How reliable are consumer harddrives?

Thor

Thor

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Hey Hey (:

I want to build a NAS from a spare i3 pc layer around and I'm planning on popping in 4 x 4TB drives + 64Gb SSD for OS.

Now the issue is, a local backup solution will never, or is unlikely to have the redundancy of Onecloud, Dropbox, etc etc

But I want more storage on my local network and also I'd like to keep my family and personal videos, pictures etc etc local in my control.

Issue is, how reliable are consumer harddrives?

I really treasure my memories and files.
 
Last edited:
Thor187 said:
Hey Hey (:

I want to build a NAS from a spare i3 pc layer around and I'm planning on popping in 4 x 4TB drives + 64Gb SSD for OS.

Now the issue is, a local backup solution will never, or is unlikely to have the redundancy of Onecloud, Dropbox, etc etc

But I want more storage on my local network and also I'd like to keep my family and personal videos, pictures etc etc local in my control.

Issue is, how reliable are consumer harddrives?

I really treasure my memories and files.
Click to expand...

There's a reason RAID 5 exists. Perfect for what you want to do.
 
Chevron said:
There's a reason RAID 5 exists. Perfect for what you want to do.
Click to expand...
Say goodbye to all your data if you have a RAID 5 array in this day and age...

RAID 5 is obsolete for use with modern large capacity drives
 
Its a bit of a hit and miss from my experience I have a 2tb drive that I bought when they just came out thats in daily use and two others (3tb drives) that have failed in a few years each.
 
Use 3 of the drives for the downloaded media. If something fails one can always just download again

Use the other drive for the OS and the family pictures stuff. Then have 2 external drives that you back up alternately on once a month (or whatever interval you select). And those 2 drives are kept separate in secure spots if possible.
 
Thor187 said:
I only have 4 open ports and want to juice out as much storage capacity as possible.
Click to expand...



UnRAID.



Runs off USB.



Drives are irrelevant and you can mix and match sizes, just make your parity drive the biggest.

But you can hit the middle ground with those A/V drives from Seagate.
 
Jypels said:
Say goodbye to all your data if you have a RAID 5 array in this day and age...

RAID 5 is obsolete for use with modern large capacity drives
Click to expand...

People should start looking into btrfs/zfs etc.
 
so to answer the question of reliability..we have some servers at work using wd 4tb red drives.. slightly above consumer i guess, but well worth the money.. in total we have about 350 of these drives and have had maybe 10 of them fail on us so far.. they are all in raid arrays and in use 24/7, so they do tend to die quicker than if used for home.. they are reliable enough.. add to that setting the drives up in a raid array and you are likely to never lose any of the data unless the filesystem conks out..
 
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