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Large hard drives

rudy

rudy

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Apr 4, 2004
Messages
8,703
I am looking for large storage for movies. Right now I am pretty stumped it seems that hard drives are just a terrible deal now. The 1 star reviews on amazon and newegg are insane. Up in the 30% range. Now this is not critical data but it would suck to need to rip all those movies again. In the past I stayed away from optical disk backups because I found them to be unreliable.

So are there any 1TB + drives for reasonable prices that seem to be more reliable? Or am I just the victim of fear mongering. In my entire computer life I have only ever had 1 hdd fail on me. But on newegg people are saying things like 5 out of 12 fail for them. Multiple people report buying around 3 drives and having one bad.

Even when I look at the more expensive server class drives it seems they have a fair amount of failure, not that I would want to drop $400 on a single drive for these purposes anyway.
 
Right now I am pretty stumped it seems that hard drives are just a terrible deal now. The 1 star reviews on amazon and newegg are insane. Up in the 30% range. Now this is not critical data but it would suck to need to rip all those movies again. In the past I stayed away from optical disk backups because I found them to be unreliable.
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The problem is there is a > 1% expected chance that a drive (any drive) will die each year for the first 5 years. Although that will not be too comforting to a user buying 1 and being part of that unlucky 1% or so. They will then leave feedback on how crappy the drive is. Especially those who did not backup their valuable data and do not know how to read SMART to predict a drive is operating abnormally.

So are there any 1TB + drives for reasonable prices that seem to be more reliable?
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From work purchases I recommend hitachi drives.
 
Also keep in mind that:
1. People are 50x more likely to complain than praise a product online.
2. A lot of the large drive problems have been people with incompatible hardware or people who bought the wrong drive for the particular application (eg green drives on hardware RAID controllers)
3. Newegg has a longstanding history of atrocious packing of hard drives for shipping, and that coupled with the gorillas that UPS/Fedex had sorting/delivering the packages is a recipe for infant mortality of hard drives.
The manufacturers are selling millions of these drives. If there was a bad design or wide-reaching problems, you would see an uproar ala IBM's 75GXP.
 
Buy two drives, from two manufacturers. Use one, keep the other on the shelf except for a backup of the used one every now and then. Don't worry.
 
Why are green drives not good on hardware raid. Yes those are some of the ones I looked at, the 3TB WD I will not be running hardware raid though, depending on what I buy I wont run any raid. I have a z68 , 2500k system I want to put it in.

If I have to buy 2 drives I will just raid them for redundancy, or be tempted to move up to 3 drives and raid 5.

Do you guys think it is fine to just buy the 3TB drives?

Also I realize that people who have failed drives complain but you can see big differences in the tone of reviews. For instance some SSDs have around 6% 1 star reviews while these hard drives have 30%. I dont think that can be explained by, people who have bad products are the vocal 1%
 
I personally like the WD black drives. They seem to have a good price/performance ratio. The Hitachi's are nice, but for some reason I have terrible luck with them. Every single Hitachi drive I've had has failed at one point. They seem to run hot, but from what I heard that's a known issue from the past and is not an issue anymore. Seagate has the worse track record in the past couple years, and I find they run slow in raid compared to Hitachi and WD.

Personally I'd buy 3 or more drives and do a raid 5 that way you get some redundancy and decent amount of space. In fact if you have the budget get 1 extra to have as a hot or cold spare. Depending on how important this data is, you'll want to buy extra drives for backups too but you can get away with cheaper drives such as green models. But if it's stuff that you can afford to lose, but that it would just be inconvenient, then you could maybe get away without a backup and just hope the raid does not fail. It's not something that happens very often but for invaluable data it still requires separate backups. So it depends how crucial it is to you. Personally, I don't backup movies and stuff like that, but I backup documents, code, emails, etc.

And yeah, avoid using green drives in raid. What happens is if there's not enough I/O going on, they go to sleep, the raid sees this as a failed drive. When it comes back, it has to rebuild the whole array. A workaround is to have a cron job that keeps reading/writing to the array so the drives stay active, but it's kinda dirty.
 
rudy said:
Why are green drives not good on hardware raid. Yes those are some of the ones I looked at, the 3TB WD I will not be running hardware raid though, depending on what I buy I wont run any raid. I have a z68 , 2500k system I want to put it in.

If I have to buy 2 drives I will just raid them for redundancy, or be tempted to move up to 3 drives and raid 5.

Do you guys think it is fine to just buy the 3TB drives?

Also I realize that people who have failed drives complain but you can see big differences in the tone of reviews. For instance some SSDs have around 6% 1 star reviews while these hard drives have 30%. I dont think that can be explained by, people who have bad products are the vocal 1%
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As to issues with green drives and hardware RAID, you are free to search the forums at your leisure and you should focus on search terms like TLER and CCTL. If you want to be guaranteed about compatibility, buy drives that have been vendor-certified by your HBA manufacturer.
Of to the tone of some reviews, glean what you want from them but you are dealing with a fixed number of reviews taken against an unknown size of sales. I and many here have dozens to hundreds of 3TB drives in production at home and at work and there is no "general problem" with the designs, the problems usually can be traced to incompatible hardware, the wrong drive for the particular use (again, search TLER or CCTL) or just some bad drives (produce a many millions of ANYTHING and some are going to be bad). If 30% of their production was being returned for failure (especially at the margins they are working at), they wouldn't be in business for long.
 
rudy said:
Why are green drives not good on hardware raid. Yes those are some of the ones I looked at, the 3TB WD I will not be running hardware raid though, depending on what I buy I wont run any raid. I have a z68 , 2500k system I want to put it in.

If I have to buy 2 drives I will just raid them for redundancy, or be tempted to move up to 3 drives and raid 5.

Do you guys think it is fine to just buy the 3TB drives?
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In addition to what mwroobel stated, the green drives are unsuitable for even consumer RAID, let alone parity RAID. This is because RAID requires all disks to spin continuously full time to function properly - but the Green drives do not. In fact, the Green drives always spin themselves down to a complete stop even while the operating system is still running - and that behavior cannot be changed at all whatsoever in the drive's firmware. Green drives will spin to a complete stop after idlng for only 10 minutes even if the Windows power management is set to never spin down the drives! In other words, the Green drives will completely ignore any Windows power management settings to delay the spindown for more than 10 minutes (which means that the drive's own power saving features will take over from the Windows power management features after a set period of idle). And when the disks spin down, all RAID controllers will mark the disks as "failed" even if they are still good! That spindown feature makes the Green drives unsuitable for any RAID configuration whatsoever; thus, they can only be used as single (individual) drives - each with its own volume.
 
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E4g1e said:
In addition to what mwroobel stated, the green drives are unsuitable for even consumer RAID, let alone parity RAID. This is because RAID requires all disks to spin continuously full time to function properly - but the Green drives do not. In fact, the Green drives always spin themselves down to a complete stop even while the operating system is still running - and that behavior cannot be changed at all whatsoever in the drive's firmware. Green drives will spin to a complete stop after idlng for only 10 minutes even if the Windows power management is set to never spin down the drives! In other words, the Green drives will completely ignore any Windows power management settings to delay the spindown for more than 10 minutes (which means that the drive's own power saving features will take over from the Windows power management features after a set period of idle). And when the disks spin down, all RAID controllers will mark the disks as "failed" even if they are still good! That spindown feature makes the Green drives unsuitable for any RAID configuration whatsoever; thus, they can only be used as single (individual) drives - each with its own volume.
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I would disagree wholeheartedly. I have been running 5 2TB WD20-EARS in a RAID5 on the back of my P9X79 Pro and have not had an issue at all. The reason green drives or any other 'non-RAID' drives are no good on the hardware raid boards is because of the TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery). Basically a non raid drive will try to fix itself by recovering any bad blocks it has found. Meanwhile, as it mucking about trying (and probably able) to recover, the hardware RAID board will have ejected it from the array as a failed disk. Also, more importantly the spin down will do much the same - while the drive spins up again the hardware raid card will possibly see it as a failure and kick it out even though this behaviour is perfectly normal.

Software RAID on the other hand will usually wait patiently for the drive to retry to it's hearts content however the array will stall whilst it's doing it. That 5 disk array I spoke of (not critical and replicated to multiple places so no finger pointing etc...) currently has a failing disk and the array will wait and wait whilst the retrys happen and it will eventually work. Bad for performance in a mission critical environment but as a 3rd backup of crappy data - it can take all day if it wants...
 
mwroobel said:
Also keep in mind that:
1. People are 50x more likely to complain than praise a product online.
2. A lot of the large drive problems have been people with incompatible hardware or people who bought the wrong drive for the particular application (eg green drives on hardware RAID controllers)
3. Newegg has a longstanding history of atrocious packing of hard drives for shipping, and that coupled with the gorillas that UPS/Fedex had sorting/delivering the packages is a recipe for infant mortality of hard drives.
The manufacturers are selling millions of these drives. If there was a bad design or wide-reaching problems, you would see an uproar ala IBM's 75GXP.
Click to expand...

And you forgot:

4. Newegg has a longstanding history of crazy people leaving "reviews". It appears to be every teenager and twenty-something that knows just enough about computers to be dangerous.
 
3TB drives have quite a high return rate, mainly because people don't know how to use them. Nothing to do with their reliability.

Green drives don't spin down if that function is deactivated in the operating system, I've got dozens of green drives from all manufacturers and generations (including the first 1TB from WD) and none of them ever spins down.

What WD drives (and others, including the new non green Seagate 7200.14) do is park their heads, that's not the same thing. And it can be mitigated with WDIDLE, but that's not causing problems for RAID anyway, the lack of TLER is.

rudy : RAID is not backup
 
I do not really need back up, I just need a little higher chance of not losing everything. If my chances of faileure are as low as people here seem to sugggest I might just buy on drive and be done with it. I figure if I put 2+TB of movies on a single drive and lose it I will need to do alot of ripping, but if I have redundancy in a raid array what are the chances both drives will fail before I can recover?
 
rudy said:
I do not really need back up, I just need a little higher chance of not losing everything. If my chances of faileure are as low as people here seem to sugggest I might just buy on drive and be done with it. I figure if I put 2+TB of movies on a single drive and lose it I will need to do alot of ripping, but if I have redundancy in a raid array what are the chances both drives will fail before I can recover?
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This is a recipe for disaster. RAID is NOT a backup. It is not a panacea. It is not made from unicorn horns.It is simply an uptime adjunct so you don't need to restore from backup. It is a dangerous mindset that starts with "I can just re-rip" which morphs to "I have parity disks so I don't have to worry about anything".
 
rudy said:
I do not really need back up, I just need a little higher chance of not losing everything. If my chances of faileure are as low as people here seem to sugggest I might just buy on drive and be done with it. I figure if I put 2+TB of movies on a single drive and lose it I will need to do alot of ripping, but if I have redundancy in a raid array what are the chances both drives will fail before I can recover?
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I like to use the example of getting hit by lightning, 1:280,000. It couldn't happen to me, it probably won't and statistics prove that, but people get hit by lightning all the time. I think it comes down to how much you are willing to spend, and how valuable the data is; the assumption is that if the data is valuable, you have to spend more money on it. If you just want some "peace of mind" per say, any RAID (except 0) will do, and any RAID (except 0) will be better than a single drive/single point of failure. From best to worst, here is my list of ways to mitigate data loss for consumers: backup, RAID 1, RAID 6, and RAID 5; no RAID 10 since that is tilted toward performance or RAID 50 or 60 as that's not in the mind of most consumers. As you can imagine, that is also the list for the most expensive to cheapest, but hey, as I said, if your data ain't worth anything, you wouldn't even have RAID. If your data is somewhat important but you don't want to spend money on it, RAID 5. It than goes up from there.

Personally, I've got a good sized media collection, and it would take me months to rerip all those DVD's/HDDVD's/BR's. That being said, I run what is essentially RAID 4 or just a single parity disk. Yeah, shit can go real bad real easily if I don't maintain it, but I don't want to throw money at it. It's also too big to backup, but this isn't mission critical data. My family pictures, insurance pictures, important documents are spread over 3 computers, multipule hard disks, on the cloud, and a few USB disks. These are important to me so I go above and beyond, and if you don't feel the same way about your data (lol steam folder needs backup?), don't feel the need to be so studious about it. The advice given is normally good advice, but you need to live within your means too so we can't all run datacenters for ourselves.
 
To determine if I should backup a certain group of data, what I normally ask myself is "if right now, all that data was gone, how much money would I be willing to spend to get it back?" Depending on the data it could be $0, or it could be a couple hundred bucks. In the case of movies that I can still re-get, it's usually not a huge deal to go without backups since it's not irreplaceable data, just a pain in the butt to get it back.
 
I'm afraid of reviews about the current hard disks. So now, what brand and model you guys recommend for storing movies? Hd 2tb +...
 
I would like some opinions on this subject as well tbh. Pre flood and pre-seagate samsung HDD acquire, I would have just bought more Samsung F3 drives, as they are extremely good imo, running one right now. But at this point It just doesn't seem like any HDD's are sufficiently trust-worthy nowadays. It looks like in order to actually have some degree of data safety I'm going to have to go all in and do a Raid6 or the like, probably with FreeNAS, so ZFS.
 
Lots of time and effort wasted in this thread.

If you own your media and are backing up to HD for convenience, then it is not a huge problem to lose a drive. And those idiots reviewers who write comments are clueless.

I just bought a 3TB drive for like $130. You don't need super performance on drives that serve up movies. I wouldn't even bother with RAID and all of that complication. Heck I have enough stuff ripped that even if I took out a drive I would have plenty of stuff to watch. Let's get real...if you have many TB of storage, you've got serious problems if you can't find something interesting to watch while you are re-building a volume. Just track what goes where, so you'll know what was on the volume if it dies. This stuff should not be considered mission critical and to do so is to simply waste money.
 
You can find 2TB drives for under $150 pretty easily these days. Go with Seagate, Maxtor, or WD for the best quality.
 
juicedown said:
You can find 2TB drives for under $150 pretty easily these days. Go with Seagate, Maxtor, or WD for the best quality.
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Maxtor was purchased by Seagate so you won't find any current Maxtor drives at all.
 
AQ_OC said:
Lots of time and effort wasted in this thread.

If you own your media and are backing up to HD for convenience, then it is not a huge problem to lose a drive. And those idiots reviewers who write comments are clueless.

I just bought a 3TB drive for like $130. You don't need super performance on drives that serve up movies. I wouldn't even bother with RAID and all of that complication. Heck I have enough stuff ripped that even if I took out a drive I would have plenty of stuff to watch. Let's get real...if you have many TB of storage, you've got serious problems if you can't find something interesting to watch while you are re-building a volume. Just track what goes where, so you'll know what was on the volume if it dies. This stuff should not be considered mission critical and to do so is to simply waste money.
Click to expand...

I'd much rather buy an extra drive or two to protect my data from simple hardware failures than spend several weeks re-ripping my discs to a new hard drive.
 
AQ_OC said:
Lots of time and effort wasted in this thread.

If you own your media and are backing up to HD for convenience, then it is not a huge problem to lose a drive. And those idiots reviewers who write comments are clueless.

I just bought a 3TB drive for like $130. You don't need super performance on drives that serve up movies. I wouldn't even bother with RAID and all of that complication. Heck I have enough stuff ripped that even if I took out a drive I would have plenty of stuff to watch. Let's get real...if you have many TB of storage, you've got serious problems if you can't find something interesting to watch while you are re-building a volume. Just track what goes where, so you'll know what was on the volume if it dies. This stuff should not be considered mission critical and to do so is to simply waste money.
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Well, I am glad you value dozens of hours of your time (or a shitload more based upon the average mkv blu-ray 1080p rip being 12-18GB) and effort as worth less than $130 (since you own/possess the originals and can just rerip them). Also, all the additional power your machine will suck down running full-out recompressing all your rips should be a few dollars more. You are welcome to your opinions,though you will find they are not shared by myself and many here. If you want to track the locations of every file on every drive so you can rerip everything, be my guest. You should have backups of any data you consider important. You can also for the cost of an extra drive or two and an HBA build yourself a storage array that can maintain uptime with the failure of a drive or two (depending on configuration).
 
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