDD.

Well ... I still to regular file-level backups to that Q: drive, but I'm also doing full images of C: and D:, with differential backups. And the 2 TB Q: drive, which seemed enormous a year ago, is now filling up. I'm not near full yet, but the inexorable increase in storage needs suggests that I should consider a bigger Q: drive.

It doesn't need great speed. Just big size. What should I choose?

I don't want an outboard NAS device. I want to simply swap out that 2 TB HDD for something bigger. Is a 4 TB drive available? Is it economical? Or would an even bigger drive make sense?

Who makes such? Recommendations?
 
Is a 4 TB drive available? Is it economical? Or would an even bigger drive make sense?

Who makes such? Recommendations?
Click to expand...

Economical - yes, certainly you can get a 4TB drive under £100.

Even bigger drive ? You didn't say what your rate of storage growth is. I guess you want to keep it for maybe 2-3 years and not have to replace it 12 months from now ? Personally I can fill 2TB in a year.

Major brands are: Seagate, Western Digital (WD), Hitachi (HGST), Toshiba.

For recommendations: suggest you look at the Backblaze drive stats: those guys buy drives in huge volumes and keep stats on failure rates: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q3-2017/

In particular, check out the failure rates for the 4TB Seagates. If you do buy a 4TB drive, there are definitely some to be avoided.
 
You have a lot of options from 4TB on up to 10...mght even be 12...plot the price vs capacity and see where you start get less gb/$ and that's where I'd buy.
 
I had been considering a NAS. But no one here has any use for one. Whatever storage would reside inside that NAS would ONLY be used for backups, and not for general access on the network. So I might as well keep the expanded backup storage inside the desktop, which is where it is now. This desktop runs the backups, so a NAS offers me nothing of value.

This Dell has three bays for storage (in addition to the M.2 boot SSD). One bay has a 2 TB Seagate. That's my mass storage. Another has a second 2 TB Seagate. That's my backup storage place. So I think I'll just add a drive in the third bay. Probably a 3 TB or 4 TB drive. That seems to fall in the $100 range these days.

From the info you've provided I guess I'll NOT be choosing a Baracuda!

Thanks for the help.
 
Somewhere in that thread it says that these are 5400 RPM drives.
I'd prefer 7200 RPM. Indeed, I've never had a 5400 RPM drive before, and I don't think I want one now.
But ... perhaps the comments in that thread are wrong??
 
margrave said:
Somewhere in that thread it says that these are 5400 RPM drives.
I'd prefer 7200 RPM. Indeed, I've never had a 5400 RPM drive before, and I don't think I want one now.
But ... perhaps the comments in that thread are wrong??
Click to expand...
No I believe those are 5400, I'm not sure what the largest 7200 drive is but many of the common 2-8tb drives are 5400rpm
 
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WD gold drives are 7.200 rpm and go up to 12tb, blacks go up to 6tb. Should be similar capacity ones in other brands too.
 
margrave said:
Somewhere in that thread it says that these are 5400 RPM drives.
I'd prefer 7200 RPM. Indeed, I've never had a 5400 RPM drive before, and I don't think I want one now.
But ... perhaps the comments in that thread are wrong??
Click to expand...

If it's only for backup the difference is negligible. Those 8TB 5400 RPM drives top out at near 200MBps. Likely faster than whatever older drives you are transferring from.
 
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