How reliable are consumer harddrives?

WAslayer said:
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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Everyone says raid is bad

So what is the alternative
 
Chevron said:
I know.

It's for media.

Get over yourself. Media can always be downloaded again.
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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.
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How's he gonna redownload those memories?
 
Chevron said:
Those obviously need to go to the cloud. Or at the very least backed up and taken off site, regularly.
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That is over a TB of data

I'm a foto fanatic and "amateur home movie fanatic"

I use the Cannon Vixia and DSLR
 
people who dont know how to use raid properly is under the impression that it is bad.. no, it is not a backup solution and should not be used as one.. a backup solution means shipping critical data off to another location other than the primary storage space, which is not what raid does.. raid simply gives you a way in which you can have a single large capacity volume on which you can store data, while making your disks redundant.. you can typically lose one to two disks in the array, depending on your specific raid level, and be able to still keep your data safe while you replace the failed drive.. using each disk independently, you still lose whatever data is not backed up on a disk that failed.. you also get read/write speed increases to your raid volume and this differs dramatically between raid levels as do your available capacity on a raid volume.. with proper research and time spent deciding on which raid level will work best for you, you can not go wrong..
 
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RAID 5 is obsolete for use with modern large capacity drives
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+1

Just wait until the raid controller itself (not your hdd's) fail and you will never recover your data.
 
Thor187 said:
That is over a TB of data

I'm a foto fanatic and "amateur home movie fanatic"
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Aside from whatever you decide to do wrt a NAS you should get a couple portable USB drives and back up your photos/videos to those as well. Keep one offsite, ie at work, a friends, a family member, and just rotate your backups between the drives.

Thor187 said:
I use the Cannon Vixia and DSLR
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Screen Shot 2016-01-14 at 2016•01•14 07.17.01 .png
 
Forget raid. Use ZFS.
Don't use WD Green at all, they're garbage.

You still need backup.

Drives will fail, but not the end of the world unless you have multiple at the same time, and don't have a backup.
I usually go for a lifetime of 3 years before I start replacing drives.

Unfortunately the rand is garbage, so pricing is up on when i last bought 4tb's for any of my NAS's

Right now in China 5TB's are the sweet point (899RMB a pop), here, it looks like the 6TB's are the sweet spot (checking takealot).
Buy drives in Cases, its cheaper to remove them from the case than to buy a naked drive.

Ubuntu+zfs+plex+samba/afs sharing is fairly simple to do on your own (I have my install scripted with ansible, as I do so many), or use an off the shelf nas solution. Unraid etc. Just make sure it supports ZFS.
 
Like the others have already said, the NAS specific drives will be better than consumer drives. Unless of course you end up going for something like OwnCloud then consumer drives will probably be OK.

My home NAS uses the WD Red drives. Together with ECC there has never been even a hint of a glitch from it.

This NAS is running four ext4 formatted drives in RAID 1, using softRAID. This probably the most robust system for preserving your data after a disk failure even though it costs a bit more than RAID 5. Having said that, this weekend I will be starting to migrate over to ZFS which should be better.

The backup for the NAS is external drives stored in a safe and also offsite. Using rsync these are very quick to update.
 
SauRoNZA said:
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.
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+100 for unraid. has saved my butt quite a few times (and yes i have been through the RAID-5, RAID-6 software and hardware saga's - all of them gave mountains of crap
 
lsheed_cn said:
Forget raid. Use ZFS.
Don't use WD Green at all, they're garbage.

You still need backup.

Drives will fail, but not the end of the world unless you have multiple at the same time, and don't have a backup.
I usually go for a lifetime of 3 years before I start replacing drives.

Unfortunately the rand is garbage, so pricing is up on when i last bought 4tb's for any of my NAS's

Right now in China 5TB's are the sweet point (899RMB a pop), here, it looks like the 6TB's are the sweet spot (checking takealot).
Buy drives in Cases, its cheaper to remove them from the case than to buy a naked drive.

Ubuntu+zfs+plex+samba/afs sharing is fairly simple to do on your own (I have my install scripted with ansible, as I do so many), or use an off the shelf nas solution. Unraid etc. Just make sure it supports ZFS.
Click to expand...

UnRAID is basically ZFS packaged nicely for normal people who don't want to Linux command line it all and lose their mind.

I would still steer clear of the Green Drives. Actually I would steer clear of WD completely.

http://www.takealot.com/seagate-desktop-internal-3tb-hdd/PLID32711543 - Normal drive 2 year warranty - R1735

http://www.takealot.com/seagate-surveillance-hard-disk-drive-3tb/PLID34166408 - AV/Surveillance Drive 3 year warranty - R 1809

http://www.takealot.com/seagate-nas-hdd-3-5-3tb-sata-6gbps-64mb-cache/PLID32713183 - NAS Drive 3 year warranty - R2139


R8556 - R7236 = R1320 difference. Almost another HDD free.
 
Chevron said:
You sure you're not thinking of the RED Pro drives?

Red 3TB R2075

http://raru.co.za/rafghm44f/electro...o-nas-drive-3tb-sata-6gb-s-64mb-cache-7200rpm
Click to expand...

See my post above.

The only real world difference to a consumer in a home setup is the additional 1 year warranty. The Surveillance/AV drives are also designed to run 24/7 and cost only marginally more while offering the extra warranty period.

If you have your UnRAID setup and the drive dies in the 3 years you simply take it out...send it back and pop in the new one when it arrives.

Of if you really want use the savings to buy a 5th drive so that if one dies you immediately replace and then send the old one back so long and have a spare again when it gets replaced.
 
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