Media storage... what drives to buy? Green? Red? Remove drives from cheap externals?

Tengis

Tengis

Supreme [H]ardness
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Ive been waiting and waiting on a good deal for some drives that will be suitable for a network storage system. Ive been avoiding the cheaper "green" drives because I was told their life will be reduced because of their power saving features. The lack of "red" drives going on a good sale anywhere but Newegg is getting me to think about buying something else. Newegg charges a lot to ship to an APO address - at least about $10 per hard drive.

Ive seen a handful of the "green" drives from various companies hit as low as $35 or so per tb. The "red"/nas drives always seem to be at best $40-45 or so per tb. All of the enterprise level drives are just stupid expensive when I realize I want to buy 3 to 5 of them.

Ive seen a lot of 2tb and 3tb external hard drives go on sale that typically are about $30-35 per tb. Is there any reason NOT to use the drives out of these? Does anyone know which in particular would still carry their warranty when removed from the case? What brand/models that usually go on sale would probably have the better drives inside of them?

I ideally want to put the drives in a ZFS setup but the cheap machine I just acquired does not support ECC FB memory like I was told. I may hold off on ZFS and do something else with the raid setup.
 
I went with a couple of Seagate 5900RPM 4TB drives and they are great. Silent , run cool and I think for the money they are great alternative to Red drives.

To be honest I would ask this question in the data storage sub forum.
 
I like the WD Green drives. They are simple solid and stable and have been for a long time in my NAS and Windows Home Server Setup. I think just as with anything else care and attention should be paid to your equip. This means making sure they have adequate cooling and keep the dust bunnies off them. They should last a long time.
 
Seagate NAS, WD Red, or step it up further to Seagate Enterprise Value (Constellation CS).. I say avoid WD Greens. It's especially important to avoid the greens if you'll be using a RAID card as an HBA.
 
Any other input? What about Toshiba? Hitachi? Is it recommended to avoid external hard drives and remove the drive thats inside of it?

Im usually not this anal about purchasing hard drives... I just dont want to spend $500+ on hard drives and be setting myself up for failure.
 
Tengis said:
Any other input? What about Toshiba? Hitachi? Is it recommended to avoid external hard drives and remove the drive thats inside of it?
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Toshiba/Hitachi are fine too. I do recommend you stick to 4 platters maximum in general. As far as buying an external and removing the disk, it can work fine but you might lose your warranty in doing that, and many externals come with the cheapest disks that manufacturer makes...
 
I'll chime in.


I built an Unraid NAS with regular drives. None of that special stuff thats out. I bought a bunch of Seagate Externals and took the drives out.

FWIW, its easier to remove the drives from STBV3000100 than STCA3000101.

The NAS works fine and the drives spin down when not in use anyway. I have had ZERO problems.


NAS specs in my sig. I have 5 drives in here. Only one of them is from the second model I listed.....only because it was a B.I.T.C.H to remove from that kind of case.

But, they are the same drives inside either one. So, I say, its worth your while to just get the first model. All you need is a knife with a really flat edge and then a butter knife that has some girth to it. Slide the knife under the front piece of the case and lift it. Slide the butter knife under there and then take the knife and just pop the tabs out all the way down. Do it on the other side and the drive comes right out.
 
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SheHateMe said:
I built an Unraid NAS with regular drives. None of that special stuff thats out. I bought a bunch of Seagate Externals and took the drives out.

FWIW, its easier to remove the drives from STBV3000100 than STCA3000101.

The NAS works fine and the drives spin down when not in use anyway. I have had ZERO problems.
Click to expand...

What HBA / RAID card do you use for them? Some controllers have problems with some drives in some modes (e.g. JBOD/single disk vs RAID) while others are fine. Greens will work with SOME hardware, but not all. NAS-specific drives should generally play nicely with more hardware than regular desktop drives like the Greens.
 
Shehateme, do those drives retain the warranty when removed? How long is the warranty?
 
I had luck with the Seagate 4tb expansion external drives that would be on sale.
They don't make noise when waking up like the WD Green.
 
dandragonrage said:
What HBA / RAID card do you use for them? Some controllers have problems with some drives in some modes (e.g. JBOD/single disk vs RAID) while others are fine. Greens will work with SOME hardware, but not all. NAS-specific drives should generally play nicely with more hardware than regular desktop drives like the Greens.
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I used a SYBA SY-PEX40039 PCI-Express 2.0 SATA III Controller Card to get two extra sata ports. It worked right out of the box. Haven't had any issues. UnRaid picked up the two sata slots immediately. No conflicts.




Tengis said:
Shehateme, do those drives retain the warranty when removed? How long is the warranty?
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No, they don't retain the warranty if you remove them from the case. You have to be careful taking them out, so you can put it back in and send it back if it breaks.

Warranty is 1 year.

There's really no reason for them to die, if they were bad drives...they'd be dead already. I bought them in August.
 
GeorgeHR said:
Any drives you buy will function as well as any others.

If you wait long enough, people will praise and curse every drive manufacturer and model.
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For data transfer, yes. However, if you use a HW RAID card, sometimes that pesky TLER can be fun. For ZFS, I don' t believe it matters though other than peak performance.
 
I would guess it depends on whether this is irreplacable data or not. If you're doing rips of discs you're keeping and willing to re-rip in case of a massive failure, I'd get the cheapest drives that have the throughput necessary.
 
dandragonrage said:
It's especially important to avoid the greens if you'll be using a RAID card as an HBA.
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Not that I'm disagreeing, but why is that? I have both the 5900rpm Seagates and 3 WD Green drives that I was going to connect to a LSI 9211-8i IT HBA. No raid by the card (Note the IT), and will be running software RAID/ZFS.
 
Doesn't matter. Buy based on price and warranty (and/or brand preference) as you would with any other HDD purchase.

And just like any other data storage, you should have a data security plan.
 
Kelvarr said:
Not that I'm disagreeing, but why is that? I have both the 5900rpm Seagates and 3 WD Green drives that I was going to connect to a LSI 9211-8i IT HBA. No raid by the card (Note the IT), and will be running software RAID/ZFS.
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Because some cards have TLER-related issues with the consumer drives. But it varies between card.
 
Depends on how you rate your media I say. I would get some inexpensive drives from Newegg with a long warranty, setup them up as a NAS and store them there. Two 2TB set as Raid 1, if a drive fails, you have your data still and can put another 2tb after it fails and good to go.
 
Also, just to be clear, RAID in any form is NOT backup. It can help mitigate data loss - keep you up and running, but like Krispy Kritter mentioned, you should have a data security plan (i.e. actually backup your shiznit regularly) - that is if you don't want to lose what you have. :)
 
I got rid of the barracudas and have the Toshiba 3 TB drives now. I hate Seagate now and don't trust WD's firmware, so my choices are narrow. The Toshis do very well for now.

If you do raid it's very important that you don't use RE (raid edition) drives if you do RAID.
 
You can get Seagate 3.5 3 Tb drives from Newegg for $109 when they are on sale. For media you don't need raid or expensive drives. If you want to use raid for redundancy that's is fine
 
Primarily I've been purchasing the 3TB external Seagates, but also bought 2x Toshiba 3TB drives for $90/ea when they were on sale.

I have 6 Seagates and 2 Toshibas now. I'm not too picky but have hear the WD greens die sooner.
 
All my recent builds since the WD red launch have been just that. I like their 5 year warranty. Plus i heard they added a sales gimmick recently of somekind of personal support attendant 24/7 idk. All i know is 5 year warranty is better than anything else WD offers (range from 2-3 years based on OEM VS retail).

Seagate I avoid like the plague.

General Rule of thumb: NEVER EVER BUY AN EXTERNAL AND THEN REMOVE IT FROM ITS CASING. ITS CHEAPER BUT ALSO IF YOU REMOVE IT THE WARRANTY IS GONE.
 
There nothing wrong with Seagate. Its easy enough to Google failure rates and most manufactures have about the same rate of failure these days which is low. Including WD red.
 
samm said:
All my recent builds since the WD red launch have been just that. I like their 5 year warranty. Plus i heard they added a sales gimmick recently of somekind of personal support attendant 24/7 idk. All i know is 5 year warranty is better than anything else WD offers (range from 2-3 years based on OEM VS retail).

Seagate I avoid like the plague.

General Rule of thumb: NEVER EVER BUY AN EXTERNAL AND THEN REMOVE IT FROM ITS CASING. ITS CHEAPER BUT ALSO IF YOU REMOVE IT THE WARRANTY IS GONE.
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Current data says "not true". I know many people that remove drives from "externals" and warranty them when they fail. They have had very good luck (e.g. haven't heard one denied yet) based upon the serial # of the drive. I also avoid WD digital like the plague. Also CAPITALS!!!!!


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A "general rule of thumb" means it is agreed upon by the broader community based upon collected data which covers a large statistical percentage of cases.

For example: As a rule of thumb, keeping a circuit trace at least a 2:1 edge to height ratio from the reference plane reduces fringing significantly.

For example: As a rule of thumb, loading a resistor at no more than 60% of nominal provides best cost/reliability ratio.

Rules of thumb are starting points to minimize design time. If other pressures become critical, then the exact evaluation may need to be carried out.
 
Trepidati0n said:
Current data says "not true". I know many people that remove drives from "externals" and warranty them when they fail. They have had very good luck (e.g. haven't heard one denied yet) based upon the serial # of the drive. I also avoid WD digital like the plague. Also CAPITALS!!!!!


---------------

A "general rule of thumb" means it is agreed upon by the broader community based upon collected data which covers a large statistical percentage of cases.

For example: As a rule of thumb, keeping a circuit trace at least a 2:1 edge to height ratio from the reference plane reduces fringing significantly.

For example: As a rule of thumb, loading a resistor at no more than 60% of nominal provides best cost/reliability ratio.

Rules of thumb are starting points to minimize design time. If other pressures become critical, then the exact evaluation may need to be carried out.
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I like your rebuttal. Its carefully thought out. +1 for that in itself.

General rule of the thumb can be applied here as well as you said in your rebuttal. Its to minimize design time. If someone is building a HTPC or any build for that matter, simplicity and long-term support is key. How is simplicity/long term support and design time similar (im gonna stretch the definition bit here) but simplicity/long term is obtained by a design that eliminates unknown variables.

In this case a builder can forgo the hassles and tribulations of guessing whether or not his or her parts may or may not have warranty in an effort to say a couple $$$.

As a rule of thumb: Building a htpc with parts that have a clear definite warranty allows for piece of mind in the long term should any part fail due to normal usage.
(apologizes if thats a unclear)

Yes are there cases where someone buys an External, removes the drive, and if the warranty is required WD or SG or anyother mfg honors the warranty. However why tempt fate. I recommend saving in other places. Paying a couple more $$ here with a guarantee is better than saving a couple dollars, needing warranty then being denied since the drive was originally packaged in an external.

In regards to the WD vs SG debate,
I think it depends on your personal experience. Our views can only be determined by such. In my experience my WD drives have fared better than the SG drives i have used. In addition, i understand metrics are very important but the following is what I have observed so please take that in consideration.

My recent experience is with two similar products from both MFGS.
Seagate Expansion vs WD elements 3TB
Point of experience: Internal Temps as measured by CPUID
I have two main External HDDs. Seagate Expansion 3tb and the WD elements. After using both drives, which cater to same target price points, I can say the WD elements runs much cooler than the Seagate Expansion. My Seagate is for occasional backup and file transfers, as prolonged usaged peaks the temps on the harddrive at 53-55C. The WD can be used much longer with temps at 43-45 max.

Now yes I can attribute this to different case design and thermal flow inside, but at similar price points I would expect level performance from Seagate.

Just my 2 cents
 
Ive been buying externals instead of bare drives for a long time, I've never been denied warranty. Bare drives are significantly more expensive than the externals. I will never buy a bare drive so long as Seagate keeps producing their enclosures that are so easy to pop open for $30 bucks less. I just picked up two 4TB seagate externals, had them out of the case and into my server in 5 minutes. Piece of cake. I keep the shells inside of a plastic rubbermaid bin...I have a bunch of them in there.

If you're an idiot that can't take your time to get the drive out of the enclosure...the practice is not for you.


But, it is NOT general rule of thumb that you shouldn't buy externals to do this. If you know the risks, then you can make a sound decision. Its not for everyone, but I certainly wouldn't be sitting around telling people what not to do as far as Hard Drives go.
 
SheHateMe said:
Ive been buying externals instead of bare drives for a long time, I've never been denied warranty. Bare drives are significantly more expensive than the externals. I will never buy a bare drive so long as Seagate keeps producing their enclosures that are so easy to pop open for $30 bucks less. I just picked up two 4TB seagate externals, had them out of the case and into my server in 5 minutes. Piece of cake. I keep the shells inside of a plastic rubbermaid bin...I have a bunch of them in there.

If you're an idiot that can't take your time to get the drive out of the enclosure...the practice is not for you.


But, it is NOT general rule of thumb that you shouldn't buy externals to do this. If you know the risks, then you can make a sound decision. Its not for everyone, but I certainly wouldn't be sitting around telling people what not to do as far as Hard Drives go.
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Thanks for proving my point exactly. If you want to keep it simple and safe go with a regular old retail or OEM drive. If you feel you can carefully remove the drive from the Enclosure (without breaking anything or removing any warranty labels) by all means go on ahead.
 
Shipping keeps killing the deals for me since APO doesn't qualify for free shipping. They want to charge me almost $30 for a couple drives.
 
I purchased a DLINK 1gigbait home NAS with two 3.5' drive bays, with 1.5tb drives in them running on Raid 1. I have no problems with it and store quite a bit. Later Ill upgrade to 4tb when they are lower in price but I dont have the need to have EVERY movie in the world.... I am happy and the transfer rate is good as well.
 
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