External Hard Drive Reliability

FastEddieB

FastEddieB

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Fast Eddie B
I use a 2tb hard drive as a Time Machine backup for my Mac Mini. I’ve been buying the least expensive Western Digitals, but they seem to start having problems after a couple years.

Are Seagates or any other brand any better, or are they all about the same at the same price point?

Thanks in advance.
 
I had a Seagate once, and it crapped out on me way before I thought it should have
 
I’ve had some of nearly every brand go ten years, and others crap the bed a year in.

Keeping spinny disks COOL is the only correlation I’ve seen.

The way to handle that is to buy the noisy external cases that have fans and install the drive yourself, since nobody sells those anymore.

I hate the noise but it’s a necessary evil for mechanical drive longevity.

Better, for no noise and long life, use an SSD as the external drive. :)

Works good, fast, cheap... pick two. LOL.
 
NAS drives seem to be better for long term life as far as I have seen. They are built for longer life. Seem to run cooler but may be a little slower.
 
If you want waterproof, fireproof, and generally indestructible, with a data-recovery warranty, consider an ioSafe.

Otherwise, do like Nate said and use a decent enclosure with a fan. I've had good luck with these ones, but they seem to have been discontinued. And back up your backup. Shadowspawn, Robocopy, and rclone are nice, old-school tools to copy pretty much anything to pretty much anywhere. Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2 are two cost-effective possibilities.

Rich
 
I’ll also throw out there if money is no object, get a five drive Synology, set it up to auto backup to S3 or Glacier with a couple of clicks, and replace drives whenever they fail and never worry about it again. LOL.

I’m still too cheap but our monster Synology at work is a total workhorse and does an amazing amount of things one could play with at home that we don’t use at the office. All sorts of things that a Linux admin can set up but would take a few hours is done in a mouse click, and relatively sanely too.
 
Synology or Qnap are probably the best, though some folks are using FreeNAS successfully.

I had two WD 4TB external drives crap out due to some sort of burnout or arcing on the controller within a couple of weeks of each other. That was the controller on the drive itself. The Seagate externals have done better for me. I have a NAS as the primary backup, with periodic backups taken off-site on Seagate externals. The NAS runs RAID-6 and has two different brands of drives installed.
 
wsuffa said:
Synology or Qnap are probably the best, though some folks are using FreeNAS successfully.
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Qnap hasn’t kept up but it’s an okay “also ran”.

FreeNAS, the lead developer left a while ago and moved it to an OS that behaves better... the fork, OpenMediaVault is the way to go, if doing it with free stuff.

Way easier to deal with than checking to see if all your hardware is compatible with BSD.
 
If you get a multiple drive external disc, make sure the power supply is replaceable. I have one that was designed and sold by Intel, but the power supply died and I haven't been able to replace it. No power supply = no external drives. :(
 
I have a six drive Cisco NAS unit that news run QNAP software. It is ten years old and still has some original WD 1TB drives in it.
 
FastEddieB said:
I use a 2tb hard drive as a Time Machine backup for my Mac Mini. I’ve been buying the least expensive Western Digitals, but they seem to start having problems after a couple years.

Are Seagates or any other brand any better, or are they all about the same at the same price point?
Click to expand...

Yes, in general Seagates are better. They've had some duds over the years too, but nowhere near as bad as Western Digital.

WD got on my "**** list" a long time ago when I was working at a university. They purchased an entire new lab worth of PCs with WD drives, somewhere in the range of 120-150 machines, and the DOA rate on the WD drives was 25%.

Later, when I had a computer consulting business, the number of WD drives I had to replace kept them on my **** list.

Then, there was a time when I needed a new drive for my laptop and @mikea told me about this new line of WD drives that he swore were great, so I bought one anyway... And it failed. Now, WD is on my "never again" list.

On the other end of the spectrum, I've had some really good luck over the years with what was IBM and is now Toshiba (and I think may have had another owner or two in between). Reliable, quiet, reasonably priced. I wouldn't say I'm a fanboy, but I definitely lean hard that way when it comes to spinny drives these days.

denverpilot said:
I’ll also throw out there if money is no object, get a five drive Synology, set it up to auto backup to S3 or Glacier with a couple of clicks, and replace drives whenever they fail and never worry about it again. LOL.

I’m still too cheap but our monster Synology at work is a total workhorse and does an amazing amount of things one could play with at home that we don’t use at the office. All sorts of things that a Linux admin can set up but would take a few hours is done in a mouse click, and relatively sanely too.
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This. We just got a Synology at work and I have been really impressed with it. REALLY impressed. So impressed that, like Nate, I'd really like to buy one for myself! Not cheap, but I think when I looked I could get a "consumer" (or did they call it "Home Office"?) one with 12 bays, and drop drives into 4 bays to start with, for under one AMU. VERY tempting.
 
The Western Digital consumer side has been notoriously cheap on their materials. HGST (Former IBM, and now the technology arm behind WD) is promising improvement there.

If you can be happy with a small amount of storage, such as 2TB, how about going solid-state. It's affordable now, and keeps you away from the trials of spinning parts.

If you have USB3 that'll be helpful, as well.
 
WD has been way better in the last decade than the decade before. Especially the WD Reds. We have some of those going on five years of service without a failure.

We also have some cheap WD greens I think they are? The super cheap ones? Going on the same amount of time with the expected two out of ten or so failures. Not great but we knew they’d fail.

Temperature controlled room at 65F other than the occasional excision to 80F when the AC fails. Twice in seven or so years.

Many of these companies have swapped their fabs and are using each other’s techniques. Twenty years ago I would have said Toshiba or IBM drives. And Seagate has their awful overheating 10K and 15K things “Cheetah” and the like back then that blew themselves up like light bulbs.

But anything spinning anymore in our place is massively RAIDed and we don’t care if a drive fails. We just hot swap it and move on. If money were no object on double digit and larger terabytes we’d buy SSDs for the arrays.

Many arrays (the Synology stuff included) can use a pair of SSDs as “often used file” storage ahead of the spinny disks as a cache and make stuff run as fast as the combined multiple 1G network connection, to a switch that can do that, will go.

Unless they’ve added a model that will do it, that’s one of our only two complaints about it. No fiber connection and extremely slow parts for a failed power supply in the dual supply chassis. Took two plus weeks for them to ship a power supply. Unacceptable in the enterprise world and we let them know it was a few years back. Maybe they’ve figured that one out by now. Don’t know.
 
Rgbeard said:
If you can be happy with a small amount of storage, such as 2TB, how about going solid-state. It's affordable now, and keeps you away from the trials of spinning parts.
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Yes - This is certainly more reliable, if the price per terabyte and the capacity work out for you.
 
+1 Synology - they are damn good NAS boxes.

For SSD in place of HDD for backup which vendor? Samsung?
 
My current off-site plan is 2 pairs of drives in a pelican style case, one set goes to the hangar, one set gets plugged in at home and all the backups are written to them. After a time the set from home goes to the hangar and the hangar set returns. I was going to use S3 or Glacier, but it cost more than the $0 extra using the hangar costs... although Glacier deep archive's price is very good.
 
Sinistar said:
+1 Synology - they are damn good NAS boxes.

For SSD in place of HDD for backup which vendor? Samsung?
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I like them. They were way ahead with V-NAND but I think the patent might be off by now. They’re pretty solid, no pun intended. We don’t buy the top of the line Pro versions but they were once warrantied for ten years. Rumor was the midrange ones were the same dies that may or may not have had a few bad spots in QA test, which are disabled.

chartbundle said:
My current off-site plan is 2 pairs of drives in a pelican style case, one set goes to the hangar, one set gets plugged in at home and all the backups are written to them. After a time the set from home goes to the hangar and the hangar set returns. I was going to use S3 or Glacier, but it cost more than the $0 extra using the hangar costs... although Glacier deep archive's price is very good.
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You have a free hangar?! LOL.
 
denverpilot said:
[snip]

But anything spinning anymore in our place is massively RAIDed and we don’t care if a drive fails. We just hot swap it and move on. If money were no object on double digit and larger terabytes we’d buy SSDs for the arrays.

Many arrays (the Synology stuff included) can use a pair of SSDs as “often used file” storage ahead of the spinny disks as a cache and make stuff run as fast as the combined multiple 1G network connection, to a switch that can do that, will go.
[snip]
Click to expand...

Have the SSDs got better duty cycles now? My first one (in a 2009/10 MacBook Pro) lasted just about three years and then started having random read failures. It was a known limitation at the time: too many reads/writes from the same spot killed it. Teh replacement lasted about the same (and was still working) when I complained to the IT department about the battery life and found a new computer on my desk. I still miss that 17" MacBook.

John
 
Thanks for all the advice.

For now, I’ll be trying this:

upload_2019-8-26_7-57-12.png

See how it does. SSD would be nice, but a bit too costly right now.

As far as backup for my Mac Mini, Time Machine keeps everything up to date and keeps archival copies of files. If the Mini ever fails, just plug the Time Machine into a new Mac and an option appears to restore the new Mac to the latest backup.

As a backup to that, I use SuperDuper every weekend to make a bootable backup to a hard drive.

As a backup to that, my really important financial files get backed up monthly in 3 places: a hard drive, and SD card and a keychain USB stick I keep with me just in case.

Thanks for the input - it’s been educational!
 
If using an external HD, just unplug it when not using it (which shouldn’t be that much if just a backup device) and the cheaper ones should last longer.


Tom
 
We have a WD Passport that has been fine as an external HD, but it only gets plugged in when needed. The newish Dell XPS desktop I bought last year has a Samsung SSD for the OS and programs, but a WD HDD for file storage. No complaints on any of them.
 
jsstevens said:
Have the SSDs got better duty cycles now? My first one (in a 2009/10 MacBook Pro) lasted just about three years and then started having random read failures.
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A lot of work has been done to modify how SSDs are being used in my portion of the industry.

We work hard on reducing cell rewrites, and making better/more full use of I/O to cells. Back in 2009, SSD technology was 'dumb' and we didn't do anything on the internal microcode to prevent individual cells from being trashed.

On the enterprise level, "cheap disks" are rated 5-years at 1DWPD, and better ones are 5-years at 7DWPD (*) Drive Writes per day. So for a customer with 24 3.8SSD in one array, one entire DWPD would be a 66TiB rewrite - not too many doing that. And 7DWPD would be 462TiB. After 5-years that that pace every day, they'll finally throw their first drives out.

That said, I'm not in touch with the consumer market as well as some others, but I know the intelligence and algorithms have trickled down. I wouldn't buy a piece of spinning rust anymore, unless it was for something I really didn't care too much about.
 
Rgbeard said:
That said, I'm not in touch with the consumer market as well as some others, but I know the intelligence and algorithms have trickled down. I wouldn't buy a piece of spinning rust anymore, unless it was for something I really didn't care too much about.
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For consumer long term storage purposes, for the price of a solid state drive, I can buy 4 discs of spinning rust and be safer than the solid state.
 
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dans2992 said:
Cloud storage.
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If you have lots of money, don't care who sees your data (depending on the solution), don't mind if it just isn't there anymore, or you can't get to it because of legal/ financial random reasons they decide to lock you out, and don't need fast access....
 
You can encrypt with keys you control. If someone breaks into your house and grabs all your electronics (or it burns down) where are you then?

Wasabi has some damn cheap storage.
 
dans2992 said:
You can encrypt with keys you control. If someone breaks into your house and grabs all your electronics (or it burns down) where are you then?

Wasabi has some damn cheap storage.
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Years ago, before cloud, and when I could fit it all on one big drive, I used to mail a mirror drive to my dad 1000 miles away every other month and he would mail the old one back when he got the new one.
 
Salty said:
Years ago, before cloud, and when I could fit it all on one big drive, I used to mail a mirror drive to my dad 1000 miles away every other month and he would mail the old one back when he got the new one.
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Years ago we sent out tape drives via Iron Mountain as well. ;)

Wasabi has S3 compatible storage at $5.90/TB/mo.
 
Salty said:
For consumer long term storage purposes, for the price of a solid state drive, I can buy 4 discs of spinning rust and be safer than the solid state.
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Depends on the size of the data.

You can get a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD for $125 now.

Those spinning disks need to be awfully cheap.
 
Ok, I just ran into a utility called Boxcryptor. I think this is the missing piece of the puzzle to allow me to use the cloud more extensively.
 
denverpilot said:
Depends on the size of the data.

You can get a Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD for $125 now.

Those spinning disks need to be awfully cheap.
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I'm just waiting for it to be affordable to switch my primary 8T array at home to SSD.(8T Cooked, 4x4 raw) of course, the other problem is that chassis only has 4 slots. Looks like I'm still in the $2000 range to pull that off, although the 4T SSD don't look to be much of a premium over 4x1 any more.
 
chartbundle said:
I'm just waiting for it to be affordable to switch my primary 8T array at home to SSD.(8T Cooked, 4x4 raw) of course, the other problem is that chassis only has 4 slots. Looks like I'm still in the $2000 range to pull that off, although the 4T SSD don't look to be much of a premium over 4x1 any more.
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Here's the problem I have with any array at home (and it's why I'm stoked about boxcryptor). Even if you use mirroring, or raid 6, or whatever, most of the consumer SAN devices are very proprietary even between versions and firmware versions. I've lost a RAID controller once, and lost all my data because I couldn't find one anywhere that would work with my disks.... That was a hard lesson learned. Oh, and the other problem was mentioned above, if your house burns down or is robbed, you're SOL.
 
Salty said:
Here's the problem I have with any array at home (and it's why I'm stoked about boxcryptor). Even if you use mirroring, or raid 6, or whatever, most of the consumer SAN devices are very proprietary even between versions and firmware versions. I've lost a RAID controller once, and lost all my data because I couldn't find one anywhere that would work with my disks.... That was a hard lesson learned. Oh, and the other problem was mentioned above, if your house burns down or is robbed, you're SOL.
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My personal gear all runs software RAID for the exact controller reason. The big array is my slowly changing bulk stuff like photos. So it's RAID1 locally, periodically copied to a system in the garage and also to the drives I rotate between the house and the hangar. A huge wildfire could possibly take out both locations, but it's hard to get anything here to burn, also a quake, maybe, But I figure something like 5 copies is probably enough.

Which reminds me, it's probably time to boot the garage and do a backup.
 
dans2992 said:
You can encrypt with keys you control. If someone breaks into your house and grabs all your electronics (or it burns down) where are you then?
Click to expand...

And that is why my laptops are backed up using Carbonite. Off-site storage in case the house burns down.
 
Salty said:
Here's the problem I have with any array at home (and it's why I'm stoked about boxcryptor). Even if you use mirroring, or raid 6, or whatever, most of the consumer SAN devices are very proprietary even between versions and firmware versions. I've lost a RAID controller once, and lost all my data because I couldn't find one anywhere that would work with my disks.... That was a hard lesson learned. Oh, and the other problem was mentioned above, if your house burns down or is robbed, you're SOL.
Click to expand...

If you don’t mind noise there’s a way to manage that. Grab an older Dell server from about ten years ago. They are screaming fast and yes, have their proprietary PERC controllers for RAID, but the move to cloud put so damn many of those boxes on the street looking for work, that they’re like $200 ready to go other than drives. And many will hold eight or more in the chassis. If you’re “rolling your own” with OpenMediaVault or whatever.

They usually had multiple GigE ports that were combinable if your switch will do it, and all the hardware is monster tough. Hot swappable everything, can even take the case top off and hot swap fans if you want ha. Remote monitoring. All the server class goodies really.

But noisy bastards. Lots and lots of fans.

For the worry about proprietary controllers and such, they’re like $20 on EBay. Haha. Store one.

Stuff like this just grabbed a screenshot at random...

10a0c910f11dcc9fbc94339656798588.jpg


There’s really no point building your own storage machines with warehouses full of these and their external arrays out there. They’ll smoke MOST of what most people will build for home.
 
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