I’ve been buying used 8TB HGST SAS drives on eBay for $50USD each, so far no issues but I really don’t care if they die. Basically disposable at that price point.
The sound is determined by what kind of drive it is. Consumer drives are for in-home use and are usually quiet. Enterprise drives are for dedicated server rooms or data centers and can get loud because it’s loud in there already.
I would recommend sticking with consumer level HDDs if this is a concern. The cost per TB isn’t as good.
I bought a 14 TB Seagate Exos and put it in a Fractal R5, which is a very good noise insulating case. I can hear clicking from anywhere on the same floor as that machine if I listen for it.
You could maybe pair two consumer drives together in JBOD to get the space you want, but that’s more expensive.
There’s no hard limit or standard, but I think 14 TB might be the largest you could find in a consumer HDD. The WD EasyStore goes on sale pretty often and sells for a good deal. Those should be quiet and already come in an external case. Look for reviews about it before buying.
Care to elaborate? Seagate is one of my favorite brand. And i read a lots of reviews and tech articles before purchasing any components. I am curious to learn about what i have missed about them. Thx
A lot of people have very strong opinions of brands based on a woefully inadequate sample size. Typically this comes from a higher than expected failure rate, possibly even much higher than expected. It could’ve been a bad model, a bad batch at manufacturing, improper handling from the retailer, or even an improper running environment. But even the greediest data hoarders only have a few dozen drives, often in just a couple of environments and use-cases.
Very few of these results are actually meaningful trends. For every person that swears by WD and will never touch a Seagate, there’s someone else that swears by Seagate and will never touch another WD. HGST and Toshiba seem to have a very slight edge on reliability, but it’s very small. And there are still people that refuse to touch them because of the “Death Star” drives many years ago.
It’s also very difficult to predict which models will have high failure rates. By the time it becomes clear one is a lemon, they’re already EoL.
I avoid buying WD new because of their (IMHO completely illegal) stance on warranty, but I’m comfortable buying their stuff used.
Don’t worry too much about brand. Instead go for specs and needs. Follow a good backup strategy and you’ll be fine
HGST is a part of WD and has been for quite a while.
But a big part of why the average consumer drive kind of sucks is that there is way more money in enterprise level drives so very little resources get put toward client drives.
Owned by, yes. Have their operations actually been integrated though? I haven’t checked in a long time, but it was still a separate division last time I did.
You would think ppl on Lemmy are somewhat more able to read, understand and interpret data like published by backblaze but it seems like they are just as everywhere blind because of a onetime experience 10 years ago (3tb constallation drivr by Seagate)
Chances are enterprise drives will last far longer than 5 years easily in my experience, but in my opinion 15% off isn’t enough to justify not having a warranty. I see those sales often enough on legitimate drives.
Enterprise drive sales aren’t restricted in anyway, you just need to buy them from a reputable seller. I personally would avoid Amazon, there are tons of “deals” like the one you found on there and they don’t make it obvious. A legitimate seller example - www.connection.com/product/…/41308811?cac=Result
I was a bit off, they were 15% cheaper than the Ironwolf on the same website/from same seller (156, not USD, vs 179, not USD).
For a better comparison, I went to WD’s official store and for what I spent on these two 8TB Exos (312, not USD) I can get two 4TB Red Plus (310, not USD). Can’t make a direct comparison with other Seagates because their “buy now” section redirects me to Amazon, which, as you said, is not the best since they allowed third party sellers, but on there the 8TB Ironwolf is 250 (!!).
As you already know, I’m not in the US so I can’t buy from there. Unfortunately, Seagate’s “buy now” section (which should be official retailers) brings me to either Amazon or other chains that don’t have much else besides portable drives.
At this point I have two options, really: try again the same online store (which is kinda like Amazon, many third party sellers), but getting Ironwolf, which should be more likely to be “legit”, and of course check them as well when they arrive, or settle for two 4TB WD Red Plus (which isn’t ideal as I’m already nearing 2.5TB total, but should allow me to get by a while longer) bought directly from WD.
edit: looking at the link you provided, I paid 30% less for my Exos. Would that sway you towards keeping it without warranty (apart from the seller’s, which is one year I think)? Mind that I don’t need enterprise-grade drives, and I think even NAS drives are overkill for my needs. For example a WD Blue with its 55TBW per year might be enough for me (that’s 150GB a day everyday for a year, which is above my average writes), but those don’t come big enough (I need 6TB min to be comfortable) nevermind, they do come in 8TB size, just at a lower spinning speed (5640rpm), but they cost more (267) than the Ironwolf, and are SMR and have 128MB cache. Sounds like a bad deal!
If they want it so much why don’t they pay him? Sounds like if it weren’t for him (and the others he seems to allude to) we wouldn’t have this opportunity.
Sounds like these 80 year olds need some friendly data hoarders to help them to digitise their collections. (Or for the BBC to promise to return the film, undamaged, once they’ve digitised them.)
Why would the BBC want old film, once they had the footage? They’ve already thrown them away once! It’s only of value to collectors at this point, and the Beeb can’t sell it if they’re claiming it’s lost.
The amazing thing about those are that they are halfing the rebuild time. With large drives you get rebuild time of over 24 hours which is actually frightening.
Setup is a one time thing and yes you need to be carefull about it but i bet software support will come as soon as those get more mainstream.
Never ever going to buy Seagate again after the crap they’ve pulled on their Exos drives.
They simply decided to completely trash SMART and spin down commands. The drives simply won’t give you useful SMART data nor they won’t ever actually spin down, you can’t force it, the drive will report is as if it was spun down but in reality its still spinning.
ZFS and BTRFS could update their codebase to account for these (if they haven’t already), but I agree that their extra mechanical parts worry me. I really don’t care about speed - if you run enough HDDs in your RAID then you get enough speed by proxy. If you need better speeds then you should start looking into RAM/SSD-caching etc. I’d rather have better reliability than speed, because I hate spinning rust’s short lifespan as-is.
My computer is a fanless Celeron in the living room and I can hear the HDD when I’m in the bed at 2am in the complete silence. If you’re concerned with noise you need to find another position, far from the bed
I can't speak to what you're looking for specifically, however I can give you an idea of the level and type of noise you could expect.
With a local server I built with 3 standard 8TB HDDs, the "noisiest" part of the whole computer is the fans itself - it's very quiet compared to say, a fanned air purifier on full or maybe even half power. I've never actually heard my hard drives from any of the computers I've built in the last 6-8 years, and I'm usually right by them. If I listen very closely I may hear some ticking/spinning if they happen to be ramped up.
So under load, there may be a chance of hearing some of the spinning disks in a quiet room, however I haven't actively heard an HDD since 2012 - though the size you're going for could be different as you mentioned. I can't speak for the 18tb sizes. As for the smaller external HDD's, I have 3 6TB ones running in tandem and it's pretty much the same, I've heard them ramp up slightly but it's nearly silent even under load it's more of a gentle hum. If there were any noise sources like music it would be unnoticeable. But again, the size may play a factor.
You mentioned it's right by your bed but would your active hours align with the backups? I.e. if you run them overnight from 2a to 8a, you'd already be asleep for the backup. If it's noise that prevents you from sleeping that may help.
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