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High storage HDD?

ZethapetaZethapeta Member UncommonPosts: 28
Hello, I need to buy a HDD with 4 -8 GB.
I am not sure if buying 2 4Gb is a better option tan buying 1 8Gb. Are 8Tb HDD slower tan 1Tb HDD?
Then one I was using is a 1Tb 7200 rpm with a 500 Gb SSD.

Seagate seems to have better prices, but they are 5400 rpm, not sure if it is an important difference compared with the 7200 rpm.
Also, WD have lots of options, gold, blue, red.... Are they worth the price difference for a PC (not a NAN)?

Comments

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383
    Once you get into the higher capacities, two 4T drives may well be less expensive than one 8T drive. Often times you can find fire sales on external USB drives (WD is notorious for this), pull the drive out of the enclosure and get a nice WD Red NAS-level drive for a fraction of the OEM/Retail cost of the drive.

    You may have lower cost with two drives, but you also have doubled the chance of failure to maintain that full amount of storage, which is why they can continue to charge more for the larger drives. If you buy two 4T drives, and need 8T, your only options are RAID0 (which will make it somewhat faster, I admit, but still pales in comparison to SSD), or some fashion of JBOD/Volume Manager (like Storage Spaces). But in any of those schemes, if any of those drives fail, you (probably) lose all the data - there is no data protection at all. You can also get protection, but you will lose capacity and need more than just two 4T drives to get the full 8T.

    Speed-wise, it will be similar, not a huge difference in speed between any of the platter drives. You have the low speed variables (WD Green, most laptop drives, etc), 5400rpm, 7200rpm, and a few server-class 10,000rpm (and up). RAID0 will split the I/O between two drives, which in theory makes it twice as fast. In practice, it is faster, but no where near double. And since SSDs are hundreds of times faster, compared to your existing SSD it will still be slow. JBOD/Volume managers vary based on their implementation - most of them just "glue" the two drives together to make it look like one large drive, with no benefit in speed.

    Regardless - all of them are markedly slower than SSD storage, and apart from those distinctions in platter speed and RAID0, aren't going to vary much in terms of speed. 

    If your just looking for cheap bulk storage, I would just go with 5400 or 7200, whichever you can find a better deal on. If speed is an issue, you don't necessarily need to look at 10K or SSD, but include in that decision tree various RAID solutions.

    WD has their various drives segmented - I don't know that they necessarily mean all that much. Blue is standard, Black is high performance, Green is power efficient, Red is NAS storage, Purple is video surveillance, Gold is Enterprise, there are probably more than that.

    Can you use a Purple in a PC and have it work just fine? Yes, absolutely. There are differences in them (Greens are noticably slower, Blacks are noticably faster and noisier, Golds have a better warranty, etc). But apart from that, the rest of it is mostly just marketing and very minor firmware tweaks.

    For spinners, I tend to recommend HGST or Toshiba, based largely on BackBlaze data. But I wouldn't recommend spending a lot of extra money for them. Most people recommend steering clear of Enterprise drives anymore - for most cases it's cheaper to buy two (or more) consumer drives and just assume you'll have a failure than to have to pay for the extended warranty of the enterprise drive. 
    [Deleted User]
  • ZethapetaZethapeta Member UncommonPosts: 28
    edited May 2018
    I have never used a RAID configuration. Maybe I have been lucky, but I have never had any broken  hard drives. Is it that common to lose a hard drive? Well, now I am nervous... I need a RAID :)

    It is going to be a PC for everything. Gaming, working, internet... I have a SSD which I will be using, but I need more storage.



  • VrikaVrika Member LegendaryPosts: 7,882
    Zethapeta said:
    Maybe I have been lucky, but I have never had any broken  hard drives. Is it that common to lose a hard drive?
    No. Hard drives don't break more often that other components. People pay more attention to their reliability because you lose data if your hard drive breaks, not because it would break more often.
    Ridelynn
     
  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383
    Zethapeta said:
    I have never used a RAID configuration. Maybe I have been lucky, but I have never had any broken  hard drives. Is it that common to lose a hard drive? Well, now I am nervous... I need a RAID :)

    It is going to be a PC for everything. Gaming, working, internet... I have a SSD which I will be using, but I need more storage.



    It's really a crap shoot. I have hard drives that are going on 12 years old and still spinning fine. I've had some that lasted 3 months and crapped without any warning at all. A lot of things can affect that as well - vibration, temperature swings, lack of ventilation, etc.

    On average, I would say I get about 5 good years from a spinner. But that's a pretty big deviation across that average. At work we swap them out at 3-4 years as cheap insurance against failure.

    My first SSDs are just now approaching that age, and still running, so I couldn't say if they are better or worse honestly.

    RAID isn't a replacement for a good backup strategy.

    That is important that a lot of people mistake. RAID is not a backup. You still need backups.

    RAID just reduces downtime in the event of failure, and in some cases, can ensure that a single failure doesn't require a full rebuild from backups.  At home, my computers don't use any RAID or redundancy at all. I use a RAID10 configuration in my NAS, and that's what all my devices back up to for live backups. At work, we use RAID5 in our server, and it backs up to a live RAID10, and that is backed up to offline (and offsite) storage.
    Quizzical[Deleted User][Deleted User]
  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347
    Why do you need 8 TB of storage?

    What you should do for backup depends on how badly you care about losing the data.  If you lose an installed game and have to download it again, oh well.  If losing your data means that you lose your career or that good people die, then you should create a vastly more robust backup plan.

    Personally, I don't back up most of my data because it's either accumulated junk or easily replaceable.  I have a USB flash drive with daily incremental backups for the relative handful of personal data that I care about.  Actually, I have two of them and swap them occasionally so that if the computer completely fries and takes out everything attached to it, I still have the other.

    That plan works great if you've only got 1 GB of data that you particularly care about.  It won't work so well if you have 6 TB of valuable and irreplaceable data.
  • Octagon7711Octagon7711 Member LegendaryPosts: 9,000
    I always clone my main drive as backup.  Has come in handy a few times.  I use Acronis also, it's great.  Over the years I've only had one hard drive crash.  When it went it made a clicking noise as in a physical failure.

    "We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa      "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."  SR Covey

  • DvoraDvora Member UncommonPosts: 499
    edited May 2018
    Buy one of the new 32TB SSD's that are coming out.  You might have to leverage your house, but well worth it.  It's a tiny 2.5" drive, pretty impressive.  Samsungs last 15tb SSD used to be like 10k, but this one should be cheaper.
  • CleffyCleffy Member RarePosts: 6,412
    edited May 2018
    I would opt for 2 4TB drives or creating a redundant RAID if you need data reliability. An 8TB drive will be negligibly faster than a single 4TB drive. Less distance to cover to get to pieces of information. However, 2 4TB drives in a RAID0 setup will be nearly twice as fast while being less reliable.
    A 7200 RPM drive will be faster than a 5400 RPM drive because its spinning faster. It will also be louder and consume more energy. However, these drives are terribly slow compared to an SSD.

    HGST makes the best mechanical drives right now. Yes HGST Deskstars...
    Ridelynn
  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347
    There are different degrees of reliability, depending on what you want to protect against.  If you only want to protect against a drive failing, then having another drive in the system that you back up to, whether via RAID 1 or a daily incremental backup, will do the job.

    If the entire computer is stolen or destroyed, then a backup drive that was contained in or attached to the computer gets lost as the same time as your primary drive, and you still lose your data.  To protect against that, you need a separate backup not connected to your computer.  Something you plug in periodically to back it up, then unplug and stick in a drawer somewhere can protect against that.

    But the drive in a drawer also gets destroyed if the reason you lost your first drive was that your house burned down.  If you want to protect against that, then you need off-site data backup.  This could mean keeping a backup drive for your home computer at work or vice versa (how viable this is depends on the nature of your job), or leaving it at a friend's house.  It could also mean cloud storage, depending on how much data you have and how much you're willing to pay to get something reliable.

    A simple drive failure is far more likely than your house burning down, of course.  Protecting your data against the former but not the latter doesn't mean that you're being reckless unless that data is awfully important.  Losing several years worth of photographs can be bad, but isn't as catastrophic as a bank losing all records of customer deposits.

    Of course, it's impossible to make sure that your data can't possibly be lost.  Something cataclysmic enough to destroy the Earth entirely will take your data with it.  But if you're dead, you might not care that you also lost your data.
  • ZethapetaZethapeta Member UncommonPosts: 28
    Right now I store the imporntant data in Google Drive and my second computer (they are sync via G Drive). 

    What do you think of these 4 HDD? (I don´t have a NAS):
    https://www.pccomponentes.com/seagate-barracuda-35-4tb-sata3
    https://www.pccomponentes.com/toshiba-x300-35-4tb-sata-iii
    https://www.pccomponentes.com/wd-nas-red-4tb-sata3
    https://www.pccomponentes.com/wd-blue-4tb-5400rpm-35-sata3


  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383
    They are all 4TB hard drives.... it's more or less a commodity item. Kind of like posting links to Kingston, Micron, Hynix, and GSkill RAM - they are all RAM.... they may have different colors on them, but it's probably all going to work the same. There's a chance any of them could fail.

    If you trust one brand name over the other, ok. If you want to pay more for one over any other for some reason, ok. But they are all going to work pretty darn similarly.
    [Deleted User]gervaise1
  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347
    The Toshiba drive is 7200 RPM, the WD Blue is 5400 RPM, and the others don't say.  The difference between 7200 RPM and 5400 RPM will affect performance.  Whether that performance difference matters depends on what you'll do with the drives.
    e_paquingervaise1
  • gervaise1gervaise1 Member EpicPosts: 6,919
    edited May 2018
    Zethapeta said:
    Right now I store the imporntant data in Google Drive and my second computer (they are sync via G Drive). 

    What do you think of these 4 HDD? (I don´t have a NAS):
    https://www.pccomponentes.com/seagate-barracuda-35-4tb-sata3
    https://www.pccomponentes.com/toshiba-x300-35-4tb-sata-iii
    https://www.pccomponentes.com/wd-nas-red-4tb-sata3
    https://www.pccomponentes.com/wd-blue-4tb-5400rpm-35-sata3


    If you wanted a NAS - and are looking at 2 x 4Tb drives without RAID then:

    https://www.pccomponentes.com/synology-diskstation-ds216se-nas-2hd

    would be one option. There are others with more bays - so you can add hdds later or use any old drives (hdd or sdd) you have etc.  All models get the Synology (business) software suite (Linux based) which has multiple options - including backup options, is easy to use and is kept up to date (it was all and I am sure it still is but check obviously).

    Access to the data would be via wired or wireless (wired is standard, think wireless is these days.) Whether it is worth it depends on what you want etc.
    [Deleted User]
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