- Joined
- Oct 18, 2005
- Location
- Chicago Burbs
All of PC part selection is about dealing with probabilities rather than certainties, but when it comes to most components, this tends to not be at the forefront of the mind, as failure tends to be neatly tucked away from the experience of most, hiding behind low percentages and high lifespans. But I dare say no component selection brings the reality of probability over certainty closer to the conscious mind than that of long term storage devices, namely HDDs. We know they're going to fail. We expect them to fail. And yet they offer the greatest balance between long term data stability and performance/utility/rewritability, between SSDs and tape/stone-tablets. Despite SSDs seemingly surging far ahead in supposed lifespan, they are dependent on being powered on much more often and maintained by their background operations. HDDs can go much longer powered off without invoking the anxiety of disappearing data and they are still bigger and cheaper. And in a way, the beauty of HDDs isn't that they don't fail, but that they tend to fail more reliably, if that makes any sense.
I ask of your opinions on this matter knowing full well that we're all playing the worst of guessing games, and yet somehow by attempting to gain a probabilistic edge I believe many of us have fared far better in the HDD department than our peers.
Long ago I was a die hard Western Digital Caviar/Black whatever fan. Several years ago with my previous build these notions were shattered. I was seeing an overwhelming torrent of negative reviews, especially on the cheaper "Blue" models, but even tons on the black models. Seagate Barracudas, another cheapo line, had terrible reviews as well, much like the Blue series. At the same time, HDDs were beginning to be categorized into different use scenarios, which, from a performance perspective, were absolutely laughable (save perhaps for very heavy server specific things), but from a potential reliability perspective quite intriguing indeed!
At the time I got the impression that drives marketed for surveillance and NAS uses were a cut above the fray. Not necessarily great, but better, as they'd both be, supposedly, made to withstand far more usage. "Black" type drives were basically a joke. Who needed "performance optimization" when you have SSDs or real enterprise/server type drives? To me they seemed like just a slight reliability upgrade from the Blue series type drives which to me almost seemed like an unholy bargain for those who just could quite afford SSDs or who were fine with the prospect of losing mass data. It would just be games or other BS anyway, right? It's not like you buy some Blue drives so you can actually run some kind of data preservation scheme. It's just a shitload of cheap storage that might last a long time but has a high likelihood of not making it past a couple years. It gets the job done, for a time anyway.
At the time I figured the best prospects were enterprise, surveillance and NAS drives. I had lost faith in any manufacturer and instead focused more on product lines and reviews. At the time Seagate Skyhawk Surveillance drives seemed alright looking so I got two of those. One as a normal drive, one as a backup. They've accumulated around 3 and something years run time so far without a hiccup. Later on I needed more space and was seeing very good things about the HGST ultrastars, and found a couple unbelievably cheap ones, well past obsolescence, but 3 TB each, supposedly new (many people say goharddrive just cleans the SMART data and pretends the drives are new, but others say it's not that simple and they are actually a good actor). Once again I did the same thing, using one as a backup for the other. Meanwhile, for the most important data I would regularly back it up to 3-4 of the drives, dropbox, and also have manual backup layers incase I accidentally batch screw something up. These two drives have accumulated so far about 1.5 years of run time, again without a hiccup.
It needs not be mentioned my experiences here are purely anecdotal; statistically insignificant. Aside from drive selection, it's been my impression that the best ways to maintain a drive's longevity are feeding it clean power, keeping them from heating up too much, keeping them off as much as possible but not switching them on and off too much either, and not hammering them constantly with ridiculous amounts of fragmentation and no free space to deal with, as if a VMEM swap drive without enough RAM.
Coming upon 2022 and my new build, in the interests of maintaining my progression of fresh long term storage space directly attached to my new system, and relegating my older 4 HDDs (not to mention my many others) toward mostly 24/7 power off tertiary backup status (occasional updates over the LAN, or pulling stuff off them notwithstanding), I have once again arrived at the ultimate dilemma of trying to optimize my HDD choice of maximum reliability prospects with decent price. One of the things that drew me to the Skyhawk Surveillance drives was not just what, at the time, were relatively favorable reviews, and the fact that they were "surveillance" drives, but also because they brought all this at a much lower pricepoint per GB than, say, WD purples did. They were significantly more expensive than the budget Blues and Barracudas, but significantly cheaper than many NAS/enterprise/surveillance product lines, while in some cases having comparable or superior reviews (albeit review quantity was rather thin, and suspiciously could have been solicited, which I accepted at the time).
And so today I've seen that any HDD model that showed promise in a backblaze test is instantly set upon by the hordes of the hard disk hungry, and all that remains is dodgy sellers pretending to sell new drives that have actually seen more action than your proverbial mother has. All that's left for affordability without being complete and utter, obvious trash, is refurbs, recertifieds, and suspicious products/sellers. When sorting by "rating" at pc parts picker, the worst product lines are at the top, despite seeing an exponential increase in % 1 star ratings. You see a bunch of 5's, 4's, then nothing at 3-2, and then 12% 1 stars of people, likely newly blackpilled on the realities of bargain basement $ per gigabyte product lines from manufacturers who have long since abandoned even the pretense of maintaining a reputation for quality.
And so I ask, to no one, hearing nothing but my echo... what are your opinions on finding the ultimate balance of price per gigabyte and reliability prospects in today's hard drive environment? And as an old former friend who is the one man responsible for getting me into the hardware level of computing so long ago said of one man turning to another in a steam room: "So... how big is YOUR hard drive?"
I ask of your opinions on this matter knowing full well that we're all playing the worst of guessing games, and yet somehow by attempting to gain a probabilistic edge I believe many of us have fared far better in the HDD department than our peers.
Long ago I was a die hard Western Digital Caviar/Black whatever fan. Several years ago with my previous build these notions were shattered. I was seeing an overwhelming torrent of negative reviews, especially on the cheaper "Blue" models, but even tons on the black models. Seagate Barracudas, another cheapo line, had terrible reviews as well, much like the Blue series. At the same time, HDDs were beginning to be categorized into different use scenarios, which, from a performance perspective, were absolutely laughable (save perhaps for very heavy server specific things), but from a potential reliability perspective quite intriguing indeed!
At the time I got the impression that drives marketed for surveillance and NAS uses were a cut above the fray. Not necessarily great, but better, as they'd both be, supposedly, made to withstand far more usage. "Black" type drives were basically a joke. Who needed "performance optimization" when you have SSDs or real enterprise/server type drives? To me they seemed like just a slight reliability upgrade from the Blue series type drives which to me almost seemed like an unholy bargain for those who just could quite afford SSDs or who were fine with the prospect of losing mass data. It would just be games or other BS anyway, right? It's not like you buy some Blue drives so you can actually run some kind of data preservation scheme. It's just a shitload of cheap storage that might last a long time but has a high likelihood of not making it past a couple years. It gets the job done, for a time anyway.
At the time I figured the best prospects were enterprise, surveillance and NAS drives. I had lost faith in any manufacturer and instead focused more on product lines and reviews. At the time Seagate Skyhawk Surveillance drives seemed alright looking so I got two of those. One as a normal drive, one as a backup. They've accumulated around 3 and something years run time so far without a hiccup. Later on I needed more space and was seeing very good things about the HGST ultrastars, and found a couple unbelievably cheap ones, well past obsolescence, but 3 TB each, supposedly new (many people say goharddrive just cleans the SMART data and pretends the drives are new, but others say it's not that simple and they are actually a good actor). Once again I did the same thing, using one as a backup for the other. Meanwhile, for the most important data I would regularly back it up to 3-4 of the drives, dropbox, and also have manual backup layers incase I accidentally batch screw something up. These two drives have accumulated so far about 1.5 years of run time, again without a hiccup.
It needs not be mentioned my experiences here are purely anecdotal; statistically insignificant. Aside from drive selection, it's been my impression that the best ways to maintain a drive's longevity are feeding it clean power, keeping them from heating up too much, keeping them off as much as possible but not switching them on and off too much either, and not hammering them constantly with ridiculous amounts of fragmentation and no free space to deal with, as if a VMEM swap drive without enough RAM.
Coming upon 2022 and my new build, in the interests of maintaining my progression of fresh long term storage space directly attached to my new system, and relegating my older 4 HDDs (not to mention my many others) toward mostly 24/7 power off tertiary backup status (occasional updates over the LAN, or pulling stuff off them notwithstanding), I have once again arrived at the ultimate dilemma of trying to optimize my HDD choice of maximum reliability prospects with decent price. One of the things that drew me to the Skyhawk Surveillance drives was not just what, at the time, were relatively favorable reviews, and the fact that they were "surveillance" drives, but also because they brought all this at a much lower pricepoint per GB than, say, WD purples did. They were significantly more expensive than the budget Blues and Barracudas, but significantly cheaper than many NAS/enterprise/surveillance product lines, while in some cases having comparable or superior reviews (albeit review quantity was rather thin, and suspiciously could have been solicited, which I accepted at the time).
And so today I've seen that any HDD model that showed promise in a backblaze test is instantly set upon by the hordes of the hard disk hungry, and all that remains is dodgy sellers pretending to sell new drives that have actually seen more action than your proverbial mother has. All that's left for affordability without being complete and utter, obvious trash, is refurbs, recertifieds, and suspicious products/sellers. When sorting by "rating" at pc parts picker, the worst product lines are at the top, despite seeing an exponential increase in % 1 star ratings. You see a bunch of 5's, 4's, then nothing at 3-2, and then 12% 1 stars of people, likely newly blackpilled on the realities of bargain basement $ per gigabyte product lines from manufacturers who have long since abandoned even the pretense of maintaining a reputation for quality.
And so I ask, to no one, hearing nothing but my echo... what are your opinions on finding the ultimate balance of price per gigabyte and reliability prospects in today's hard drive environment? And as an old former friend who is the one man responsible for getting me into the hardware level of computing so long ago said of one man turning to another in a steam room: "So... how big is YOUR hard drive?"
