What's the best hard disk brand / model for off site backups in an external enclosure?

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#1201744 22-Dec-2014 09:12

DravidDavid: I would not touch Hitachi with a 10 foot poll. I'm not sure if they have changed their game plan or something, but they out-numbered Seagate in failures when I was a tech a few years ago. Maybe it's different now.

...We used to joke they put all the good parts in to their power tools. Best power tools around. Hard drives, not so much.

They got a bad reputation with the click of death, or death star, or something. Rated the best by a good margin by BackBlaze - check this out - click for article. Note it's for WD Red drives not black.

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#1201950 22-Dec-2014 11:53

I'll have to have a look at the actual article this afternoon, but it looks as if there are more reported failures of the Seagate 1.5TB because I'd guess that was the more affordable, more popular drive for home applications?

Where as I have never heard of the HGST line of drives until I saw this thread.

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#1201957 22-Dec-2014 11:59

timmmay: They got a bad reputation with the click of death, or death star, or something.

That was IBM and was probably the reason they bailed from the consumer market. I have a 30GB DeathStar that still works. At the time IBM had the reputation as best and fastest then they introduced a new tech that started failing. I've never seen any post mortem info but suspect it was something like the coating on the glass platters.

The same thing happens every time Brand X changes anything, their past reputation only counts for how fast they'll get back on track. If you've never had trouble with Brand X you've just dodged their duds.

Ragnor

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#1202094 22-Dec-2014 14:57

kiwikiwi: As an IT Tech. The Black Blaze article can not be trusted at all. In terms of getting another drive.
Green drives have really really slow seek times and also have weird power issues.
Reds are known to fail, when working as an intern I had 150 out of 200 put on my desk with head seek failures.
Blues are budget.
Black are yes expensive but fast and pretty much worth it.

Anecdotal experience with a few hundred drives is more reliable then their recorded stats using thousands of drives?

If we are going with anecdotes... in our two 4 bay co-located NAS servers in the last 2 years I've had 1x Hitachi, 1x Seagate and 1x WD Red die.

The bottom line is never rely on a single drive in a single location, period.

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#1202096 22-Dec-2014 15:01

Ragnor:
kiwikiwi: As an IT Tech. The Black Blaze article can not be trusted at all. In terms of getting another drive.
Green drives have really really slow seek times and also have weird power issues.
Reds are known to fail, when working as an intern I had 150 out of 200 put on my desk with head seek failures.
Blues are budget.
Black are yes expensive but fast and pretty much worth it.

Your anecdotal experience with a few hundred drives is more reliable then their recorded stats using thousands of drives?

I don't know you tell me. Every WD drive I've had has had a 50% chance of dying. I've still yet to have a Seagate fail. Experience is better then opinion. My opinion seagate drives or WD blacks. Most reliable in my experience

You can also follow me on twitter here @kiwifortw I do twitch streams every now and then at twitch.tv/kiwiforthewin :)

HTTP 404 Sarcasm not found.

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#1202101 22-Dec-2014 15:04

Was just editing my post above to add couple more lines re anecdotal evidence...

Going to repeat this, the most important thing is to never rely on a single drive in a single location.

timmmay

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#1202175 22-Dec-2014 16:13

kiwikiwi:
Ragnor:
kiwikiwi: As an IT Tech. The Black Blaze article can not be trusted at all. In terms of getting another drive.
Green drives have really really slow seek times and also have weird power issues.
Reds are known to fail, when working as an intern I had 150 out of 200 put on my desk with head seek failures.
Blues are budget.
Black are yes expensive but fast and pretty much worth it.

Your anecdotal experience with a few hundred drives is more reliable then their recorded stats using thousands of drives?

I don't know you tell me. Every WD drive I've had has had a 50% chance of dying. I've still yet to have a Seagate fail. Experience is better then opinion. My opinion seagate drives or WD blacks. Most reliable in my experience

A few hundred is statistically significant IMHO, plus your experience is likely more fitting - consumer machines not data centres. WD Black is my current pick.

Ragnor: Was just editing my post above to add couple more lines re anecdotal evidence...

Going to repeat this, the most important thing is to never rely on a single drive in a single location.

Absolutely, hence I need this reliable offsite backup drive.

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#1202302 22-Dec-2014 19:01

If you care about the data then the best enclosure is a multi-bay one, so that you don't lose data when (and it is when, not if) a drive fails. Make it a NAS, and every machine on your network can see it. An adequate 2-bay NAS only costs around $200, although you do also have to spring for two drives - but you will regret not spending the extra when the inevitable drive failure occurs.

Personally, after losing a couple of drives, I am migrating to an 8-bay NAS , with initially with three drives (6TB reds) and configured as RAID5. Just as soon as I can afford the drive, a further disk will be added to move it to RAID6. Two duplicate copies of everything will be kept on USB drives. Yes, it costs more. But not as much as the aggravation of lost data.

EDIT: Spelling

timmmay

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#1202312 22-Dec-2014 20:07

JimmyH: If you care about the data then the best enclosure is a multi-bay one, so that you don't lose data when (and it is when, not if) a drive fails. Make it a NAS, and every machine on your network can see it. An adequate 2-bay NAS only costs around $200, although you do also have to spring for two drives - but you will regret not spending the extra when the inevitable drive failure occurs.

Personally, after losing a couple of drives, I am migrating to an 8-bay NAS , with initially with three drives (6TB reds) and configured as RAID5. Just as soon as I can afford the drive, a further disk will be added to move it to RAID6. Two duplicate copies of everything will be kept on USB drives. Yes, it costs more. But not as much as the aggravation of lost data.

Thanks for your suggestion. I'm an Amazon certified architect (amongst other things), I know a thing or two about RAID, NAS, data protection, etc. Really just looking for a reliable disk for my offsite backups. A NAS isn't appropriate - fire can burn it just as easily as it can burn my PC.

Mark

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#1202381 23-Dec-2014 00:24

I've been in the storage arena since 1996, and to be honest I just use whatever brand of drive is cheapest at the time, not once had a failure (touch wood) .. currently my Thecus NAS is using 2TB WD Green drives no had any issues with that drive type at all, NAS had a wobbly a while back with bad SATA cables but no data loss.
I go cheap as anything I want to keep I make sure is backed up to something like Mozy ... "backups" of movies and TV shows just get whatever protection the NAS can do, if I lose them it's not end of the world ... but photos of the family are irreplaceable so off to Mozy they go!

But remember drives don't like starting up or shutting down, they are happiest and most reliable when spinning away, so ditch all the green power saving functions from day one.

Now at work I go with "you can burn the city to the ground" style redundancy in as many cases as I can ... pesky budgets don't let me build proper setups as often as I would like! :-)

timmmay

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#1202393 23-Dec-2014 07:15

I have three copies of critical data (financials, my wedding photos, my keeper photos in jpeg) which includes cloud backup. I have three copies of my customers wedding photos in three locations. I have three copies of my personal photos in three locations. Plus there are often old retired disks which are in a drawer. I think you could say I'm adequately backed up! I do prefer reliable disks, will probably go WD Black.

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#1202398 23-Dec-2014 07:19

I've started a new related discussion on checksums and bit rot here, if anyone's interested.

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#1202421 23-Dec-2014 08:07

I have been using WD reds in RAID arrays in various enclosures since they became available, and have had no failures (yet):

10 x 3TB
8 x 4TB
10 x 6TB

I have experienced early (day 1 & 2 !) failures in 50% of one batch of Seagate drives - replaced without argument, still working OK one year later - but I don't trust them.

PS

If you wait long enough, a 100% failure rate is normal for all drives.
Therefore never archive on a single drive.
I keep critical data on 3 different RAID arrays.

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#1202427 23-Dec-2014 08:14

Thanks SF. WD Red 3TB are unreliable according to BackBlaze, who have huge sample sizes. Of course critical data is kept in multiple locations, this disk is for one of those locations.

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#1202822 23-Dec-2014 18:30

If it's for archived material that doesn't change once it's created, another option is optical disks. Last time I looked good 25GB BD-Rs were going for around $US 45-50 (+ shipping) for a 50 spindle (approx $NZ 50/TB excl shipping) . I would be tempted to grab a couple of those, burn 2-3 copies of the archival material, and stash it in multiple locations. Then, every time you create another 25GB, burn another set.

Probably more reliable than trying to spin up an old drive that has been seldom used for a few years.

For stuff that really matters I would trust good single layer more than dual layer disks as reliable longer-term storage, although it does double the number of disks to burn.

Of course, for extra safety and convenience, you can go the hard drive and the optical route - belt and braces.

As for drive reliability, I have had a few greens fail on me over the last three years. Everything else (non-green WDs, Seagates) have not had a single failure.

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