High Capacity Hard Drives for Storage

[juro]

I have a custom built system with 2 1TB M.2 internal hard drives. These keep on running out of space, so I want to add some larger capacity drives. This is mainly for video footage (damn GoPro and dash cam ....) and images (lots of them). The drives need to be good quality (Seagate or Western Digital have served me well) and I will be running them as a Raid 10.

I have checked both Evetech and Wootware but both of them don't have larger drives in stock (anything above 4TB). So my question is: where can I get high quality, large capacity (> 4 TB) hard drives at a reasonable price?

 

[ponder]

titan ice
takealot

 

[Tekku Tech]

Greetings juro

You can get 6, 8 or even 10TB HDDs nowadays for very decent prices due to the onslaught of SSDs. Prices are around R3,400, R4,000 and R5,000 respectively for Seagate Barracuda drives. Looks like 10TBs are out of stock at present though.

Hope that helps Let us know if you have trouble sourcing one as we'd be happy to serve

Ganbatte!

 

[newby_investor]

Takealot also has up to 16TB though these are pricy

But it works out to about R700/TB pretty much whatever size you buy, IIRC. Did the calculations myself about a month ago.

 

[juro]

Thank you everyone for your answers. I'm thinking of a Raid 5 - so I guess 4 4TB drives will have to do ....

 

[genetic]

I have a custom built system with 2 1TB M.2 internal hard drives. These keep on running out of space, so I want to add some larger capacity drives. This is mainly for video footage (damn GoPro and dash cam ....) and images (lots of them). The drives need to be good quality (Seagate or Western Digital have served me well) and I will be running them as a Raid 10.

I have checked both Evetech and Wootware but both of them don't have larger drives in stock (anything above 4TB). So my question is: where can I get high quality, large capacity (> 4 TB) hard drives at a reasonable price?

6TB - 8TB - Larger than 8TB - Internal Hard Drives - Wootware

Browse 6TB - 8TB - Larger than 8TB - Internal Hard Drives at Wootware & get quick delivery & superb service!

www.wootware.co.za

Won't post links to Evetech out of principal, but they do have.

 

[newby_investor]

Thank you everyone for your answers. I'm thinking of a Raid 5 - so I guess 4 4TB drives will have to do ....

Just be aware of the dangers of raid 5 with large hard drives.

 

[Not_original]

Just be aware of the dangers of raid 5 with large hard drives.

What dangers, asking as I want to learn

 

[juro]

Just be aware of the dangers of raid 5 with large hard drives.

So would you suggest more, smaller harddrives?

 

[PsyWulf]

What dangers, asking as I want to learn

RAID5 increases strain on other disks during degraded/rebuild scenarios (Every drive gets read to calculate parity so all drives get more worn)
The larger the drives the higher the risk of a URE (Unrecoverable Read Error) occurring during rebuild. This URE would cause a 2nd disk to be flagged as failed/errored and basically dump your storage array as bad (2Disk failure in a 4Disk RAID5 = dead array)

So would you suggest more, smaller harddrives?

Just skip raid5 before you come back asking for a Data recovery company in a year or 5 especially on a homebrewed storage setup

Personally a fan of Drivepool now,very diverse data protection options

 

[ryan10]

+1 for Stablebit Drivepool.
Been using it for about 3 years. Works best for me, 7 HDDs and SSD cache drive. Can do file duplication for important files and/or backup to cloud storage with their CloudDrive application. I bought the whole bundle with Scanner and Clouddrive.
The Scanner application saved my data when 1 of my drives started producing errors, the data was automatically transferred off the drive to other drives in the pool and the faulty drive crashed a few days later.
I use CloudDrive with my Gsuite Business account for important files.
Very happy with these products.

 

[newby_investor]

I've used raid 5 (technically raid z1) with 4TB hard drives x5 before. You just need to be aware of the risks.

As @PsyWulf says you can use a more advanced filesystem, or go to raid 6, which gives more protection. In my case I just made sure I had a good disaster recovery plan, with backups which I updated regularly.

No hard drives failed before I upgraded to another configuration but if they had, I would simply have run another backup of the degraded array (minimal activity) and then replaced the drives (I was due for a space upgrade anyway) and restored from backups, rather than trying to rebuild the raid 5.

 

[Not_original]

Might be a bit expensive for what it is but I opted for the family pack of Windows 365, 5 users, each get 1tb cloud and Office 365, think it is R165 pm.

 

[Pineapple Smurf]

Yoh, those are big numbers
I remember the good ole days backing everything onto 1.44MB stiffies
A typical weekly backup for me would be about 8 of them

 

[newby_investor]

Yoh, those are big numbers
I remember the good ole days backing everything onto 1.44MB stiffies
A typical weekly backup for me would be about 8 of them

I hated those disks. Satan's magnetic media as far as I'm concerned. The number of them that I used in high school that just failed...
USB drives were a godsend, I did my high school comp-sci around the time where flash drives were slowly replacing the so-called "stiffies". I seem to recall having a 64 MB flash drive! Could fit lots of homework on that sucker.

 

[Not_original]

I hated those disks. Satan's magnetic media as far as I'm concerned. The number of them that I used in high school that just failed...
USB drives were a godsend, I did my high school comp-sci around the time where flash drives were slowly replacing the so-called "stiffies". I seem to recall having a 64 MB flash drive! Could fit lots of homework on that sucker.

I fondly remember my first 64Mb flash drive

 

[juro]

RAID5 increases strain on other disks during degraded/rebuild scenarios (Every drive gets read to calculate parity so all drives get more worn)
The larger the drives the higher the risk of a URE (Unrecoverable Read Error) occurring during rebuild. This URE would cause a 2nd disk to be flagged as failed/errored and basically dump your storage array as bad (2Disk failure in a 4Disk RAID5 = dead array)


Just skip raid5 before you come back asking for a Data recovery company in a year or 5 especially on a homebrewed storage setup

Personally a fan of Drivepool now,very diverse data protection options
View attachment 932559

That looks very interesting - I'll definitely check out some Youtube Videos on that!

 

[juro]

Yoh, those are big numbers
I remember the good ole days backing everything onto 1.44MB stiffies
A typical weekly backup for me would be about 8 of them

... I remember when I had a bunch of 5 ¹⁄₄-inch floppies with different configurations to make sure that I didn't run out of my 64KB of ram ...

 

[ponder]

The number of them that I used in high school that just failed...

The cheap ones failed, had very few issues with the decent brands.

 

[PsyWulf]

In such cases, RAID Recovery can be used. This software will help restore data and the very structure of the disk.

I guess you can rebuild the car and treat the injuries after a car accident too,i'd rather just avoid it when possible by making smarter choices