Drive failure rates discussion... what are the best HD for NAS/storage use?

Richdog

Richdog

Richdog

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Hi chaps and chapesses,

Firstly, I know this data has been posted in other threads, but as far as I know there has been no single discussion on it yet.

So, based on the excellent data from the guys over at Backblaze.com there is now some really good info on drive failure rates which I found quite surprising (and yes I know it has also been posted in other threads(... https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/


  • In that chart we see the Seagates have an appalling failure rate of almost 30% on their newer range of HD's.
  • It is also surprising to see the Western Digital Reds as the second most unreliable, frequently hovering around the 10% mark.
  • The most reliable by far appears to be the HGST Deskstar range, hovering around the 1.5% mark.

So does this then translate to the HGST's, particularly the 4TB model, being the most suitable for NAS use? They are certainly quite expensive at around 130GBP per disk, but getting two or three to start would give you a good amount of storage while leaving another 4-8TB upgrade possibility for the future.

Would be interested to hear some thoughts. :)

PS: Please lets not turn this into a "but my WD/Seagate has always been fine and I've never had any problems" thread, we are just talking about the objective data provided above.
 
This is the Golden rule.. Keep a backup of the data on your NAS.

Never put trust in any hard drives.



Personally I use WD Red drives.

For the backups I keep of my NAS data, I use a large mix of single drives from all manufacturers. Keeping two copies of my NAS data.

Yes, it's costly. But I don't want to lose anything.
 
yep never trust any hard drive.

i'm an It support officer at college, 4,500 PC's and 1000 MAC's over 6 campuses.

hard drive is most common thing goes wrong. you'll need backup of backup :)
 
personally for home use

get a single disk NAS and get an usb external hard drive for backup of the Nas daily automatically. both on separate power plug socket
 
Up until now I've been exclusively WD red. I have something like 14 of them. One has been replaced under warranty - it expired after a few days use. The replacement has been fine.

I just however managed to snaffle some new HGST Ultrastar 3TB drives so am going to try those in a new build (4x3TB RAID 10) - looks like they're pitched at the same point as WD Red Pro as they are 7200 RPM and 5 year warranty.
 
I have not experienced that with the Seagate drives at all. I believe the failure rate with us is less that 1%... I must have used hundreds of the STX00DM00X drives and rarely have an issue.
 
bledd. said:
This is the Golden rule.. Keep a backup of the data on your NAS.

Never put trust in any hard drives.
Click to expand...

This is why I love cloud services... you can back up directly from a NAS to them (I have fibre, 1GBit upload speed) and keep all your important data safe. Clearly that doesn't involve backing up music or movies as all are to me very replaceable, so I only backup my "My Documents" folder which literally has everything important to me in it.

I'm now considering paying the 12EUR a month for unlimited Dropbox services as it's such a versatile system, the cost of 144EUR per year is nothing to me if my data is always safe. :)
 
Indeed.

I spend a lot on hard drives, I'd love to have even 100Mbit upload, that would cover me needs.
 
Richdog said:
This is why I love cloud services... you can back up directly from a NAS to them (I have fibre, 1GBit upload speed) and keep all your important data safe. Clearly that doesn't involve backing up music or movies as all are to me very replaceable, so I only backup my "My Documents" folder which literally has everything important to me in it.

I'm now considering paying the 12EUR a month for unlimited Dropbox services as it's such a versatile system, the cost of 144EUR per year is nothing to me if my data is always safe. :)
Click to expand...

I would consider something along those lines too - but uploading it all is sooo slooow, it is painful. Would have to be choosy about what I upload to avoid that problem - which kinda defeats the object really.
 
I use WD Red drives too in my NAS and one 2TB Green on a seperate volume in the NAS which takes a back up of certain folders.

The NAS drives I have in bays 1-4 are 2 x 3TB Red and 2 x 6TB Red. They have all been great drives and are running 24/7, so I have been very pleased with them.

As mentioned previously my Synology NAS is great with cloud services and I back up my My Documents folder to the cloud as well. I also have a Samsung Portable USB 3.0 1TB drive connected to the NAS which takes a daily backup of selected folders too.

I live in Australia and have a HFC Cable connection which gives me around 112Mbps (14MBps) down and a lousy 2Mbps up (250KBps) so although my download is very fast my upload is appalling so unfortunately I can't really do large file uploads to cloud based services. Hopefully in a couple of years the existing infrastructure gets upgraded to DOCSIS 3.1 which should give me 1Gbps up and down.
 
tipes said:
I would consider something along those lines too - but uploading it all is sooo slooow, it is painful. Would have to be choosy about what I upload to avoid that problem - which kinda defeats the object really.
Click to expand...

Well as for being choosy, imo you don't need to back up non-essential, general media to a cloud like music collections etc, it's fine to just have those backup on an external HD. What is important are your essential personal files and photos (or videos depending if you do editing etc), and once those are all uploaded then it's simply a matter of uploading anything new. It doesn't matter how long it takes as long as it all gets uploaded eventually, and I guess you could set it to do that at night times when your're not using it.
 
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ZXSpectrum said:
I have not experienced that with the Seagate drives at all. I believe the failure rate with us is less that 1%... I must have used hundreds of the STX00DM00X drives and rarely have an issue.
Click to expand...

I have a Seagate drive happily spinning away in my PC I bought in 2007. I have just replaced it though, just as a precaution, with another Seagate.
 
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