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by mlgray12 on Sat Apr 12, 2014 6:45 pm
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I am about to buy a new Ethernet external storage system (basically my own cloud) I am looking at Seagate's new 4 bay system. My computer has a 1 TB SSD and (2) 4TB drives. I had no problem with these big 4 TB drives (mine are Seagate's) I have had some people recommend not going above 2TB drives - I don't buy it - Anyone having failure problems with 3 or4TB drives. With every increasing file size - I really hate to limit a new 4 bay system with just 2 TB drives. This has been a topic before but like everything in electronic it changes at a fast pace!!!
Michael L. Gray
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by E.J. Peiker on Sat Apr 12, 2014 9:05 pm
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I've had 4 Seagate 3TB drives in service for two years and 4 HGST 4GB HD's in service for about 6 months with no issues so far (knocking on wood).  3TB drives have been out a long time so those have a proven track record.
 

by rnclark on Sat Apr 12, 2014 10:22 pm
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I have several dozen 4 TB seagate drives, a couple of dozen 3 TB seagate drives, also a dozen or two 1 TB small portable seagate drives (for trips--when I fill one on a photo trip, I put it in a safe as the first backup). Since the 3 TB drives came out several years ago, I have had 2 drives move toward failure, and they were older 2 TB drives. Fortunately, linux was monitoring the SMART data on the drives and alerted me before the drives actually failed, and I copied the data to new drives. I have had zero problems with 3 and 4 TB drives, but I only use them on linux systems.

I have bought two of the seagate 4-bay systems filled with 4 TB drives. I just received them but have not integrated them into my systems yet so have no experience. Reviews from a year ago are not kind on amazon with windows users (my plan is linux EXT4 files systems in a Raid 5 configuration).

There are different grades of disk drives in the seagate line (and I'm sure the other manufacturers). The low end will have a higher failure rate and are in the deskstar line. Better quality, designed to be on 24/7 are the constellation series. If the 4-bay system works out for me, I'll buy more, but buy the boxes empty and fill them with constellation series drives for my servers and use the ones containing deskstar as offline backup.

(I mainly need a lot of disk space for spacecraft data.)

Roger
 

by photoman4343 on Sun Apr 13, 2014 11:04 am
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Hi Michael, I just got a new desktop from Microcenter in Houston with 4 TB internal hard drives. These drives were from Western Digital because of their longer warranty. These drives were formatted using the GPT format to end up with one partition. Here are two links that might help explain all of this technical stuff regarding 4tb drives. I am not sure how the Seagate 4 bay external system works, but these links may help you if you have to format the drives you put into them.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... s.85).aspx


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2581408

Joe Smith
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by photoman4343 on Sun Apr 13, 2014 11:06 am
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Here is the first link again: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... s.85).aspx
Joe
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by Royce Howland on Sun Apr 13, 2014 2:45 pm
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Any recommendation to stick with 2TB drives because they're magically more reliable, is overly simplistic and not really helpful. There are some reliability differences across manufacturers, models or even batches of a specific model. But these issues have very little to do with something as trivial as saying that capacity X is reliable and capacity Y is not. I've had no issues with various 3TB and 4TB models, mostly Western Digital Green (for desktop) and RE2 and Red (for server/array) models for me, over the last few years.

One thing that may affect reliability, which we have discussed here many times before, is that the cheaper desktop hard drives are not designed to run 7x24 in storage arrays. So you're taking a risk if you do that. I always use drive models designed for servers and RAID arrays, in my servers and arrays. That's true whether I pick Seagate or Western Digital. I don't run enough capacity to be able to amortize the higher failure rate of desktop-designed drives vs. their lower cost compared to server drives; also, my time is too valuable to intentionally do things that are more likely to cause me trouble down the road.

Also as we have discussed here many times, I don't recommend basing overly much of your choice on a specific model or capacity of hard drive or enclosure, anyway, especially if it's somewhat new and not much operational info has had time to accumulate. Instead, you should have a robust backup & recovery approach that plans for and tolerates the failure of components without exposing you to large risks of data loss. If you get a single 4-bay NAS box regardless of who made it or what kind of drives you put in it, how are you going to back it up? Or is it supposed to be the backup for your workstation internals? If the latter, that would sound like you have only 2 copies. Either way, what if the NAS box itself (not the drives in it) fails? Unless you have a 2nd identical box you can't just remove the drives and stick them in something else and have it work. Boxes like this change all the time; unless you bought 2 identical ones at the same time, you can't guarantee your ability to buy a replacement box in the future that will be plug-in compatible with the dead one. So you'd potentially lose the entire contents of the storage array and have to re-copy it all again from another source, even if the manufacturer replaced a dead box with another comparable (but not identical) model.

I recommend thinking through things like this before creating a giant basket and putting a lot of eggs into it. Having a single loaded storage array is a risk point in itself. Having only two copies of data is also a risk. Combining both of those factors together is a multiplied risk. 3 copies with 1 copy powered off & disconnected (ideally rotated offsite to a secure location) is the minimum to consider as even a basic backup approach. If one of those 3 copies is the storage array, and it goes down, then you're sitting with only 2 copies. Probably both of them will be in the same place and live connected to each other for the duration of time it takes you to recover the storage array. How long will that be? During that window of time you're now at an increased risk of losing everything if something clobbers the 2 copies that are live and in the same place. That's why I run more than 3 copies, and never have a single brand/model of storage array -- I always buy them in 2's or 3's so they can back each other up in the event one of them fails.

Back to hard drive models, for a good snapshot of info on reliability, see this article from cloud storage vendor Backblaze.
http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/wh ... uld-i-buy/

Note that they don't buy enterprise-grade drives designed for servers & RAID arrays. So I think at least in the case of Seagate models, their data supports the argument that using desktop drive models in arrays increases the risk of failure in 7x24 arrays. Look at the failure curve plotted over 36 months of Seagate vs. Western Digital vs. Hitachi (now owned by WD). These are all consumer grade desktop drives, and clearly there is a manufacturer difference at work here, with Seagate not doing nearly so well due in large part to certain specific models.

Out of hundreds of units in use in their storage arrays, Backblaze data shows that one model of Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB suffered a ~25% failure rate, while another model of Seagate 1.5TB suffered a ~10% failure rate. A third Seagate Green 1.5TB model with low count of units suffered a whopping 120% failure rate. So clearly these 1.5TB technology-based drives from Seagate had issues. (This flies in the face of a simplistic recommendation that anything over 2TB is an unsafe choice, because many of the Backblaze models they report on are far more reliable than these smaller 1.5TB models.) A Seagate 3TB model also did suffer a ~10% failure rate. But generally I feel the issue is partly specific Seagate models, but more generally it's likely related to using desktop Seagate drives in 7x24 arrays. You can read the article for the rest.

Obviously armed with info like this, one could make some generalizations about what to buy or not buy. But it has little to do with capacity, and more to do with manufacturer or model-specific issues...
Royce Howland
 

by Primus on Mon Apr 14, 2014 3:26 pm
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Great write up, Royce.

Even for amateurs like me, the concept of backup is terribly important. Nobody wants to lose their precious images even if they are only of the family and friends (I consider these to be even more important).

I've been thinking of taking the plunge with the new Mac Pro, but that would mean setting up a whole new drive system with boxes that take thunderbolt connectors. So far the choice of empty boxes in that category has been rather limited.

Any advice on which way to go? I've looked at various recommendations from the Apple forums but nothing seems to be truly tested and tried, with the few consumer reviews being all over the place.

And sorry for the thread drift, you could move this elsewhere if you like.

Pradeep
 

by mlgray12 on Wed Apr 16, 2014 9:42 pm
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Thanks everyone - Royce your reply was incredible almost an article in itself
Thanks again _ I will try and absorb all this and see what is best for me
I do try and keep at least three copies - one is external drive kept in a safe deposit box
Problem right now is last several months have been so super busy I need to catch up - one thing is to get a big external box so I have enough space to keep some basic data and carry one of my back-ups!!
Michael L. Gray
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