Which 18TB hardrive should I get?

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Sep 24, 2021
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I want to upgrade my SnapRAID server parity drives to 18TB and use the 6TB drives that I have now as a striped or JBOD logical 18TB drive for my SnapRAID server. So I'll have 3-4 18TB parity drives for 3-4 18TB Data drives. I am leaning towards just striping them but debating on if the added performance/risk is worth it.

Should I buy all the same drives or should I buy half and half? I need at least 3 but would like 4 but I don't know If I can afford 4 drives atm. I am looking at the SATA ones for ~$400 because the SAS 12Gbps drives have too much of a premium to be worth it. I would prefer the mach.2 drives but those aren't really available and sadly they are SMR and only 14TB. Maybe some day better version will exist.

Is there a difference in the longevity of these drives? Is there a different drive I should be looking into? The Seagate Exos are only rated for 550TB per year....is that right? Does that mean I can only fill/rewrite the drives 30 times a year? That seems really low to me and worries me with rebuilds of my parities/scrubbing/syncing regularly. Is that 550TB of writes or 550TB of writes and reads?

Any advice and thoughts are greatly appreciated! Thanks!

https://www.newegg.com/western-digi...wuh721818ale6l4-0f38459-18tb/p/1Z4-0002-01CG8

https://www.newegg.com/seagate-exos-x18-st18000nm000j-18tb/p/1B4-00VK-00616?quicklink=true
 
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Buying all the same drives, and especially all the same drives, made in the same batch risks them all having the same manufacturing or firmware defect and all having sudden failure at the same time. If you can get a mix of drives, that reduces that risk. If you can stagger when you first power them on by at leasr a few days and maybe a week per drive, that helps too. Of course, if you have a real backup strategy, that's even better.
 
Buying all the same drives, and especially all the same drives, made in the same batch risks them all having the same manufacturing or firmware defect and all having sudden failure at the same time. If you can get a mix of drives, that reduces that risk. If you can stagger when you first power them on by at leasr a few days and maybe a week per drive, that helps too. Of course, if you have a real backup strategy, that's even better.
I understand all of that but what about those specific drives? Are they good? Are they comparable? Are these a good deal or will there be a major price drop in the future?

I am pretty poor so I have slowly built my storage system over the years bit by bit. I also am working on an off-site storage system and backing most important stuff up on archive BDs but again. I wasn't asking for advice on this stuff so please don't derail.

Please give me advice on these hard drives specifically and if there is any future news on hard drives that might be relevant like are HAMR drives around the corner and prices about to drop massively? Or is this a pretty good deal and waiting would be a waste?
 
Well, I got 1 Seagate 18TB Exo and 2 WD/HGST HC550 18TB drives. In the past, I would run HD Sentinel's read/write/verify every block 2 times before using the drives to make sure every block was healthy. Should I still do that with these drives only having 30 full drive writes (550TB writes) per year? It would waste basically a month's worth of life but I feel like I should still do it to make sure the drives are healthy before use.

Any thoughts from intelligent people? Icedigger seem to be worthless......
 
read/write/verify on 18TB is going to take a long ass time.... it's probably worthwhile, but takes so long. I do try to run the SMART full test; that also takes a long time, but not that long, not as comprehensive; doing conveyance, then short while you're awake then doing full overnight isn't too bad. It's all about risk vs reward though. If you'll get alerted when the important SMART metrics change (unreadable, pending, reallocated sectors IIRC), and you've got a data recovery plan, being thorough about pre-qualifying the drives is less important; if this is the only copy of your master's thesis, running burn-in testing is a good idea. I wouldn't worry about using up the write capacity though -- unless you're really churning your storage it shouldn't be a big issue, I assume you've got more of an archive situation going? I'm sure there are ways to churn 54 TB of storage a couple times a month, but that's a lot of Linux ISOs for personal use.

I'm only serious about pre-testing USB disks and SD cards, because fraudulent capacity games exist, although I've heard that's starting for internal SSDs, too :(
 
Games? Howz dat?
Sell you a 2 GB USB stick that claims to be 8 GB, for the same price as a 4 GB stick. Works ok, until you put more than 2 GB on it, then who knows what it decides to keep, or if it just drops off the bus, never to be seen again.
 
Sell you a 2 GB USB stick that claims to be 8 GB, for the same price as a 4 GB stick. Works ok, until you put more than 2 GB on it, then who knows what it decides to keep, or if it just drops off the bus, never to be seen again.
I personally have never seen that happen. I have heard about it but never personally experienced it. Maybe the type of products I buy aren't hit by those scams?
 
I personally have never seen that happen. I have heard about it but never personally experienced it. Maybe the type of products I buy aren't hit by those scams?
I haven't seen it personally either, but running an exhaustive test on incoming flash storage seems worth the effort to avoid it, anyway. (I'm also a little bit careful about where I buy things that might be easy to fake)
 
I haven't seen it personally either, but running an exhaustive test on incoming flash storage seems worth the effort to avoid it, anyway. (I'm also a little bit careful about where I buy things that might be easy to fake)
fair enough. Almost everything I buy is Newegg/amazon and I test it right away. There are a few exceptions like when fiberstore.com or Adorama/BP&H(sp?)/etc. are cheaper/better.

Also, I only buy sandisk/prograde/mushkin/intel/samsung/microcenter stuff when it comes to flash. They are the best/best bang for your buck stuff.
 
Sell you a 2 GB USB stick that claims to be 8 GB, for the same price as a 4 GB stick. Works ok, until you put more than 2 GB on it, then who knows what it decides to keep, or if it just drops off the bus, never to be seen again.
A bogus USB drive, I get that. But now can a * game * have a bogus amount of storage?
 
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