Hard drives for NAS

[SauRoNZA]

Point is failures WILL happen and then I’d rather have a no fuss warranty over an already proven to be unreliable drive with a finger up my arse.

 

[garyc]

Backblaze disagrees.

WD has consistently outperformed Seagate

Backblaze buys hard drives based on what offers the best value at the time of purchase and assumes that hard drives fail. To account for this they have robust multi-server RAID.

The average consumer is unlikely to go this way and should probably buy NAS specific drives which offer the advantages of time limited error recovery and vibration correction. In the local market this will mean WD Red or Seagate IronWolf.

A few years ago WD introduced SMR technology to their NAS drives despite having published a paper about how unsuitable it was for this application. They reconciled this by simply not telling people that the drives used SMR. This resulted in a lot of people losing data. They still use on their Red drives, but use the more appropriate conventional recording on their Red Plus and Pro drives. Even though these latter drives are OK, it will take a long time for me to trust them again. Therefore Seagate.

 

[xera]

I get it about the warranties, I do, but calling those stats pointless is doing data science a disservice.

eg, Looking at the latest quarterly, anyone installing Seagate 10/12TB drives is in for some heartache. Their 16TB models, on the other hand, performed *really* well.

WD offers higher MTTF/lower AFR across the board - with some exceptions. Understanding that matters. The chances of even engaging with the warranty are surprisingly low - if you use the data available and make an informed choice.

Use case is NAS. Longevity, reliability matter. Why would the most meaningful data set we have that speaks to both be "pointless"

I looked at their reports before purchasing my HDD's.
Picking a HDD model based on reliability reports and rands per TB is a fine way to go.
Even the best brands have bad models. It helps knowing which ones to avoid.