[SOLVED] New & reliable desktop HDD needed -- please advise

[hrisiqk]

Hello fellow men,
So I finally filled all my storage and im in desperate need to buy a larger hdd with the intent to store big game installation, hd movies/tv series, music and personal history.
Last day i spent educating myself further, so my plan so far is buying a new hdd around 4-6TB(Im getting kinda paranoid bout random failure and full data loss, so hopefully no short sticks 😀) and lately another one as a second backup.

Right now I have a 2TB barracuda DM-SMR(few years old, probably out of warranty, slowed down, but seems healthy, 20% fragmented atm due to being full, if i get it some space I can optimize it to 0% again probably) and 2 1TB barracudas DM-SMR also filled and sitting in my desk that i bought months ago thinking they will do the job, I havent even tested them properly they might be bad ones who knows, i've made full formating to both of them, optimazed them thru windows feature and are 0% fragmented, but they havent been touched other than transfering half of my data.

So thats my plan, in a matter of preserving the backups hdds i will be doing the usual format, windows optimization, run hard disk sentinel check/tests( im new to the program just installed it) and refresh them regularly every 1 or 2 years with DiskFresh, or copy/paste(rewrite) the data.
Ive used barracudas whole my life and had only 1 disk failure when i was way younger, so subjectively i trust them, but still its a matter of luck.

Can some1 point me in the right direction, hopefully with some objective knowledge, Im thinking of getting Seagate as usual, there are some WD that i've never had on good prices, but my subjective expirience and random feedbacks of WD failures are making me sceptical, so i dont know.

If anyones thinking of suggesting external hdd/ssd, from what I've red theoretically hdds have longer shelf life and i find it easier to plug em thru sata for faster transfers over usb3, i will find proper parts to store them the best I can, also from what I've understood yesterday NAS hdds can work as single drives and have "better" features in terms of exploit and stability, so it sounds kinda better than the regular consumer hdd, but made for 24/7 usage and im going to pretty much not use them at all, also the TLER type of features are scaring me, that im going to lose data easier since im not using them in a RAID setup.

So theres the long story, this is the site i've always used since its gives multiplatform information from different online markets https://www.pazaruvaj.com/tvyrdi-diskove-hdd-c3103/f:kapacitet=4/?st=6tb its only in Bulgarian saddly, but if you have the nerves to check out whats available around me would be much appreciated, I could still use multinational platforms, but honestly I dont trust ebay, amazon, aliexpress and all those.
Thank you very much for your time, effort and share of knowledge

 

[Lutfij]

You could just pickup a RAID enclosure and then have a mirrored RAID array to protect your data regardless of what sort of data you want to have on it. I'd also advise on having sensitive data(one's that can't be bought or sourced through other means0 on a drive that's rarely used. I'd stay away from WD drives, since they've been failure galore for me. Toshiba drives tend to exhibit the same clicking noise when almost close to 85% of their storage capacity, for me, which is the same as WD drives. It could even be that I had access to a bad batch of drives, so yes luck does come into play since you can't tell what stock of inventory you will be granted access to.

You could conversely look at drive docking bays and work with drives like you would with a cartridge, plug in, move data and then unplug from dock.

 

[hrisiqk]

Thanks for the fast feedback, im not leaning towards RAID since i have zero knowledge about it, plus my plan is to keep everything on few drives that would probably be used very rarely, like buying a car, catching dust in the garage, but almost never being used, unless i need to 😀 , I have some cheap sata2usb connector R-Driver 3 that ive used with the 1TB baracudas that are idling, so i was thinking the same, does docking stations offer some firmware or its better to use drives thru their PSUS, not with AC power adapter?! I completely forgot those were around 😀
Also im not sure if i should go for standard barracudas or the NAS Ironwolfs offer me better firmware, stability gadgets to aid my task of shelfing backup data.
Best regards

 

[faalin]

I run 3 WD red pro 6TB drives in my computer, 1 holds all my steam games, 2 hold blizzard, origin, epic, and any other games, also have ripped all my cd/dvd games to iso, 3 hold any movies, music, and files. I then run 3 Seagate Ironwolf 8TB in my server in raid 5 for backups (mostley my steam games, who wants to download 5TB of games again) and 6 Seagate Constellation ES 3TB in raid 5 for my BlueIris camera system.

The red pro's ive had for around 5 years now
Ironwolf's are about 1-2 years old
Constellation are around 3 years old, ive had a few of these die on me. But i do beat the crap out of them writing video to them all day long and then running a script to delete anything older then 14 days.

 

[hrisiqk]

I see, so you have 1 backup server that relies on raid if any disk goes bad, so the others can retrieve the data?!
Do you use the WD reds in raid on your PC as well, since they are NAS or simply as single drives/partitions?
And thanks for the feedback brother man

 

[USAFRet]

RAID IS NOT A BACKUP.

It is for uptime in the event of physical drive fail, not data protection.

 

[faalin]

I see, so you have 1 backup server that relies on raid if any disk goes bad, so the others can retrieve the data?!
Do you use the WD reds in raid on your PC as well, since they are NAS or simply as single drives/partitions?
And thanks for the feedback brother man

no my WD reds are single drives.

USAFRet is correct raid as a standalone is not a backup, but my backup solution is using raid. The only thing im backing up to the server is my steam library and that is literally only because i dont feel like downloading 5TB of games all over again. Other then loosing a dive (which would piss me off) i have nothing life threatening that i couldn't live without, just the inconvenience of reinstalling. But i typically reinstall window every 1-1.5 years jsut to clean stuff up and get rid of any unwanted bad stuff from the internet.

 

[USAFRet]

What drive?

Seagate SUX
WD SUX!
Toshiba, HGST, blah blah blah....

No.

If you look at the reliability stats from Backblaze, you'll find very little fail rate differences between different brands.
Except for a couple of outliers in specific models, they are all within about 1% of each other.

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html


No brand or model is 100% failproof over time.
To actually protect your data, backups. This also protects against things other than a simple drive fail.

 

[Eximo]

And Backblaze mis-uses their drives by taking consumer parts and shoving them in racks. Not all the drives they use support anti-resonance and other features that would help them when used in large arrays. So really worst case for normal operation.

Edit: Found my new band name ant-resonance

 

[USAFRet]

And Backblaze mis-uses their drives by taking consumer parts and shoving them in racks. Not all the drives they use support ant-resonance and other features that would help them when used in large arrays. So really worst case for normal operation.

Oh, very true. Not typical use.
But there aren't a lot of other sources to compare across brands.