I came here to see if there was an "eggs in one basket" comment and bam, there it is.

But where is the "I would never buy a Seagate drive" comment

The too many eggs in one basket argument is so stupid when applied to hard disks. If you needed to store 8TB of data, you'd be equally stupid to buy 2 x 4TB disks without bothering with RAID *and* backups.

Right next to the my mate bought one and it failed in a ball of fire 3 seconds after install.
Whereas he has 3hundred thousand WD drives and they are fine.

hot, is 8 the new 4

amazing price for a 8TB drive, especially when I remember my first HDD was 85MB and contained Windows 3.1

These large HDD's scare me, egg's in one basket spring's to mind for the majority of people buying them.

£450 to RAID is still an excellent price for an archive of this size though.

The too many eggs in one basket argument is so stupid when applied to hard disks. If you needed to store 8TB of data, you'd be equally stupid to buy 2 x 4TB disks without bothering with RAID *and* backups.

I came here to see if there was an "eggs in one basket" comment and bam, there it is.

Right next to the my mate bought one and it failed in a ball of fire 3 seconds after install.
Whereas he has 3hundred thousand WD drives and they are fine.

What needs to happen is for these drives to be incorporated in external USB drives, that's the way I've almost always got my cheapest 4T drives.

Great deal, heat added. Cheapest these have ever been.

Pretty sure that was in reference to RAM and not storage... :wink:

I would never buy a Seagate drive. Far better to go with Western Digital, I have three hundred thousand of these and have never seen a single failure. :stuck_out_tongue:

Actually have no idea about Seagate these days, anyone got a view on these drives? Looks like this might be a good backup option....

I love the "grapevine" reputations products seem to gain, even when facts contradict reputation people still insist they are not wrong.

Computer products are harder to gauge as reliability stats are rarely published but take Cars for example. The majority of people purchase based upon what is perceived as quality and reliability, even when there are publicised facts to contradict their conclusion.

Buy what you want and be happy is my summary lol I've seen many many drives and Seagate are OEM for many manufacturers and are of similar reliability to most in my experience.

Get better at carrying eggs. If they're in more than one basket, you're assuming you're going to fail at some point, which in itself is enough. If you're thinking like that, then you've already failed, and all your eggs are doomed.

follow the 3-2-1 backup regime if you want to give yourself a strong probability of being able to recover from a data failure. http://windowsitpro.com/blog/why-3-2-1-backup-rule-still-makes-sense

Agreed. However, I'd like to shout out for those like me with dreadful rural wired broadband. Mobile broadband can offer a way to equal the utility of a fast city ADSL or fibre connection - but it's not cheap per GB to set up and use a 500GB cloud in this system.

If I have all the drive bays in my server full up, is replacing my drives with bigger drives the only solution for a one server setup?

Sure, most data is probably local copies of films and pictures - but why not keep a (legal) local copy, for ease of access or backup reasons?

You are also terribly unaware of:
- own pictures + movies (=> can easily go into 100's GBs)
- documents + emails alone take 10-20GB for me.
- my MRI scans etc from hospitals => >>1GB
- backups...

Remember to always complete a FULL format on new hard drives and not a QUICK format.
A quick format will not discover bad sectors and the last thing you want is to discover weeks/months later that it was damaged in transit!! (Hard drives are susceptible to shock damage)

I have 3 PCs at home and total number of nearly 10 HDDs - including 2.5" and 3.5", internal and external, different manufacturers - including Toshiba, Seagate, WD and Hitachi. x2 of them - x1 3.5" and x1 2.5" are made by Seagate and both of them failing. 2.5" 500GB one - barely used - is showing x8 bad sectors and the other one - 3.5" 2TB 24 bad sectors. All other ones are fine and perfectly "healthy".

Symantics, just like what have eggs got to do with seagates? :stuck_out_tongue:

So can I just clarify, this is neither a suitable storage location for eggs nor a basket?

You're comparing two different types of drives, the Seagate 8TB Backup Plis drive uses shingled magnetic recording which gives high capacity at a low cost but can have a serious impact on performance (hence why they originally badged them as 'archive drives' and now 'backup') - this sort of drive is still cheap:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-Backup-Desktop-External-Integrated/dp/B01IAD5ZC6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490104504&sr=8-1&keywords=seagate+backup+plus+8tb

The more expensive 8TB drives are standard hard drives that don't use SMR which puts the price up considerably but performance is much better as well. The prices certainly aren't coming down but they're not shooting up either like it may appear.

John

If you plan to use several of this with a NAS in your bedroom, good luck with sleeping http://www.hw4all.com/test-review-seagate-ironwolf-8tb-wd-red-8tb-toshiba-enterprise-cloud-6tb/

Just to let people know that thieves/burglars are now targeting external HDDs and memory sticks. They then make contact and attempt to ransom them back to their owners who can have all kinds of personal & sentimental data on them.
It's not enough just to make a backup, you need to hide it, possibly off site.

You've missed the point! They don't want to access your data, they want to ransom it. If you don't have a back up and all your family photos are on a drive, you can imagine how much most people would pay to get it back. The fact it's encrypted doesn't matter to the criminal, they have it and you don't !

For me it's my own photos and videos, I shoot raw + jpg on my cameras and I have a variety of high quality video sources including action cameras (sometimes use multiple at a time for different views), a 4k drone plus mirrorless, bridge and compact 4k cameras. It's difficult with video to only capture what you need, I went through a phase of not recording much video due to the space it was taking up but I regret it now as it's great being able to go back to old video to relive experiences or make up a new compilation video. I use a pair of HGST 4TB drives which then leaves the problem of back ups, I added an Ironwolf 10tb to allow me to easily back up and give me scratch space for working with intermediate video which can be 100's of gigs in size.

All that aside, even if people have 8TB of commercial video while that's replaceable it's going to take a fair amount of time to replace.

John

You don't get it do you? They don't have it either its inaccessible, you could laugh at their ransom demands and restore from your backup.

And that is why you need a hidden backup. They bin the device if you won't pay. They're too thick / drugged up to be able to do anything with the contents.

That's my point, encryption prevents identification theft from documents etc. Back up prevents data loss, both go hand in hand.

Yes, but you're kind of one of those 'fringe cases' I was talking about. In the case of commercial film/video, I meant it will be available elsewhere, not lost forever (in the case of your personal footage) so expensive backup disks may be less important for them - I don't really know, I was just vocalising my thoughts!

It's far from unusual for those into photography and video to use a lot of personal storage and while commercial files can be replaced, it's a lot of time and effort against the cost of a backup hard drive.

John

eggs in 1 basket

Yep... An encrypted drive with all of my really important irreplaceable stuff is kept at work, plus all of my photos are kept on Google Photos' free storage.
I have loads of stuff on my NAS (4X 4TB -1 drive for parity) that's easily replaceable, so i don't see the point of spending hundreds on backing that up too. If the house goes up in flames/NAS gets stolen/two drives in the array simultaneously fail then I'd just gradually replace that as needed.

Yes you need to back up your stuff, but at the same time you need to draw a line and decide what's essential to have multiple copies of and what isn't...

Why not just shoot raw, and convert to jpg once you get home? That's the way I do it, and it means i can shoot more shots in a burst while saving space on the card. It's a bit of a drag to do the batch convert job, but home time is plentiful, whereas field time is not, especially when something comes up that needs a lot of shots.

Sometimes I need raw files, sometimes I need jpegs so shooting both gives that flexibility - some people want a copy of photos when I'm out and about or I upload them straight away so the jpeg is handy, other times I want to spend time with the raw file. For a bit more storage space I think it's worth it for the convenience particularly as the smaller cameras aren't good for high speed anyway and the big cameras have pretty big buffers.

John