Re: [PLUG] HARD DRIVES

On April 8, 2018 3:43:24 PM EDT, Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 8, 2018 at 2:17 PM, Anthony Martin
<anthony.j.martin142@gmail.com> wrote:
 I would vouch for the WD reds series. I have 3 drives at 4TB (1 from Amazon
 and 2 from Microcenter) that I have been running for over 3 years in a
 system that only gets turned off when there is a fear of power outage. I run
 scans on them roughly every 4 months and so far have not had any issues
 *knocks on wood*.

Honestly, I don't think there is a lot of value in anecdotes here.

You'll fine cases of good and bad drives for all the major vendors,
and personal success/horror stories from all of them also.

I highly recommend checking out Backblaze's drive stats as they're
really informative on this front, but the problem is that they tell
you how well the drives from two years ago worked.  I remember one
Seagate model that had an absurdly high failure rate - Backblaze was
going through thousands of them, and I personally had one of those
that failed under warranty, and then the warranty replacement drive
ALSO failed under warranty.  But, most Seagate drives have been fine.

Hitachi used to be much better than the rest.  If I were running
single-drive without RAID I'd seriously consider them, but they've
changed ownership and whether their stats hold out remains to be seen.

As far as I can tell, there really are no good/bad vendors.  Often the
newest largest-capacity drives have issues when they're first
introduced, so I would probably stay away from those, but for 1TB
drives this is a non-issue.

I know the vendors want you to buy the Red drives for always-on or
RAID.  Honestly, I've used these sometimes but not all the time and I
can't really say it has made much of a noticeable difference.  Maybe
they'll fail faster and result in less latency when one flakes out.