HTPC built with Seagates. Do I need to invest in a back up system?

[CyrilFiggis]

Hello!

About 18 months ago I built my first computer; an HTPC. It's an i3-3225, ASRock Z77Pro4-m, Samsung 840 Evo SSD OS drive, Asus 2GB HD7790, and a Ceton Infinitv4. For the HDD's I went with Seagate Barracuda 7200's (a 3TB and a 2TB). I currently have ~2.2TB of blurays + another few hundred GBs of other movies and recordings. It's also my Plex server, and I don't have a standalone NAS. I went with the Seagates because at the time they had great reviews and were at great prices. Now, it seems everything I read says they almost always die at around a year and a half...which is almost exactly today. Which brings me to my question..

Should I continue relying on my current HDDs? Buying external HDDs or building a NAS simply for backup seems costly. I know very little about RAID, but is it possible to add an additional HDD and create a RAID array within my HTPC for redundancy without compromising the data on them? How do you all back up large amounts of media? (I do have back ups to most all the blurays in the form of the physical disks, but that's gonna be a pain to replicate if a HDD fails)

Thanks!

 

[Someone Somewhere]

From what I see, it's only the STx000DM* drives that you really need to worry about, and even then it's mainly 24x7 (which admittedly they probably do as a plex server) work that you need to worry about. I'm not sure if they have abnormal failure rates at lower usages. You could try setting windows to spin them down on inactivity.

You normally need to start with blank drives to do a RAID array, and the drives need to be the same sizes.

Personally, if it's only movies (and not family photos or anything), I wouldn't worry greatly. HDD failures are still fairly unlikely.

 

[mamasan2000]

Could be interesting for you
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

 

[Someone Somewhere]

That's almost certainly what he's referring to, and applies exclusively to the STx000DM drives. Which are not rated for 24/7 use, what backblaze is using them for.