nice big drive to go caput

If a plane landed where my NAS is located my data wouldn't be the first worry I had.

​absolute rubbish, the MTBF on these drives exceeds 800,000 hours for a start secondly you're comparing a components reliability against an appliance with multiple components.
Far more like to say have a bad capacitor in the psu of the nas or it could take a power spike which could destroy it vs a relatively simple hard drive.

Fact is no matter how your data is stored you keep it backed up.

When I was network manager I had 2 NAS's one was used by everyone the other was in a second building using rsync to backup the other NAS

Why do we have to have this stupid debate on every single hard drive post? It's quite frankly ridiculous, don't like big hard drives vote cold or just stfu instead

Failed arrays, failed power supplies, board, etc.

nice big drive to go caput

nice big drive to go caput

same price at Amazon, £25 per TB is not a deal price especially for these SMR drives

At this size should be looking at a NAS. I wouldn't want to put up to 8tb of data on a single box

Why would you back a NAS up?

Failed arrays, failed power supplies, board, etc.

These drives aren't built for every day use. These are archive drives built for use as backup drives or for unimportant data like say use with an Xbox.

It's also worth noting that these are NOT to be used in RAID for those breaking these down for the drive.

Are He drives at consumer level yet? For me the 3 & 4tb drives are the right price point

What happens if an airplane lands on your NAS? All the RAID arrays in the world, won't help, it's the backups (hopefully cloud or offsite) that will come to your rescue.

I backup to the cloud plus NAS, but whenever I'm away, I also take my really important data with me. It's all a question of value vs cost, I'm 99% confident in my cloud backups, but I'm also 100% confident it would take ages to recover the data, so I like to carry a complete set of important stuff with me, so recovery will be quick.

Equally I have 7TB of easily reproducible data on my NAS, so logically I could drop 3 disks and replace with one of these, which would be handy. For this data time is the only concern, but it's not exactly time critical to get it back either, just a little irritating.

mike

More chance of a failure of the 8tb drive than any of the NAS components.

If you're happy with a single point of failure then that's fine - you won't need one of these

If a plane landed where my NAS is located my data wouldn't be the first worry I had.

Because redundancy and Backups are totally different things. What happens when you or someone in your family accidentally deletes a folder full of photographs...your NAS disk redundancy isn't going to be a lot of use.

Ideally you want the data stored on your NAS backed up to an external drive on a regular basis and then a copy of the stuff you really wouldn't want to lose (Photos, Home movies, Documents etc.) backed up to some cloud storage.

As the OP said this is a nice big drive for Backup use.

Depends if you're under it, I bet the HMRC would still want their tax return completing ;-) unless you're called Amazon or run a chain of coffee shops, regardless of what killed your NAS.

Assuming I'm not in the house when my NAS gets flattened, I can rebuild the house easily enough, given time, but would rather the data was safe as well, since without the backups there's no chance of recovering a large chunk of it.

mike

Because my NAS does backups of my PCs, so if a folder is deleted it is restored from the NAS. Anyway, who would give someone dim enough to delete important data access to a NAS. I don't.

You misunderstand my comments. Who would back up a NAS to a hard disk? A **** Seagate one at that.

​absolute rubbish, the MTBF on these drives exceeds 800,000 hours for a start secondly you're comparing a components reliability against an appliance with multiple components.
Far more like to say have a bad capacitor in the psu of the nas or it could take a power spike which could destroy it vs a relatively simple hard drive.

Fact is no matter how your data is stored you keep it backed up.

When I was network manager I had 2 NAS's one was used by everyone the other was in a second building using rsync to backup the other NAS

Why do we have to have this stupid debate on every single hard drive post? It's quite frankly ridiculous, don't like big hard drives vote cold or just stfu instead

Like many people I use my NAS for many things, as a file server, a virtual server host and a streaming media library among other things
All the PC's in my house point to a Virtual File server running from storage on my NAS as centralised storage. It means that whatever device someone in the house (I have four kids with tablets, laptops and phones) uses all there files/music/movies etc.. are available. Files and folders don't just get deleted by 'Dim' people, files can be overwritten in error or file corruption can occur, having a backup copy means they can easily be restored. Having a backup copy in the cloud as well also means files can be accessed when not at home if needed.

The real 'Dim' people are the ones who store all there data on a NAS with no backup expecting disk redundancy to work as there only backup method.....then complain when they lose data

​You've just outted yourself as someone who is just biased against a particular manufacturer, been reading blogs on the Internet?

Fact is working in the industry hard drive failures are actually relatively rare these days despite information density increases hard drive failures have dropped massively in my experience. In all my years experience I've come across failures across all manufacturers, sometimes you get a bad batch from one supplier so you see more failure per thousand but over time it averages out.

They're all pretty much the same failure rate wise in recent years so just buy one with the best warranty & keep the drive cool. I've got 2x2tb, 1x1tb and 1x500gb running in one machine right now from WD, Seagate and Samsung and they've been in there for many many years now no problem and all of that is backed up to Onedrive too

So you wouldn't back up your NAS to a usb drive then?

Yes I backup anything I wouldn't want to lose from the NAS to both a USB External drive and Cloud storage, both done automatically via scheduled jobs.
If your data doesn't exist in at least 3 places it may as well not exist at all....

SMR (shingled magnetic recording) is something to avoid unless you are wanting to write files which you will only really want to access rather than change in any way. It is a fairly new technology, which might be one reason to avoid it in itself, but it essentially allows manufacturers to increase the storage capacity of their platters in a different (slightly cheating imo) way. Downsides appear to be increased writing times as a consequence of data writing over other parts of the drive which in turn need to be re-written. I'm assured that this does not reduce the lifetime of the drive, but if you expect to be changing files or moving a lot of data on/off a SMR drive it is going to take an eternity and not just because of the massive 8TB it offers.

100% with you on the Toshiba 5TB drives, just don't leave them in the housing to overheat. Solid performers and best £/TB when on offer.

Lol, not in my office, which currently is registering 10 Celsius, but even then I've not noticed any major heat issues, even when one was mirroring 4TB to the other, with both stacked on top of each other, but now you've got me thinking, this is potentially a situation where both drives could overheat and fail together.... better move them apart.

mike

I have a lot of drives in my NAS, but a 8TB external is overkill. External drives are far more prone to failure, and it's certainly no laughing matter when it's that much data at risk. Having multiple drives in an NAS is far more economic and if one dies you've still got the rest of it safe. While one sensible option is mirroring your data, I only really mirror the more important data. I also put this data on the cloud. Data like TV shows are dispensable.

As for portability, it would be very awkward with this drive. If you're going to power your laptop and this drive you'd probably need an extension if there's a plug actually available on a train or in a café. I suppose it would be an option for business trips, although I can't see why you'd need that much data for reasons outside of leisure.

once i had a 2 tb of data stored on seagate hdd, once i had....

A lot of people haven't got a clue here.

I can remember buying a 40MB HDD. The vendor said it'd take a lifetime to fill it. Storage requirements increase, people. In 5 years time we won't be thinking that 8TB is a lot of data to put on one drive. It goes on and on.

If you use this to back up your NAS, what's the problem? If it goes pop just buy another one, or get it fixed under warranty. If it's a backup drive it's not the end of the world if the original data is still good as long as you get it replaced quickly.

I know Seagate had issues, especially with their 2TB drives, but those issues have been resolved now. The current high-capacity drives don't suffer from the same issues so there's no reason to call these drives. My 5TB external drive is fine and it backs up one of my NAS' every day.

Always amazes me comments on hard drive threads - always goes the same way every single time.
Seriously, im going to make a HUKD bingo card for Hard drives.

Why do people take it for granted that the hard drive is guaranteed to fail? 95% of people buying these will never have an issue with them.

also, ive said this before: not everything needs to be backed up! If you buy 2x 8TB drives (one for backup purposes) then your just wasting money. You only need 1 or 2 smaller drives to backup the essential stuff (photos, documents)> I'd wager a 500GB drive is ample for most people to backup the essential files.
With superfast internet - software/movies/music can be re-downloaded in a relatively short period of time should the worst ever happen. And, lets face it - you're unlucky if you have a HDD fail these days (or your doing something wrong :stuck_out_tongue: )

Eggs in one basket
Was cheaper during black Friday, cold
Only 5XXXRPM, cold
Lot of data to lose in one go
Seagate drives all fail, cold
Drive X drive is cheaper than WD Red, cold
Who needs that much storage?
Is this compatible with the Xbox / PS4?
Is this compatible with a Mac?

Did I miss any? :smiley:

I've read the above dual & all I came to say was 'they make 8 TB Hard drives :confused:'

For any students out there, you can get a My Duo 8TB (Raid, USB 3) from WD Store for £192.99. That has the benefit of having your data split across two drives. Granted it's technically only 4TB of storage in Raid 1 configuration, but it's cheaper and surely a safer place for your data than on one sole drive.

I've been seeing this tired old set of arguments since I put a 330MB (!) SCSI drive in my first PC, upgrading the already huge 80MB drive that was in there. Then the same for memory cards and cameras ("Lose all your photos ... blah blah...") Every shift up in storage brings the same rubbish out. Regardless of capacity, always have a physically separate backup for you non-reproduceable data. Simples.

Yes - but Seagate have the best reputation for going bang!

Yeah all Seagate's are terrible....

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/14/server_retired_after_18_years_and_ten_months_beat_that_readers/

In its day, it was a reasonable machine - 200MHz Pentium, 32MB RAM, 4GB SCSI-2 drive,” Ross writes. “And up until recently, it was doing its job fine.” Of late, however the “hard drive finally started throwing errors, it was time to retire it before it gave up the ghost!” The drive's a Seagate, for those of looking to avoid drives that can't deliver more than 19 years of error-free operations.

Yes they USED to be good... but they arent as reliable as the old days. :wink:

I also referenced a list and a bingo card in another hard drive thread :laughing:
Yes you're missing the backblaze graphs

Although mostly correct, you're making the same mistake of telling everyone what they should or shouldn't use, the most important advice is to consider your personal circumstances and buy accordingly.

For instance my twin 5TB drives carry mostly vital data such as photographs and business documents, if I go away, owning a pair of identical drives I can put them in separate locations when the system is off, and know if the house was burgled, I probably wouldn't lose both. The data is still backed up to the cloud, but it would take about a month to recover, which is time I could well do without losing.

I also have 4x 3TB in the NAS as 2 mirrors, on this system it's entirely unimportant data, such as CD/DVD and Bluray rips, why might I mirror them, well it took literally months to go through the process of ripping this stuff in the first place, that time has a value to me, so I consider the cost of mirroring to be low compared to the cost of getting the data back, even though it's 100% replaceable (even if the house burnt down with the originals). However due to the the fact I could, even if I didn't want to, get it all back, there's no point going to the expense and time of backing up to the cloud, plus it's probably quicker to re-rip than download. I also replace one pair of drives every year to maintain data on drives no older than 3 years.

But of course this is entirely my personal position, others must evaluate the value of their data and decide for themselves, none of us here can truly tell someone else what to do, it's a personal choice.

Interestingly, I was looking at the stats for storage size vs cost over the years, and up until the cheap 5TB, it cost the same to store 10 digital photos when I bought my first digital camera, as it did to store 10 of my latest cameras photos on a 4TB drive at today's prices. The 5TB finally makes it cheaper, but then my camera is a little old. I've also just decommissioned a device that had a 40GB drive made in 2005, used daily, until a couple of years ago, so I suspect reliability is as much a measure of the owners treatment, as the name printed on the label.



mike

had 3 seagate drive fail on me, 8tb is alot of data to lose, just a heads up!

Seems like a good option for backup if you have 8TB of data worth backing up that is. I don't. Personally I would buy two 4TB drives, just because I don't really trust this new storage technology yet.

I really don't get why people get so obsessed about RAID mirroring for home use. Unless availability is a key concern (which it shouldn't be in a home server), why bother. Just because you can do something, doesn't mean it's worth doing.
It makes much more sense to use the drives you would use for mirroring to store a backup of all your data. And then maybe keep another copy of data that is most important in the cloud.

This is blurb i found online: It sounds like these drives are for long term backup not for daily frequent write use - suits fine for someone like myself who is going to keep a load of video/audio/images over a long period of time as an archive.

"First, the speeds and feeds. This is a new range of hard drives that Seagate refers to as Archive HDD, where performance is eschewed in favor of reliability and power efficiency. There will be 8TB, 6TB, and 5TB models, and they’ll all come in Standard and Secure flavors (the Secure drives have a hardware encryption chip). The drives all spin at 5,900 RPM and have a 128MB cache, with an average read/write throughput of 150MB/sec (190MB/sec max). There’s a three-year warranty, and a fairly high MTBF (mean time between failures) of 800,000 hours."

So instead of this one, should I get a couple of 5tb instead!

I am building a Server now and have space for 4-8 HDDs, I was planning 4 x 5TB, backing up from nearly full (1,3,5 & 5TB). Yip, loads of stuff over the last 10 years.

Question is with all this raid and so on talk, what should be the ideal backup method.

Plan is
Microserver 4 drives to my new server with the new 5tb drives. What is the ideal method is it raid (is that backup)?

Lets say 4 drives into the 2x5TBs (main stuff, I can live with backed up) and then most important files into the 3rd HDD from the 2x5tbs and then mirror the 3rd to the 4th drive.

So I will end up with a copy of the 4 drives and then 2 copies of the most important files.

Does that make sense? Can this be done?

Yes i see where your coming from - it largely depends on your personal circumstances,and what value you place on your personal time vs the purchase cost of the hard drives or having to manually back everything up every so often (if you dont use RAID or automated backup method)

My setup, i have a 5TB drive in a Microserver at home (with a 500GB Drive containing a copy of Photos, Documentation and Family Videos - the irreplaceable stuff)
I also have another Microserver at my Parents house with an (older) backup of most of the 5TB drive, though this is more for my convenience for when im staying at my parents than for backup reasons.

Software wise, i have a written copy of any software serial numbers i have purchased. Meaning i can legally re-download the ISO files should the worse ever happen. Since my server is running 24/7 - this means i can remotely set the server downloading the files overnight so not too much inconvenience for me.

one thing that always plays on my mind is, if one drive fails that's in a Mirrored Raid - Assuming both drives are the same age - then the second drive could be likely close to failing too. This means that both drives would need to be replaced (double cost each time a drive fails?)

I am also very loathed to move data from one drive to another (bad previous experience where i lost hundreds of photos and many went corrupt. I discovered it too late and had already formatted the original drive! :disappointed: ). Thankfully i learned from the mistake and now if i have to move data between drives i use a tool like terracopy, which verifies the file copying to make sure its a 100% CRC match.

Theres one last disadvantage to using RAID Mirroring to backup instead of a "Delayed" style backup. Because the changes are live, anything you delete, edit, overwrite etc.. is permanent, and unless you've got another copy elsewhere - theres no getting it back.
Im not sure about bad sectors on one drive, e.g what happens if you have a photo that spans bad sectors on one drive but is healthy on the Mirrored drive?

Some automated backup software solutions can be set to backup on a nominated day, weekly, fortnightly etc - i use one to automatically move the photos/documents/videos weekly onto my Backup 500GB drive.

Finally - It always helps to get some advance warning about the health of your drives. On my server, i run Hard Disk Sentinel Pro which monitors the SMART attributes allong with other things. its not guaranteed protection, but its better having a chance of advanced warning than none at all.

This is my setup, im not saying for one moment that this would be ideal for everyone but there are some tips/ideas if anyone wants them.

Same price at amazon and other places.