I need to get 4-6 HDDs..any advice?

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SomeGuy133

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I need to get 4-6 HDDs. I have 2 3TB that I could use but depending on price and options out there I am willing to just buy 6 new ones. Below are my basic needs and I am currently budget conscious on the HDDs since some other purchases are more important at the moment and I am not money backs but I refuse to shoot myself in the foot with cutting corners that just make it worse.

FYI this will be a raid 0 in my desktop...assuming I can fit them.

I need/want
1.) 4-6 HDDs
2.) 7200 RPM
3.) 3-6TB (whatever is best bang for the buck)
4.) needs to be reliable
5.) from a good merchant (amazon, newegg, rakuten, antonline...basically have more than 10 google reviews)

I have heard everyone on here talk about Red drives and toshiba drives being good and all but reds are NAS drives...does that really mean anything besides marketing? I know some drives now exist as storage drives that have low life and such but are massive. I obviously don't want those. I will be using this for data and steam games in a RAID 0 for speed. I really don't want Kaspersky and MBAM taking 4 days to scan my whole system since they are retarded and scan 1 drive at a time. Putting them into a RAID is a work around. The stupid scans already take a full day with current drives and I loathe it and getting large files takes long as is and I have no space so you get the picture.

I am seeing Toshiba 3 TB drives going for under 90 on amazon and I am unsure if those are good drives and a good price. The market has become so proliferated it gets hard to find a good deal/drive.

Toshiba 3TB drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149396


Newegg search I made. It looks like Toshiba is the best one from what I read and is a decent price. Although, I wanted to double check with you guys since I know a lot of you buy 100s of drives and know the system. I can also wait on the purchase if something is going to drastically change the market in the next few months in terms of price. I also plan on building a custom NAS in August once I get 6700K and re-purpose another PC so It would be nice to keep my options open with re purposing these drives in order to cut costs.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...17643 600486069 600490667 600083978 600003340
 
I do not think RAID0 will help the scan issue that much since it mainly improves sequential performance not random access which is what you will need for scanning thousands of small files.
 
drescherjm said:
I do not think RAID0 will help the scan issue that much since it mainly improves sequential performance not random access which is what you will need for scanning thousands of small files.
Click to expand...

I still need sequential for other things plus I need a large single drive for steam. I would like to download my 1k games again -_-

How does a program not scan sequentially? or grab bulk files...are they programmed that idiotically?
 
Customize the scans to only do your OS/Apps drive, which should be an SSD for the kind of small file scanning speed you are looking for.

Regular files drives don't need to be scanned that often, especially since RealTime scanning picks up most things immediately as new files are added.
 
rive22 said:
Customize the scans to only do your OS/Apps drive, which should be an SSD for the kind of small file scanning speed you are looking for.

Regular files drives don't need to be scanned that often, especially since RealTime scanning picks up most things immediately as new files are added.
Click to expand...

color me paranoid. I still need the drives for transfering data to SSD and RAM disk and faster access in general.

And I refuse to believe after 20 years they have yet in integrate more than a single thread into scanning files. sequential 1T psh. No way they are that retarded. I want to see proof of that level of idiocity. I wont believe it until I see a review or white paper stating Nortan/Kaspersky/MBAM are that dumb

and none the less the question wasn't on raid 0 it was on what HDDs should i get. I still need 4-6 drives no matter what
 
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Lower capacity drives are still less reliable than higher capacity ones, seems they transition from PMR to TMR at those points and it did not work properly so dont go for anything under 4TB. I saw backblaze had 5 and 6TB Toshiba and Hitachi which they seemed to like. 6TB is still higher priced. So unless you want to wait 6 months it would be 4TB seagate/WD or 5TB Toshiba or Hitachi.. The 5TB's are the fastest drives on the market and the only ones with 7200RPM.. So you dont have many choices here.. Wait for amazon sale where they sell the 5TB's for $130 once a month.. Other wise it is like $160..
 
AlienTech said:
Lower capacity drives are still less reliable than higher capacity ones, seems they transition from PMR to TMR at those points and it did not work properly so dont go for anything under 4TB. I saw backblaze had 5 and 6TB Toshiba and Hitachi which they seemed to like. 6TB is still higher priced. So unless you want to wait 6 months it would be 4TB seagate/WD or 5TB Toshiba or Hitachi.. The 5TB's are the fastest drives on the market and the only ones with 7200RPM.. So you dont have many choices here.. Wait for amazon sale where they sell the 5TB's for $130 once a month.. Other wise it is like $160..
Click to expand...

can you elaborate on how 3TB or less are less reliable? PMR is worse than TMR?

so the newer larger drives of today are better than the older ones from a year or two ago?

Also the amazon sales are those front page deals or hidden ones. Can you reference the drives your talking about so I can view and add them to camelcamelcamel.com

UPDATE: i checked this TMR thing and those 3TB toshibas are TMR

EDIT: looking back the newegg page says it uses TMR head with PMR recording. I am a little confused now since your statement doesn't make sense if the can use both.
 
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I think you might be going about this the wrong way. I doubt you actually want RAID 0 in any production system. hardly anything will be reliable in RAID0.

If you just want apps to see one drive. change your mount point from a drive letter to a directory. You don't have to do RAID0 which is NOT fault tolerant.

Basically you set it up so what would normally be your D:\ that you use for music or what ever you can mount that as C:\music\ or C:\Drive1 or whatever

Here is how to do it no 3rd party apps needed.

If you just need fast drives and a lot of storage then you probably want SSD(s) in your computer and some sort of NAS or external storage that has a fault tolerant raid array instead of RAID0.

only use RAID0 if your data doesn't matter and you where going to dispose of it anyway.

the Red Drives is not just a marketing ploy :) the difference between a Green and a Red stands out pretty big side by side. Also the longer warranty is nice but in a desktop probably wouldn't use them.
 
OP:
I'd only buy HGST drives at this point. You'll have to decide whether that is too expensive or not.
 
I'm going to put forth another vote for the HGST drives. Been running them in my primary file server, and they are rock solid.

OP, What does the rest of your rig look like?
Would you be better off by just dropping a RAID card in and running the 6 drives in a RAID6?
If space isn't crazy important and you want more performance... could always just run 'em in a RAID10.

Just seems that this is a good use case for hardware raid.
Also. RAID 0 can be avoided like the plague. All it'll take is one bad drive, and... POOF. All data lost.
RAID 10 is close on speed, and both RAID10/6 are nicely resilient to hard drive failures.
 
I stated in another thread my end goals and this is what it looks like.

4770K (will dump that for a 6700K in august and give the 4770K to dad and turn 3770 non k into NAS unless I really need a server chip/board for ECC. I'll be asking about NAS for advice in a few months)

Z97 but will get equivalent for 6700K

16GB but will get 32-64 for 6700K. Had 32GB but the two types of RAM had conflicts so sitting at 16 :/ No point to buy more when I'll be going DDR4

currently 480GB Sandisk Extreme Pro but will be getting NVMe drive. Most likely intel 750.

770 GTX but getting 980 TI or Fury X but learning towards 980 TI at moment.

When I build NAS I plan on doing nightly builds over 1 or 2 Gb Es depending on how long that takes. I Also plan on sending Intel 750 build to intel RAID 0 and porting that to NAS so dailys on SSD can back up fast. This is why I also want RAID 0 and I don't care about data recovery on PC since there will be multiple back ups. Also rebuilds heaven for bid If I must will be fast.

OS on
1 SSD (original)
2 RAID 0 (Copy)
3 NAS (Copy)

RAID 0 on
1 RAID 0 (original)
2 NAS (Copy)

This gives me plenty of safety since I plan on daily incremental ranging from 7-14 days to 4-8 weeks of weekly builds than to monthly builds after that.

My experience with True image is that the incrementals are "fairly" small even considering my ridiculous usage.

As you can see I have a lot of purchasing coming up. If rakuten only still did those deals :)

Also I want to avoid Hardware RAID due to PCIe slot limits and I don't want to throw another 300 dollars into this since I can get away with IRST RAID. I don't think the HDDs will due enough IOs to cause heavy CPU overheard. If these were SSDs...different story.

I also want to have good HDD space to use for secure wipes. Currently I have almost no HDDs to use for secure content and I don't like not being able to wipe space.

Also if I do RAID 10 with 6 drives its like a RAID 0 with 3 drives right? Thats a lot of wasted potential and expensive.
 
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SomeGuy133 said:
can you elaborate on how 3TB or less are less reliable? PMR is worse than TMR?

so the newer larger drives of today are better than the older ones from a year or two ago?

Also the amazon sales are those front page deals or hidden ones. Can you reference the drives your talking about so I can view and add them to camelcamelcamel.com

UPDATE: i checked this TMR thing and those 3TB toshibas are TMR

EDIT: looking back the newegg page says it uses TMR head with PMR recording. I am a little confused now since your statement doesn't make sense if the can use both.
Click to expand...

Well you dont know if the drives you are getting are based on the new or old tech. I fell for that with seagate where newier drives were far worse off than older drives. But thats only seagate. I would not buy them! and spent the $30 more and got the toshiba.


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OP2PKH2/ref=twister_B00TIQ213Q?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1


TMR heads featuring integrated microscopic heater coils to control the shape of the transducer region of the head during operation. During the same time frame a transition to perpendicular magnetic recording is occurring (PMR),

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_read-and-write_head

So both are possible. But for some reason maybe due to cost reduction, a lot of problems cropped up around 2012.. That was for the entire industry. And now they use shingle recording which they dont tell you about but hide it. Electrostatic discharge (ESD) effects on GMR recording heads have been reported as the major cause of head failure.
 
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AlienTech said:
Well you dont know if the drives you are getting are based on the new or old tech. I fell for that with seagate where newier drives were far worse off than older drives. But thats only seagate. I would not buy them! and spent the $30 more and got the toshiba.


http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OP2PKH2/ref=twister_B00TIQ213Q?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1


TMR heads featuring integrated microscopic heater coils to control the shape of the transducer region of the head during operation. During the same time frame a transition to perpendicular magnetic recording is occurring (PMR),

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_read-and-write_head

So both are possible. But for some reason maybe due to cost reduction, a lot of problems cropped up around 2012.. That was for the entire industry. And now they use shingle recording which they dont tell you about but hide it. Electrostatic discharge (ESD) effects on GMR recording heads have been reported as the major cause of head failure.
Click to expand...

???? The 3 TB toshibas I referenced are the same thing according to specs except they are 64 MB cache and 3 TB instead of 128MB cache and 5 TB.....

heres the link again http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149396
 
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iamwhoiamtoday said:
I'm going to put forth another vote for the HGST drives. Been running them in my primary file server, and they are rock solid.

OP, What does the rest of your rig look like?
Click to expand...

redrage said:
... i'm confused.. what is this used for?
Click to expand...

he asked what my rig looks like so i explained to him what it currently is and what it will be over the next few months as i build out. Honestly irrelevant but he asked the question so i humored it. I just need to know what current drives of the market don't suck and are well priced.

debate is going on if the 3TB Toshibas are any different than the 5 TB. Alientech is saying there is a difference but according to specs they are the same.

Valnar said:
OP:
I'd only buy HGST drives at this point. You'll have to decide whether that is too expensive or not.
Click to expand...

those look nice but my god are those expensive...way too much for my budget
 
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SomeGuy133 said:
I am seeing Toshiba 3 TB drives going for under 90 on amazon and I am unsure if those are good drives and a good price. The market has become so proliferated it gets hard to find a good deal/drive.

Toshiba 3TB drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149396
Click to expand...

I have 15 of these drives and they have been working great, the first 2 I bought are labeled Hitachi as the manufacturer. On the other drives the label has changed but the part numbers and ect are identical. So I am pretty sure these drives are made by Hitachi and the price is right. Oh and HGST is owned entirely by Western Digital, so basically you get a HGST branded by Toshiba but its all owned by Western Digital lol.

10 of these are in my FreeNAS server and 5 in my desktop.
 
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I just bought 2 of the HGST 6TB drives on sale for $255 from Newest Eggest. Amazon had them for $300.
 
I've been picking up the HGST 4TB Coolspin drives for $139/ea shipped from B&H.
They're 5400 RPM but I'm sure their 7200rpm "NAS" version is also good to go.

Formerly using the 5k3000 Hitachi 2TB drives, two of which have over 3 years of power on time and still humming along with clean SMART reports.

The Toshiba 3TB drive in the original post is a great deal.
 
spencers said:
I've been picking up the HGST 4TB Coolspin drives for $139/ea shipped from B&H.
They're 5400 RPM but I'm sure their 7200rpm "NAS" version is also good to go.

Formerly using the 5k3000 Hitachi 2TB drives, two of which have over 3 years of power on time and still humming along with clean SMART reports.

The Toshiba 3TB drive in the original post is a great deal.
Click to expand...

yea i am really thinking about getting 6 of them unless alientech can tell me how they are different from the 5 TB ones.
 
drescherjm said:
I do not think RAID0 will help the scan issue that much since it mainly improves sequential performance not random access which is what you will need for scanning thousands of small files.
Click to expand...

That is not necessarily true.

If the files are significantly smaller than the chunk size, then they will mostly be distributed among the drives but contained entirely in each drive (occasionally you will have one spanning two drives). So reading small files should see a speed up almost N times as compared to with one drive, where N is the number of drives in the RAID 0. That is assuming that the program doing the reading is doing async IO, of course. Then the IO scheduler can just dispatch the reads to each drive as they come in, and then you have all the drives seeking in parallel (and seeking is what takes up the vast majority of the IO time when you are reading small files).

Of course, if the reading program is doing synchronous IO, then you will not see any speedup, since the drives will not be seeking in parallel, but rather serially for each IO.
 
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I was about to pick up 5 of those Toshiba drives but ended up getting 6 WD EFRX 3TB drives. NE was running a combo deal on them, 3 drives for $300 so I purchased 2 deals.

Newegg doesn't seem to be running very well for me right now, but are these the rebranded hitachi drives? Those are great and they support many raid features.
 
Hey, look at that, the 6TB Toshiba drives (PH3600U) are available at amazon:

http://amzn.com/B0105TIHR8

I've been waiting for those for a while now. Unfortunately, they are $250 at the moment. I was hoping for less than $200, since the 5TB Toshibas are less than $150.

Maybe once the 6TB Toshiba drives start appearing at other retailers in a few weeks, then the price will start to come down.

I'm going to be keeping an eye on the prices of those:

http://camelcamelcamel.com/Toshiba-...H3600U-1I72/product/B0105TIHR8?context=browse
 
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drescherjm said:
I do not think RAID0 will help the scan issue that much since it mainly improves sequential performance not random access which is what you will need for scanning thousands of small files.
Click to expand...
It doesn't? Could you tell us what what RAID group is better for random access than RAID 0?
 
bigdogchris said:
It doesn't? Could you tell us what what RAID group is better for random access than RAID 0?
Click to expand...

RAID 1 or RAID 10 can be both better than RAID0 (depending in the implementation) for that however obviously not as space efficient. With that said I worded that wrong. It was 5:18AM and I am very much a night person...
 
drescherjm said:
RAID 1 or RAID 10 can be both better than RAID0 (depending in the implementation) for that however obviously not as space efficient. With that said I worded that wrong. It was 5:18AM and I am very much a night person...
Click to expand...

Given 6 drive limit RAID 0 is the best option for maximizing performance...I can't magically fit another 6 or afford 6 more :/

Plus redundencency isn't an issue
 
I think I am going to buy 6 of those Toshiba 3 TB drives today when I get a chance.

In an effort to not create another thread:

If my MB has 10 SATA slots is there any limit to IRST RAID that would keep me from make a RAID 10/01 with 10 Drives?

I think I have 4 spare 3 TBs around in other devices or at least 2 to make 8 drives.

Also out of curiousity....how is a RAID 10 drive of 6 drives half the speed of a RAID 0 in reading when in all intents and purposes it really could read from all drives at once. When they created the standard did they just make it stupid where it can't handle something like that or am I missing something?
 
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