Do you trust the large 3-4 TB drives?

[katz]

I need to purchase a few new hard drives and the "more bang for the buck" idea is to buy larger, of course...

These would be internal 3.5" drives.

But, do we trust the higher capacity drives to be reliable long term? I've heard on more than one tech podcast that the guys do not favor anything much over 2 TB because of reliability issues.

And, I'm still old school, I keep everything on my personal drives instead of using the cloud...maybe someday.

EDIT - I just found a 6 TB WD Green for $279.006 TB...WD Red for $296.99......Seagate 6 TB for $299.99. Sounds like good prices, at roughly $46/1 TB.

 

[lan101]

I personally don't trust anything over 500 gb. Not a lot of space nowadays I know. I think 1 tb and above seem to fail a lit sooner.

 

[katz]

I've been using a few 1 & 2 TB Seagates and WD for a couple of years and I like them.

I seem to have good luck with HD's though...mine usually do not fail like so many of my customers do. maybe I treat them more gently...

 

[Go-To Gordon]

I have a number of 2tb drives as use for storage backup. I also have a 4tb that is strictly an offsite backup. Aside from the initial copy these don't spin a lot since they are just backups.

Now onto drives that get use I have a windows home server for all my media with 2 3tb and a 2tb running 24/7, serving up Frozen every morning for my toddler and music/movies for me every night. Had those drives in the server for about a year and a half (again 24/7) and zero issues.

I too was wary of large capacity (still am to an extent) but have had good luck so far.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

For backups I'm finding I like buffalo drives. Reason being you can buy like a 6tb external drive, which is really 2 3 tb drives in a single enclosure. That said the software that comes with it allows you to set the drives in raid 0 or raid 1, so if memory serves, then the raid 0 skies you to have the drives be a single large drive. However, the raid 1 lets you mirror the drives so if a drive drops out then you have the other drive with your data theoretically.

 

[bertie40]

As drive capacity increases, the tolerance levels decline. Personally, I treat anything over 2GB with suspicion. The latest 4GB drives are just too new, so the longevity jury is still out.

They can publicise their warranties as much as they like.
I, for one, would rather not have to bother.

Of course, security-wise, you would need to buy a second drive, to act as a backup for the original. Then it starts getting pricey.

Buying, and using, a solitary large capacity drive is asking for trouble.

Cloud backup is obviously an option, but for most, upload speeds are still pitiful.

I had a customer who wanted a "small" Dropbox upload which turned out to be 83GB.

I assumed most of her Dropbox was already uploaded.
Erm.... No.
Even with my fibre 5GB upload, it would have taken days and days. That surprised her.

I explored cloud backup last year, but no uk provider offered a hard drive initial seed service. At that time anyway.

High capacity drives definitely have caveats.

 

[Martyn]

I personally don't trust anything over 500 gb. Not a lot of space nowadays I know. I think 1 tb and above seem to fail a lit sooner.

I'm the same especially with laptop drives. The typical consumer user doesn't bred anything like 500GB never mind larger.

 

[NYJimbo]

Every time a new large drive comes out we are wary of it until it becomes the standard. I will agree that I am always a little wary of drives over 500gb, but we get laptops in with 640gb and 750gb almost every day now. New towers almost always have 1tb as the smallest drive as standard.

I remember when we first saw the big 1gb drives back in the early 90's and thought they were packing too much info on them.

A few years from now we will see 10tb drives as standard and then talk of a 20tb drive will come out and we will think the same thing we do now about 3-4 tb drives.

 

[bertie40]

It's actually becoming more difficult to get lower capacity drives.

Most drives start at 500GB, and most customers (mine anyway), barely scratch the surface.

So we have large chunks of drive that will never see a bit/byte of data. Ever.

The price difference between a 500GB and a 1TB drive us actually quite small, and I'm occasionally asked why I didn't go for the larger drive.

So I have to explain that bigger isn't necessarily better...... Yet again.

I show them the graphic illustrating the amount of used space, which normally resembles a blue "hair" , which puts things into perspective.

But they still feel they are getting robbed.

Hay Ho.

 

[Go-To Gordon]

The price difference between a 500GB and a 1TB drive us actually quite small,

bought a new wd 1tb on friday and it was cheaper than the 500gb right next to it.

 

[JustInspired]

Typically my own drives are between 500gb and 1tb.
I have three 3TB and a 2TB for DDRescue images and Acronis back ups on customers' machines.
Ran into an issue now though.
Need to image a 3TB drive (not clone) and my 3TB is too small.
DDRescue is going to take longer and longer as the drives grow and grow...

 

[ohio_grad_06]

I agree. At microcenter I can usually even pick up a 1 tb Toshiba for around 50 bucks. In fact I think it was less last time I looked. But I usually always add the 2 year warranty in store and only really need to worry about backups.

 

[Krynn72]

On my desktop, I have the ssd for my os, then a 1tb, a 1.5tb, and a 3tb drive. All of them have been living for years. The three tb one stores my bluray/dvd rips, and probably gets used for 2-4 hours a day when I'm watching some tv show or movie on my pc or streaming to my ps3. Quite happy with how long it's been going without problems, but every day I'm getting closer and closer to buying another to make a backup as I get more nervous about it failing.

 

[HFultzjr]

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. (Fail)

I would hate to lose data on a drive that size.

I try to stay at 1TB on multiple drives.

Just paranoid I guess due to all the failed drives I see.

Harold

 

[gunslinger]

The only way I'd do anything over 1TB would be to have a mirrored drive. Thats just too much data to take a chance with one drive. Also the only one I would even kind of trust over 2TB would be WD red.

 

[cypress]

I agree that I just tend to not trust anything over 750gb. I usually like the 500gb drives. The 4tb space is insane lol.

 

[Tim275]

I was pondering this when recently buying a new drive. One of my main concerns was that some disk utilities in the past have had trouble detecting issues with the larger drives (2TB >). I think a lot of the high capacity 3.5" drives are probably okay but it is the high capacity 2.5" drives that worry me slightly, especially in the environment that the are mostly used.

I ended up going for a 3TB Seagate Barracuda. I am already running a fairly new 2TB Seagate Barracuda in the system so we shall see how they both fair.

 

[tom11011]

The problem with really big drives like a 2TB or larger is rebuilding raid arrays. Although disk sizes are getting bigger, their speeds are not. Depending on how many drives are in say a raid 5 array and the size of those drives, it can take a super long time to rebuild the disk group.

Under a best case scenario a 1TB drive that was full would take approximately 2.5 hours to rebuild, but that's if there is no IO being required of it which is never the case in a production environment. Controller speed has something to do with it too.

I don't do anything other than Raid 1+0 these days in production.

 

[tankman1989]

Didn't read all the replies, but I have 2 4TB WD Red's for almost 8 months and they are running very well in a NAS. They seem to be built better than the WD blues, almost to the black label level (MUCH better than the greens).

I was hesitant to trust a drive of that size at first and was going to run RAID 1, but decided to run each drive separately and cross my fingers. So far all is good!

I had the same feeling when going to 2TB drives from 500GB years back. I'll bet a lot of the "old-timers" felt the same way when going from 8" 80KB disks to 20 & 40MB hard drives (I know it is totally different technology, but ideas is same - lost data). Back then the data that was saved was mainly all text so 40MB is LOTS of data IMO when stored in plain text and especially if compression was used (remember PKzip?? IT seemed like magic at the time!! )

 

[tom11011]

I was hesitant to trust a drive of that size at first and was going to run RAID 1, but decided to run each drive separately and cross my fingers. So far all is good!

You should probably rethink the cross your fingers strategy