help me choose qty=6 s/ATA disks for my multi node NAS - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 04, 2023, 01:49:35 pm
content: As stated on the last page ofthistopic, my Seagate Barracudas have a bad reputation for being unreliable and something tells me I need to give serious consideration to the warnings given in this forum.so I would like to replace them with modern and good HDDs, but I have constraints related to the project in which they are to be used.The selection criterion is therefore3.5"capacity less than 2TB, even better if 1TBsATA2 if possible since the (SiliconImage) HBA is sATA2If possible Hitachi, given that it is one of the brands I have heard best about... umm?CMR (avoid SMR (1))short ERC (error recovery controlThanksedit1:criteria updated with fresh new points!-(1) I forgot it was discussedhere("seagate s/ata disks") a while ago.-interesting noteshereon how records age, in relation to how they are used: { always on, on when needed, then off }interesting notes about flash-storage deviceslet's face it: usb sticks are not reliable,hereSSD vs HDD for data security,hereDo you trust consumer grade SSD to store back up?here...

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 12:04:12 am
content: Small capacity 1 and 2TB SATA drives are still readily available, brand new. However you're unlikely to find any drives with a SATA2 interface, that has long been replaced by SATA3, which really doesn't matter as it's backwards compatible.If you're using it for a NAS, and can afford it, go for the enterprise variants (like HGST/WD Ultrastar, Seagate Exos etc...). The ones that are marketed as "NVR", "Surveillance" or "NAS" hard drives are typically going to be in the consumer range, not that they are a bad choice, but check their specs carefully as they are usually designed for specific workloads. Things like read/write speeds, cache size and error recovery control (ERC) can be important depending on how you use them.For example: I've had nothing but issues with traditional hardware RAIDs using consumer drives with a longer ERC timeout. If the drive's internal error control detects an error, they can stop responding to the RAID controller for extended periods and eventually present as a failed drive in the array. That being said, it's a bit like putting regular unleaded fuel into a supercar; It's not designed for that job. If you're planning to use software RAID or something like ZFS, they are probably going to be more forgiving with consumer drives.Whilst this is purely anecdotal evidence: I'm on my second set of Hitachi/WD Ultrastar drives in my NAS. The previous set were 2 TB drives and in about 10-12 years, I only had to replace 1 due to failure. The remaining drives still work fine today. I replaced them with 8TB drives about 4 years ago and they've been rock solid. All of them have been running 24/7/365.I don't think there is a "best" drive brand as-such, it just depends on what you're going to be doing with them.I have had friends who have had some very good results with refurbished drives purchased from reputable sellers that sell second-hand enterprise IT gear. They will usually have some kind of warranty if the drive dies within the first 2-12 months. It's definitely a viable option to get enterprise equipment for much cheaper. I'd avoid ebay and alike, you just don't know what you're getting and sellers sometimes lie.If you're going to go down the route of consumer drives, make sure they are of the CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) type (sometimes called PMR), not the SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). There are various sites on the internet which list known SMR drives (the ones you want to avoid). I'll let you do further reading on why SMR drives in a NAS are a bad idea.I hope this helps point you in the right direction.

author: Shonky
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 04:19:37 am
content: Yep agree with the above.Be aware that full enterprise grade drives can be a bit noisier seeking in particular which may be an issue if your NAS is in close proximity. I have a couple of WD Golds I bought for a server rack and they are noticeably noisier.I have mostly Seagate Ironwolfs (not Pro) in my NAS and they have been pretty good in unRAID. Better than the WD Reds I had. I think I might have one WD left.Some recommend buying from different sources in case you get a "bad batch" but I don't really think that's worth the effort. I mostly add/upgrade one or two at a time anyway.No doubt this thread will probably end up with at least one person anecdotally swearing against every one of the major brands, never buy them again, highest failure rate etc etc.

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 05:26:37 am
content: Quote from: Shonky on October 05, 2023, 04:19:37 amIt's like insisting on one brand of fuel over another. It's entirely meaningless.Backblaze publishes some interesting data if you really want to crunch numbers:https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive-test-data

author: Shonky
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 06:02:53 am
content: Also agree. If you want to decide based on data, Backblaze data is about the best available but I'd only use it as a guide since specific models may be better or worse within brands.Understand your potential for data loss (i.e. amount of redundancy) and assume at any time the whole thing could go away (fire/flood/theft/surge etc). i.e. 3-2-1 backup for critical data.All drives can fail.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 10:02:06 am
content: Quote from: Halcyon on October 05, 2023, 12:04:12 amI bought my first six Barracudas new in a physical store in 2010 (used in my NAS project)Code:25/09/2010:qty=6, Seagate Barracuda ST3500418AS, 7200.12 500GB, €44,90/eachqty=2, Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Intern 3-Bay, €65,90/each...and other four Barracudas in 2017 (used in my s/ATA to SCSI box)Code:13/06/2017:qty=4, Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM, €54,90/eachqty=1, Icy Box IB-2226StS for 2x SATA 2.5", €35,90/eachAfter 12 years of use, although not continuously, none of the ST3500418AS HDDs has ever shown a single defect, neither badblocks nor S.M.A.R.T.-test reports no-error and none of the checksums of the files on the layer above mergefs have ever reported data-corruptionHowever both in this forum and on Google I have seen very bad things talked about about them, especially about the 7200.12 family, and aboutST3000DM001HDDs, and I'm a bit ' Worried about the future of this NAS.A bit of details, to better illustrate what type of engine this is. The NAS that I built in 2010 is a bit particular, it's made up of 3 nodes, each based on PPC40x, managing each a pair of disks in soft-RAID-1 (2 disk/node, 3 nodes, 6 disks), provided by a SiliconImage PCI chip. The nodes are controlled by a little SBC that is always online, consumes less than 5Watt, monitors the network traffic entering the NAS, if it notices a request for one of the three nodes that is offline (off), forces a softboot to the node, and in less than 12 seconds (bootstrap time) it satisfies the request. Similarly, if it sees no activity on a node within 40 minutes, it requests shutdown and turns off both the node and the hard disks connected to it.Periodically (during night) also forces the bootstrap of the mediatower, and also organizes backups according to different levels. From daily backups, on DDS tape, to weekly backups on CDRW, to monthly backups on DVDRAMCode:. _______| |network === ctrl0 | _______| | |A |--- sata.ch0----- hdd0| === lan0 & uart0 === | node0 |--- sata.ch1----- hdd1| | |_______|--- pata_ramdisk| | |B |--- sata.ch0----- hdd2| === lan1 & uart1 === | node1 |--- sata.ch1----- hdd3| | |_______|--- pata_ramdisk| | |C |--- sata.ch0----- hdd4| === lan2 & uart2 === | node2 |--- sata.ch1----- hdd5| | |_______|--- pata_ramdisk| | _______________| | |D || === lan3 =========== | media_tower || | | SCSI || | | + ramdisk || | | + media || | | + DVD-RAM || | | + CDRW650 || | | + DDS-4 || | |_______________||_______||| uart4___|__________| || power unit || || || 12V,5V ---- group.A { node0, hdd0, hdd1 }| 12V,5V ---- group.B { node1, hdd2, hdd3 }| 12V,5V ---- group.C { node2, hdd4, hdd5 }| 5V_TTL ---- group.D { media_tower } (ATX poweron)|______________|Code:. ___________| bay0 || ______|_| | hdd0 |------ node0.sata.ch0| |A_______|| | hdd1 |------ node0.sata.ch1| |A_______|| | hdd2 |------ node1.sata.ch0| |B_______||___________| bay1 || ______|_| | hdd3 |------ node1.sata.ch1| |B_______|| | hdd4 |------ node2.sata.ch0| |C_______|| | hdd5 |------ node2.sata.ch1| |C_______||___________|Through an internal 1000Mbps Ethernet line managed by a pair of Tulip chips (with dedicated network processors and queues, but limited to 20Mbyte/sec) the data flows from the disks of one of the three nodes to the SCSI ramdisk (8GB) of the mediatower, only then does the backup begin.That NAS basically manages source archives in C and assembly, as well as vhdl, latek and txt files, vector files, OpenOffice document, and some pictures, all things that never exceed 10Mbytes per file. I have developed software to track updates, so ONLY what ( = a project) has changed is backed up.A 4GB DVDRAM fits perfectly into my monthly archives.Made with late 90s and early 2000s tecnology, it had a troubled and controversial start, but this system has been working perfectly for 5 years now.Why 3 sets of disks? Because things are compartmentalized into 3 big categories, which must NEVER be online at the same time, this is due to my paranoia.---I think I can summarize some points:redundant RAID1 (two HDDs in mirroring) with periodic backup on different mediaxfs, with an overlay on top of mergefsalmost never work 24 hours a day, except for a few (~12) weeks a year with peaks of continuous use, and this is where it MUST be reliableotherwise "data on demand" means turning on and off both the node and the pair of disks connected to the node. In a day there are in the order of a maximum of 6It self-regulates based on traffic on the lan (sshfs, NFS), or in critical weeks a node always stays onchoose HDDs with the smallest disk-cache possible:there is a built-in UPS, but it is not battery based and does not hold the entire NAS for more than 25 minutes, this, combined with the fact that the SiliconImage PCI-HBA does has neither a large command queue nor a large buffer, leads me to choose HDDs with the smallest disk cache possible so there is less things that can be lost on a brutal power-off due to electricity blackout, and it's ok for performance since the bandwidth of each node is never higher than 20Mbyte/sec, and in any case on every single node there is a diskram for temporary files that must never be written to disk

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 10:18:08 am
content: Quote from: Halcyon on October 05, 2023, 12:04:12 amYup, this is what also emerged from the other topic that I opened in the chat area, but also from a previous topic here in this area where I asked how to check the real working hours of an HDD, and it turned out that well 3 sellers on eBay lied through their teeth.The problem I have is also where to buy HDDs?For SCSI components, both 68p and SCA, we are talking about enterprise disks, the only reference I have is a shop in Germany that also sells online.To date, they have never lied, if they tell you that an HDD is new, you go and test it, you get a maximum of 40 hours, which are the hours they need to check that everything is ok before sending it.I recently bought about qty=16 70GB SCA HDDs, plus other qty=16 68p one year ago, and there isn't one out of specification, all as described!Unfortunately they don't have them available when you need them (Murphy's law), they can provide NOS but it takes time, even in the order of a couple of months, and they almost never have modern material, almost never sATA disks. Possibly some SAS.

author: Shonky
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 10:18:49 am
content: Sounds way way over complicated, with irrational limitations, low performance and many potential points of failure.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 11:00:25 am
content: Keep in mind that any brand new drive you buy has a higher failure rate simply because it's new and unproven.HDDs fail more when they're brand new and then much less as they prove themselves defect free over time, until the probability starts to come back up again because they are so old.Replacing existing drives with brand new ones is initially a higher risk of data loss.But you of course have everything backed up and know for sure your backup is good.

author: madires
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 11:33:51 am
content: WD RE series. Not cheap, but more likely to last long. And I would power down the NAS every few months for 15 or 30 minutes as a measure of preventive maintenance.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 12:27:23 pm
content: Quote from: Psi on October 05, 2023, 11:00:25 amyup, but didn't they say that they have improved the QA processes and failure predictions a lot?My 2010 HDDs have ~40K hours with ZERO defects, I bought them in a physical shop and when they were new and under warranty, I tested them for a year to understand whether or not they had overcome infant mortality.They all survived the light tests:power on, every day, at tea time (17:00)about 10GB of data written, re-read and comparedreport results and power offevery day for a year, while I worked on the firmware of the PPC nodes, which took 8 years of work before working properly.~40K hours isn't a lot, it's not even a few. They are not sufficient, based on statistics, to justify a replacement, however...

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 12:35:12 pm
content: Quote from: Psi on October 05, 2023, 11:00:25 amNot to brag, but the software I developed on the top of GNU/Linux embedded is a "war machine" that not only allows you to automate backups, but verifies the integrity of every single file and allows you to reconstruct a file if it was to be accidentally deleted(1) or corrupted, thus exploiting partitions such as "parity ".(1) this is a serious problem on ext3 and ext4, it's difficult to undeleteSo on each node you have "data partitions" and "parity partition", mirrored across two HDDs and backups. I use mergefs combined with my software.While I've never seen a serious hardware crash, all sorts of things have happened in 13 years of development, some pretty creepy kernel space bugs have caused a lot of serious problems, and yet with the current version of the NAS what I have simulated in various scenarios, including a somehow simulated copy of those catastrophic ones, the three nodes have always managed to recover the data.Thanks! of course they restore as you made the backup! yes, but the point is without dispersing them in a chaotic and messy pile!-Speaking of "media", dds4 are not reliable in the long term, they are only good for weekly backups, while I have excellent confidence with the 4.5GB DVDrams cartridges, they have never let me down, both as media and as the optoelectronics of the unit that uses them reads and writes them, and "just in case", I have two spare Hitachi SCSI units in stock, identical, both imported from Japan. They have never been marketed either in the USA or in Europe, but they fit in a handbag and so it goes well and it's completely free (no import tax to pay) to pick them up in person and take them home as "hand luggage" when you need to take a trip to Osaka for work.And it's not a problem anyway, any DVD-RAM drive, even a very cheap PANASONIC one, is capable of reading the media.

author: kripton2035
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 12:46:55 pm
content: even if it's a raid, DON'T FORGET THE BACKUP DRIVE(S) *****************

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 01:00:35 pm
content: Also thoughtful that the disks work in a self-ventilated box,Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Intern 3-Bay(1), with a fan for each HDD and the airflow designed for 24/7 use. It's not particularly loud and keeps HDDs cool enough.If you have anything better to suggest for the new HDDs I will buy in the future, I'm all ears, considering only this:they will always be 4-6 HDDsthey won't be for rack cabinet(1) From what I have been able to test, the Sharkoon is definitely better than the version marketed by Manathan, which looks aesthetically identical, costs less, but does not have the same level of quality, especially as regards the connectors and closing slots.

author: Haenk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 01:50:27 pm
content: I find the requirements quite odd.For this low capacity, I'd go with a commercial/server grade SATA, mirror it, and have a backup drive as well.I'd never ever install mechanical HDDs again, unless you need a huge storage capacity.Compare this to my desktop SATA drive (Samsung 840 Pro): in use 3642 days, 38 TBW. And only 63 power cyclesAnd that's not even something I'd consider commercial or server grade.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 02:38:34 pm
content: Quote from: Haenk on October 05, 2023, 01:50:27 pmmy NAS is a multi node, its software doesn't work with a single big mirrored disk.I don't want SSD, It may seem strange to you, but they would greatly complicate the software I wrote, besides the fact that personally they don't bring me any advantage: 20Mbyte/sec is the maximum I can squeeze (and with kernel modules written with a lot of inline in PPC assembly) from a 133Mhz SoC that work with a 33Mhz PCI HBA! It's already a lot to get to 20Mbyte/sec, and it's more than enough for my uses.Quote from: Haenk on October 05, 2023, 01:50:27 pmMy profile is "data on demand", HDDs must remain offline when not providing any service, and it's also my project design.An HDD that remains turned off is also an HDD that does not consume power unnecessarily and does not wear its bushings unnecessarily, even if these were designed to probably last longer than the NAS will.A few of my colleagues asked me to build a modern one based on Zimaboard, which makes my skin crawl since it's based on x86, and I hate Intel deeply, especially I hate x86, but they point out to me that there is the possibility of using containers, virtualization, and lots of other stuff that in my opinion is useless, but it's cool to mention because it's modern stuff.Umm, we will see, for now it's a NO! That multi PPC nodes stuff is war machine, an armored tank which also has anti-tamper sensors and mechanisms, and it's perfect as it is!Sure, its HDDs have clocked up ~40,000 hours, and it's been 13 years since I first assembled it, so it probably needs new HDDs and a good cleaning, even if every four months I dismantle all 12 fans, including the six small ones on the HDD boxes and the two large panaflow ones on the chassis and I clean them one by one.Dirt and dust management is a high priority, both to preserve proper airflow and to avoid other problems.Another important aspect of the project, all the individual components, including the built-in UPS (superCap based), the double redundant power supply, the three nodes, and the HDDs bay-compartment, everything is easily dismantled for inspection and cleaning.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 04:16:38 pm
content: Quote from: Halcyon on October 05, 2023, 12:04:12 amI have to thank you for this point, which I underestimated!I just simulated one of these errors and discovered that my software is not at all tolerant, and needs to be modified.No problem, I can fix it, but it's better to get it fixed now, rather than later

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 05, 2023, 04:34:37 pm
content: Quote from: Haenk on October 05, 2023, 01:50:27 pmlow capacity means { 512GB .. 2TB }I'll explain why 'no more' than 2Tbyte, there are various reasons behind it and also a technical problem: the SiliconImage s/ATA chip internally uses 48-bit LBA, but on a 32-bit PPC40x whose hardware encryption engine works best when blocks are 32-bit LBA, so I'm using48-bit LBA stripped down to 32-bit, which simplifies a lot of things, but gives problems on disks larger than 2.2 terabytes.It's a detail of both the firmware (u-boot/iBSP pre-initialization) and the software (linux/kernel drivers), I can fix it, but this will introduce up to 20% performance penalties on an already slow system, as nodes are clocked at 133Mhz.The alternative is to give up the hardware disk encryption, disable the circuits in the PPC SoC, bypass the block, and go back to using LBA-48bit.-The most extreme alternative is to redo the project from scratch and port the NAS software I developed to a three mikrotik rbm33g SBCs coupled with modern miniPCIe HBA-s/ATA and forget the hardware encryption, it will be done in software, since the rbm33g has two cores, one can be dedicated to the purpose.umm, I will probably do something similar in 2024, but to support the 2008 NAS, not to replace it

author: Halcyon
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 06, 2023, 06:26:37 am
content: Quote from: DiTBho on October 05, 2023, 04:16:38 pmAnother person's pain, is someone else's relief.Is this what they call "wisdom"? I'm too young for that.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2023, 09:12:12 am
content: If you want new, I'd probably suggest a bunch of WD Purple , WD Red Plus (CMR) or WD Black.WD Purple (surveillance) would work well, as they're designed to run up to 16 drives in an enclosure, so supposedly they have the firmware "optimized" for usage similar to NAS , to handle vibrations better, maybe to handle heat a bit better (if the drives are in a case in some small cage or rack that may be dusty etc etcWD Purple are around $50 new on Newegg :https://www.newegg.com/purple-wd10purz-1tb/p/N82E16822231532?Item=N82E16822231532The 2 TB WD Purple are $10 more :https://www.newegg.com/purple-wd20purx-2tb/p/N82E16822236661?Item=9SIAG98JRE5378The drives MAY have jumpers to force them to sata 2 or sata 1 modes.For example, see page 44, section 5.3.1 Jumper settings ... this PDF that supposedly is for WD Purple OEM models (but I think they use same jumpers on multiple series) :https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library/en_us/assets/public/western-digital/product/internal-drives/wd-purple-hdd/technical-ref-manual-wd-purple-hdd-2tb.pdfWD Red Plus is CMR (classic, regular Red is SMR which is worse at writing, worse to use in RAID mode)The lowest Red Plus I see on newegg is the 3 TB one at 65$ but maybe the 2 TB versions are on amazon :https://www.newegg.com/red-plus-wd30efzx-3tb/p/N82E16822234464?Item=N82E16822234464You could also use WD Black , not sure if 1 TB black are still made, but 2 TB drives are still made - these are high performance, have high warranty (5 years), but they'll be noisier and quite a bit hotter than regular WD purple or WD Red PlusAlso they're expensive, so not really worth it. example $93 for 2 TB :https://www.amazon.com/Black-Performance-Desktop-Hard-Drive/dp/B00FJRS628/If you don't mind used or very little used/new old stock, I would suggest trying a bunch of enterprise SSDs, like for example go with some Samsung PM863A ... $69 for 960 GB models :https://www.ebay.com/itm/175686938823They are rated for around 6100 TB of writes, compared to around 300-500 TB for a 1 TB QLC drive.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2023, 11:25:15 am
content: Quote from: mariush on October 06, 2023, 09:12:12 amI don't know whether to believe or not what I read about the QA criteria with which they test discs today before putting them on the market.From the last two discussions I understood that a disk that has worked correctly for a year without defects carries more information in terms of reliability than a new disk: with the used one, it is known to have passed the infant mortality stage, which is a bonus.Given that it will still take us a year to migrate the HDDs, or to place them alongside a new NAS (maybe), I could buy the HDDs today, perhaps 2 more spare HDDs, and test them (6+2=8) all in parallel for a year, as long as they are still under warranty .power on, every day, at tea time (17:00)about 10GB of data written, re-read and comparedreport results and power off(every day for a year, distrusting the manufacturer's QA, and considering one year sufficient for checking the infant mortality)If they pass the test, they will be put into production in a year, what do you think about this?Quote from: mariush on October 06, 2023, 09:12:12 amIf it works like for bicycles, of which I have much more mechanical experience, in my opinion it is precisely the vibrations that mechanically age the HDDs until they collapse into the first serious failure.So vibrations are my biggest paranoia! To the point of putting rubber caps, vibro-absorbent, on each screw that holds the HDD into its cage.This is another big difference between Sharkoon SATA QuickPort and the cheap Manhattan cloneThe Sharkoon SATA QuickPort allows comes with qty=10 rubber vibro-absorbent caps (optional, but it can be ordered), and allow you to install themManhattan clone, does not ...Quote from: mariush on October 06, 2023, 09:12:12 amHere, in my opinion,Stardom SohoRaidproducs are even better than theSharkoon SATA QuickPort.Unfortunately they are not simple HDD-boxes, but complete NAS with a built-in controller card ... you could force the card into JBOW and manage the s/ATA HDDs manually, but such a kit costs 3 times as much as aSharkoon SATA QuickPort, so I have to think about it.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2023, 02:05:00 pm
content: I personally think Google had good conclusions in their hard drive study :https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//archive/disk_failures.pdfI run my computer 24/7 and have hard drives with nearly 90k hours of usage. Oldest is a WD Black 1 TB that run 24/7 with maybe around 7-8 months of downtime (pulled from computer)Latest purchases were a HGST NAS 4 TB and a WD Red Plus 4 TB. HGST no longer exists, WD merged the brand into their lineup, and they're the higher end NAS and enterprise server drives.I believe in that "premature/infantile" failure they noticed in the study... every new drive should be run as much as possible in the first 3 months and have an average workload on it (stuff copied onto it, read from it, basically use it a bit harder than how you'd normally use it.If it survives, there's a good chance it will last at least 3 years. After that, risk of failure increases, but there's a good chance if you have good power supply and keep temperature constant that they'll last a long time.Also note how temperature affected the drives in Google's study... not good to run them very cold unlike what some may think.Only Seagate drives failed on me with loss of data.A WD Green started to have bad sectors on me maybe 2 weeks before the 2 year warranty expired and the store replaced it with a new one.The WD Black has a few bad sectors but just isolated them onto a partition without a drive letter and the remaining disk space I used for less important stuff (old tv shows I like to rewatch from time to time, some music I have backed up in other places)Also if you go back in Backblaze's reports, you'll notice HGST scored pretty well ... but note though that Backblaze reports should be read with "a grain of salt" - their usage is not really like a regular user would use drives, they shove 30+ drives in a case and that case goes in racks ... it's different vibrations from other drives in the case and from fans cooling the drives.... and different pattern of operation, as they're mostly doing writes.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2023, 02:54:33 pm
content: thanks for the article, it's very interesting!Quote from: mariush on October 06, 2023, 02:05:00 pmwhich model?see these ones, I have two installed into my Apple PowerMacG4 MDD, bought in 2005Code:Model Family: Seagate Momentus 5400.2 seriesDevice Model: ST9808211AUser Capacity: 80,026,361,856 bytes (80GB)...ATA Standard is: ATA/ATAPI-6 T13 1410D revision 2...SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error# 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 47641 -~48K hours is impressive, and as someone may have already noticed, I opened atopica few months ago because the power supply and the motherboard(1) of this computer broke up, but everything else, and especially the two Seagate disks, are still perfectly functional(1) I fixed it a few months later and sold on eBay to pay the new motherboard, which comes NOS, with a faster dual CPU set and better chips. The problem on the old motherboard was a bad contact on the PRAM battery connector. Don't ask me why, but without that bloody PRAM battery it won't start; while the original Apple PSU had blown capacitors and a couple of transistors didn't look good at all. I closed everything up without even trying to fix it. Better to use a modern ATX power supply, much more efficient and silent, and adapt it.

author: alm
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2023, 03:10:32 pm
content: Quote from: DiTBho on October 06, 2023, 02:54:33 pmCareful how you interpret the data. I remember back when the article came out that people argued that the difference in temperature was because at that time there was a mix of 5400rpm drives and 7200rpm drives. The latter where newer and higher end models with better quality control, but also ran hotter.Quote from: DiTBho on October 06, 2023, 02:54:33 pmThis is not how statistics work. Drive failures are fairly rare occurrences, so you need a large population sampled in an unbiased way to draw any conclusions. Basing your decision on anecdotal evidence is just superstition. The Google and Backplaze studies are the only public sources I'm familiar with, but they are about old drives that won't have the same reliability now. Of course manufacturers and retailers will have their own data, but that's not public.If drive reliability is so important, then you're doing something wrong. You should design your system for drives to fail through redundancy and backups. Sending a drive for warranty replacement should just be a minor inconvenience. Just buy a drive made for the type of load (e.g. continuous activity vs frequent start and stop) and if it breaks, send for warranty replacement or buy a new one.Expect SSD to eventually take over all but the high capacity models, so if you're dead set on spinning rust you might want to start hoarding

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 06, 2023, 04:42:22 pm
content: Quote from: alm on October 06, 2023, 03:10:32 pmIt's not important for the data integrity, the NAS is built with strong backup mechanisms and strong integrity.But it's a very a great bonus for a single person project, as it saves time.

author: DiTBho
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 12, 2023, 10:23:06 am
content: ok, after much thought on DataSheets and Manuals, I decided to invest inWD Red Pro, 2Tbyte!{ SCSI, SAS, FC } HDDs are more expensive than "consumer-grade" s/ATA drives, and usually used in servers and disk arrays, where s/ATA drives were sold to the "home computer" and "desktop" and near-line storage market and were perceived to be less reliable.This distinction is now becoming blurred, especially with the WD Red Pro line, which has an immense disk-cache, and I don't like it too much, but this model is the best possible compromise and it's also good for my next NAS.