Good hard drive for streaming lossless??

[stunta]

I buy branded external HDDs when they go on sale and use cloud backup. A spinning disk is going to die some day. Cheap ones have lasted me years. Remember that for the most part, its reads vs. writes.

 

[Pluto]

there's nothing actually wrong with the drives

Apart from the fact that they may not work in the role for which they are specifically touted (resilvering a RAID). WD were the first to offer this kind of product that claimed to be optimized for particular roles and that could well come back to bite them.

The Court will decide.

 

[Soniclife]

You mean the actual hdd spinning noise ?

Yes. If the drives are in the listening room it can be annoying, if you are weird about this like me, if they are elsewhere it's not an issue.

 

[CDMC]

Look at BackBlaze HDD reports for their quarterly reliability statistics.

Those are great, but only cover a limited number of drives.

Over the years, I have found Western Digital and Toshiba to be consistent on reliability. Personally, I use Western Digital Black for my platter. Red's are good for NAS, but I have read they are not really designed for desktop use.

The truth is, unless you get a model hard drive with known issues, your chance of having one fail in your sample size of one user is about the same for any of the major brands. Just make sure you have an offsite backup (i.e. Idrive, crashplan, etc.). Ironically, the only drive I had fail in the last 10 years was an Intel SSD, a model which was known for its reliability (again small sample size, so luck of the draw).

 

[Jinjuku]

Those figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. They use cheap consumer drives well outside their intended parameters. It's like measuring how many bricks you can throw at a car before the windows break.

The #'s are what they are.

 

[somebodyelse]

I'm aware of that. I have 2 mirrored Red drives in my Synology NAS. What you should care about is this: "SMR hard drives are best used in workloads where the majority of the drive's duty cycle consists of reads rather than writes. "

With my NAS I do exactly that - I write the music files once and listen to them many times.

The problem comes when one drive fails, you replace it and try to rebuild the array. People have been reporting that the rebuild with the shingled drives at best takes orders of magnitude longer than usual, and at at worst fails entirely as the drive hits an error condition during rebuild.

 

[QMuse]

The problem comes when one drive fails, you replace it and try to rebuild the array. People have been reporting that the rebuild with the shingled drives at best takes orders of magnitude longer than usual, and at at worst fails entirely as the drive hits an error condition during rebuild.

I replaced a drive a year ago, it was a Seagate mirrored with WD Red. I put in another WD Red and rebuild it without any issues. IIRC it took 3-4 hours to rebuild a 2TB drive. I see no reason why it would have difficulties rebuilding it.

 

[LightninBoy]

For you Windows users out there, Storage Spaces is a little known feature available since Win 8. It basically is a software RAID that is flexible and easy to use and configure. So if you have a tower desktop or any case capable of holding multiple drives, you can easily go buy 2 or 3 commodity HDDs and pool them together into a single logical drive. Its all mirrored in the background so if one drive fails you won't lose anything, and you can hot swap drives in and out. The drives are also 100% portable to other Windows machines. It works really slick and can be a simpler solution if you don't want to get into a hardware RAID setup. Its not as fast as a good hardware based RAID solution, but should be fine for most domestic uses.

http://techgenix.com/windows-10-storage-spaces/

 

[mansr]

I replaced a drive a year ago, it was a Seagate mirrored with WD Red. I put in another WD Red and rebuild it without any issues. IIRC it took 3-4 hours to rebuild a 2TB drive. I see no reason why it would have difficulties rebuilding it.

SMR drives perform _very_ badly if writes are not done properly. Maybe your OS knows what to do.

 

[QMuse]

SMR drives perform _very_ badly if writes are not done properly. Maybe your OS knows what to do.

It is a small Synology NAS and WD Red is one of the recommended drives, so it probably does.

 

[miero]

https://www.extremetech.com/computi...ing-inferior-smr-hard-drives-to-nas-customers

 

[somebodyelse]

I replaced a drive a year ago, it was a Seagate mirrored with WD Red. I put in another WD Red and rebuild it without any issues. IIRC it took 3-4 hours to rebuild a 2TB drive. I see no reason why it would have difficulties rebuilding it.

If you did it a year ago there's a good chance the new drive wasn't shingled. If you check Synology's compatibility list the shingled WD Red models are notable by their absence.

 

[Pluto]

If you check Synology's compatibility list the shingled WD Red models are notable by their absence

Which is sadly ironic given that WD Red was the first drive range marketed to the public-at-large as specifically for RAID use.

 

[mansr]

Which is sadly ironic given that WD Red was the first drive range marketed to the public-at-large as specifically for RAID use.

I don't see what RAID has to do with anything. It doesn't alter the overall access pattern seen by the drive.

 

[maverickronin]

Try with WD Purple or some other NAS/surveillance one's. Now days price sweat spot is on 4TB side.

I've heard the firmware in those video surveillance drives will skip writes on sectors its having trouble with in order to keep overall throughput up and continue writing footage to the drive.

Skipping some frames here and there may be a good tradeoff for surveillance, but not for general file storage.

 

[maverickronin]

Also, I have 3TB 8 WD Reds in RAID6 on my own machine. They're a decent value for bulk storage.

Like any other hard drive the most important factor to long life is keeping them cool. Even "enterprise" class SAS drives drop like files when someone decides it's a good idea to lock their server in the closet because it's too loud or something.

External USB drives are generally best used with external forced air cooling since it's popular to put them in insulating plastic cases with very little ventilation, although you'll probably have to make a fan caddy yourself...

 

[Svperstar]

After my 1 tb Samsung 850 Evo died on me I got a Sabrient 2tb because of its huge MTBF.

You can pick up a 1tb model if you have nvme slots:
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rock...d=1591102741&sprefix=sabrient+,aps,152&sr=8-4

 

[QMuse]

If you did it a year ago there's a good chance the new drive wasn't shingled. If you check Synology's compatibility list the shingled WD Red models are notable by their absence.

You are right. I just checked what I bought and it was WD20EFRX, so no SMR in that one.

 

[mansr]

After my 1 tb Samsung 850 Evo died on me I got a Sabrient 2tb because of its huge MTBF.

MTBF numbers are mostly meaningless. The relevant parameter for SSDs is write endurance, which I can't find anywhere on the Sabrent website. Not a good sign.

 

[Pluto]

I don't see what RAID has to do with anything. It doesn't alter the overall access pattern seen by the drive.

Don't think I see your point. Have you read the entire story over at The Register? The problem concerns the WD Red range, which is specifically sold as the drive of choice for RAID use. When used outside a RAID environment* the worst case is that writing will be a lot slower than reading. If that suits you, fine. However, if you use a new low capacity “Red” (I believe <8TB) as a theoretically identical replacement for a failed drive within a RAID (“resilvering”), the process of reconstructing the RAID may fail as the write performance of the new drive is far worse than that of its older RAID partners.

This particular issue is RAID-related and RAID is the intended and advertised role of the Red family. Got it now?

* though why would you pick a “Red” in such a case?