New Hard Drive

It's time for some new drives again so I'm asking for suggestions from experienced users here. I'm looking at 4TB or larger drives. I've mostly stuck with WD Blacks in the past but the more recent info I can find suggests Hitachi drives over Seagate and WD.  WD has taken over Hitachi so I'm not sure if that is as clear as it was a couple years ago.  Even within Hitachi there are 4TB NAS drives, consumer drives, hybrid drives and Enterprise drives.  One of the drives will be my main image drive that I work from regularly and others for backups. 
Thanks for any input.

The enterprise ones will be the most reliable and the hybrid ones the fastest but, as you know, all drives fgail, some sooner , some later, but eventually they fail.

BTW, I am using HGST drives now. I just noticed they now have 8TB models!!!

Thanks E.J. I'm looking for reliable. I hear you on the failure at some point. I keep a min of 4 copies of everything and in a couple different locations as well! I might be paranoid with 4 but it still makes me feel better.

They seem to have the Enterprise versions available as oem with only 1 year warranty while boxed versions have a 5 year. Consumer Boxed have 3.

I saw those 8TB drives. Amazing. There is even a "cheap" under $300 one now but super slow. I guess it would be great for archiving though.

For single stand-alone drives, I wouldn't say that spending the extra money for Enterprise drives is worth the additional cost. Especially within the HGST models, since they all seem to be very reliable, even after the take-over by WD. Enterprise and NAS drives are designed to be spinning 7x24 in multi-disk enclosures, typically running under some kind of RAID config. There are specific design changes made in these models of hard disk to provide best reliability. You don't really need those design factors if you're not running the drives 7x24 in multi-bay RAID boxes.

For what you described, you're probably fine with any model that has the capacity you want, matches your budget, has a good warranty (3 years minimum I would say), and about which there are no current bad reliability reports. Then make sure your backup and recovery process is trustworthy and go from there.

Thanks for the input Royce. While of course price always is a factor at some point, for my main image disk I don't want to scrimp or to waste money either. For backup drives I'm not as concerned as there are several and they don't run typically only maybe a half hour a day when they are being backed up to.

I will be replacing a few hd's myself in the near future and found this article at the Backblaze blog to be very informative. Real world usage with reliability percentages given. It has made me rethink the drives I am considering. And seems to have made it clear I need to replace my Seagate drives before the fail.

What Hard Drives Should I Buy?

E.J. Peiker wrote:BTW, I am using HGST drives now.  I just noticed they now have 8TB models!!!

Just now discovered I am in the same position as Jim Zipp. 

Looking at a 4TB external HGST (HGST 4TB Touro Desk DX3 USB 3.0 Hard Disk).  In  your opinion E.J., is this a good idea ?   Of course, this depends on my personal size needs and 4TB is plenty big for now. 

Or, could you recommend one of those external HGST's?  

Thank you
Robert King

I would never buy a housed external drive like that from the HD companies.  They are unreliable because they aren't properly cooled and essentially designed to fail after a certain amount of time due to excessive heat.  You are MUCH better off buying an actively cooled (fanned) external case and then buying a bare drive and sticking it in the housing.

E.J. Peiker wrote:I would never buy a housed external drive like that from the HD companies.  They are unreliable because they aren't properly cooled and essentially designed to fail after a certain amount of time due to excessive heat.  You are MUCH better off buying an actively cooled (fanned) external case and then buying a bare drive and sticking it in the housing.

thank you E.J.

That is what I will do.

Blck-shouldered Kite wrote:

E.J. Peiker wrote:I would never buy a housed external drive like that from the HD companies.  They are unreliable because they aren't properly cooled and essentially designed to fail after a certain amount of time due to excessive heat.  You are MUCH better off buying an actively cooled (fanned) external case and then buying a bare drive and sticking it in the housing.

thank you E.J.

That is what I will do.

Earlier in the year when I was looking for an external drive housing with USB3 and eSATA (lot's were USB2), I did find this company and their housings can be found on Amazon as well. They may have one that fits your needs. Based on reviews I put an HGST drive in it and will add another as I need.
http://www.startech.com/HDD/Enclosures/?filter_DRIVESIZE=3.5in&filter_NUMHARDDRIVE=2

On the link above, this would probably be a good choice for a single drive:
http://www.startech.com/HDD/Enclosures/ ... 3510BMU33B

Thanks to all for the extremely useful info.  The statistics from Backblaze seem especially significant, although I think most photogs don't subject their drives to BB's 'battlefield' environment.

Is anyone using an online backup service for storing photos?  Here's a recent review of their capabilities:
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2500640/data-center/5-online-backup-services-keep-your-data-safe.html?page=3

LaCie drives, popular with some, are not mentioned at all.  Too expensive?  Has anyone had experience with them?

One final caveat.  The recommended HGST drives are preformatted in NTFS for use with Windows but need to be reformatted to work with Macs.  Apparently this problem can be solved rasily.  See the review comments by A.J. Scaltrito: 
http://www.amazon.com/HGST-Touro-Desktop-External-0S03396/product-reviews/B007K4HA0W/ref=cm_cr_dp_see_all_btm?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending
I'll leave it to those far more expert than me to elaborate.

JM

HGST? Cannot seem to find them in Europe, but seem to be, part of WD?

They are Hitachi drives which is now a subsidiary of Western Digital.

The big problem with online storage is the amount of data that we have to deal with these days is so large that the time it takes to upload or download makes it impractical.

Wildflower-nut wrote:The big problem with online storage is the amount of data that we have to deal with these days is so large that the time it takes to upload or download makes it impractical.

That was the impression I got too.  Some layered PSD files can reach 1 GB.  So at present we are pretty much limited to our own mechanical hard disk drives.  But solid-state drives are getting larger and larger ....

Meanwhile some ISPs are launching data transmission service with speeds up to 1 GBps.  Think of the possibilities.

JM

James McIntyre wrote:

Wildflower-nut wrote:The big problem with online storage is the amount of data that we have to deal with these days is so large that the time it takes to upload or download makes it impractical.

That was the impression I got too.  Some layered PSD files can reach 1GB.  So at present we are pretty much limited to our own mechanical disk drives.  But solid-state drives are getting larger and larger.

JM

Ahhh….Interesting.  BTW, with this thread, this whole back up challenge is finally coming clear to me.

Good stuff….thanks to all. 
Robert

I have been looking into this also- I can get a little tech stupid in a hurry so is this the drive Jim Zipp and EJ are talking about? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145969
HGST Ultrastar He8 HUH728080ALE600 (0F23267) 8TB 128MB Cache SAS 6Gb/s 3.5" Helium Platform Enterprise Hard Disk Drives

In an enclosure like: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.a ... 6817707358
StarTech S3510BMU33B USB 3.0 to 3.5” SATA III Hard Drive Enclosure with Fan and Upright Design – SATA 6 Gbps & UASP Support

thanks
Jim

Hi Jim,
the ones we've been talking about can be seen on this page.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... isNodeId=1
4TB HGST drives in the boxed regular one f or $164 with 3 year, OEM Enterprise version with 1 year for another $100, or the enterprise version with 5 year warranty for about double the boxed version.

I use this enclosure as I've had good luck with the ones from MacGuru's. Rock steady and well built. They are spendier but they have great service. http://www.macgurus.com/store/Item/BurlyLite_SATA