Large HDDs or SSDs?

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  1. Posts : 1,203
    11 Home
       #11

    All my external HDDs are regular 3.5 inch models. Some of my external HDDs are the "green" type, i.e. the exact opposite of NAS/enterprise models. Not all green drives belong in the "slowest of the slow" ballpark, so I saw no real reason for me to avoid buying them altogether, and, instead, I went for a more nuanced kind of strategy, i.e., not all of my data was going to be accessed frequently enough to be able to justify the added cost if the price difference was fairly big compared to the difference in performance. All the other ones I have are just normal consumer models (7200rpm) the primary focus of which was always storage capacity vs cost while still not sacrificing too much on performance vs cost. I don't own a NAS, as empty NAS boxes are expensive, and they don't have any storaga capacity whatsoever because... well, they're empty! As for RAID 0 arrays and any other type of configuration that requires multiple drives to be kept spinning the entire time, I have no use for them. Keeping multiple drives spinning consumes more power, running them 24/7 limits choices because not all drives are designed to be reliable enough for that so it tends to hold back storage capacity vs cost, and I would need to buy one or more separate enclosures so the total cost would be much too high. (Even, if I decided to build my own storage pod.) I own a 16-port USB 3.0 hub that uses its own external 100 watts power supply. External HDDs also give the benefit of being designed to be portable so they are better protected when they get moved around a lot. A safe backup isn't safe until it is stored in a safe location away from the computer and physically disconnected from anything that is still connected to the power grid, and their integrity has to be verified often if you want to call them reliable so moving them on a regular basis tends to be somewhat of a compulsory type thing. What a lot of people seem to be hopelessly unaware of is that increasing the number of backup copies is what helps to avoid suffering permanent data loss orders of magnitude more effectively than choosing a drive that is touted to be the bees knees of reliability. (Before anyone should ask, MTBF stands for Mean Time Between Failure, not Mean Time Before Failure─as I saw a discussion about that in another thread not too long ago... )
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  2. Posts : 10
    W10 LTSC 2019 x64/W10 PRO21H1 modified by mee
       #12

    ignatzatsonic said:
    I'd think the best way to not "risk loosing it all" is to have more than 1 backup..................regardless of the size of the drives.
    I'm with you too ...
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  3. Posts : 11,247
    Windows / Linux : Arch Linux
       #13

    [QUOTE=hdmi;2220913 ..... As for RAID 0 arrays and any other type of configuration that requires multiple drives to be kept spinning the entire time, I have no use for them. Keeping multiple drives spinning consumes more power, running them 24/7 limits choices because not all drives are designed to be reliable enough for that so it tends to hold back storage capacity vs cost ......, [/QUOTE]

    Hi there

    If you get those large HDD's that are designed to be used with Disk based security video systems then these will run 24/7 with absolutely no problems for years on end and as they don't have to be fast they are much cheaper than you think -- so if you have a large amount of essentially unchanging data e.g large music files etc then using those is no problem when running on a NAS and power consumption won't be an issue as most of the time the HDD's will be in "Idle mode".

    However any sort of NAS or computer system should always itself be backed up in any case from time to time. You don't need the entire backup for a music collection if its already been done once - just new and changed files.

    A lot here seem to be scared of RAID 0 --if you have these type of HDD's designed for video surveillance cameras etc these will run reliably in that configuration for years and if you have any failures you can always recover from off line backups.

    Cheers
    jimbo
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  4. Posts : 1,481
    W10 22H2 19045.3031
       #14

    I image my BU drive to an HDD that only gets connected when I do the image.
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  5. Posts : 2,068
    Windows 10 Pro
       #15

    ^ Yeah, I work in Enterprise IT. I've used EMC products, NetApp products, Dell PowerEdge products and they all support huge arrays and many shelves of drives. Even with the enterprise class drives we have, we still replace drives on a regularly basis that the array says are going to potentially fail in the future. I'm sure these devices are far more sensitive to maintaining uptime and are not taking any chances whatsoever on a failure.

    I do understand the point you are making, and the absolute #1 key is to keep a backup. Typically, a RAID 0 is designed to utilize 100% o the disk space (benefit to you), but also to provide faster access as you are accessing the data across multiple spindles. (not really much of a benefit as far as music storage goes). Except maybe during backups...but that would mean your backup drive was faster and could keep up.

    I've had very good luck with hard drives over the years. I've used connor, maxtor, toshiba, seagate, western digital, samsung, etc....and i've only had 1 maxtor ever fail on me. I've never had on dead on arrival.

    Like you say, keep a backup. If it's important to you, don't rely on 1 copy of it. And ideally, keep your backup offsite.
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  6. Posts : 165
    Win10 Pro
    Thread Starter
       #16

    Ghot said:
    There comes a point when you have more things to store than you have SATA connectors.

    They do sell external enclosures with 5 or more hot swap bays... but they get pretty expensive.
    Hi,

    Sure, I understand that but some members external HDDs are humongous, 4-6-8tb and so on, it is not the amount I question or data stored be it games, films, music--whatever, it's the wisdom of putting all eggs in one basket instead of a nest of smaller HDDs/SSDs--say 2-3tb.

    I'm of an age when 120gb HDDs was considered more the ample, of course things have moved on, data larger, more capacity requirement but putting everything on one large TB HDD, to my reasoning is asking for trouble.

    I'm thinking of home use, not business.

    - - - Updated - - -

    ignatzatsonic said:
    I'd think the best way to not "risk loosing it all" is to have more than 1 backup..................regardless of the size of the drives.
    BIB, To true, not forgetting a monthly image---now I have discovered how unreliable system restore in Win 10 can be.
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  7. Posts : 2,487
    Windows 10 Home, 64-bit
       #17

    Jaylob4 said:
    BIB, To true, not forgetting a monthly image---now I have discovered how unreliable system restore in Win 10 can be.
    Monthly image is good....but I'd hate to rely on imaging at all for data backup, particularly when data is changing hour to hour.

    System Restore can fail to run to completion, but it can sometimes be a quick fix short of restoring an image. Windows Update has a way of turning it off and deleting previous restore points, so it's tough to count on it.

    On Windows 7, I used SR maybe 5 or 10 times a year, nearly always successfully. On Windows 10, I use it much less often...maybe 5 times in 5 years.
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  8. Posts : 2,068
    Windows 10 Pro
       #18

    Jaylob4 said:
    Hi,
    Sure, I understand that but some members external HDDs are humongous, 4-6-8tb and so on, it is not the amount I question or data stored be it games, films, music--whatever, it's the wisdom of putting all eggs in one basket instead of a nest of smaller HDDs/SSDs--say 2-3tb.
    I get what you are saying. For example, I do have an 8TB Western Digital USB external drive. The purpose of that drive is to hold
    1). Macrium backup images of my machines at home
    2). A plethora of ISO image files for different OS's and software.

    So, with respect to #1.....it's not a huge concern to me if my backup drive were to fail. Sure, I would lose my ability to restore back to a specific point in time, but as long as my workstation didn't fail at the exact same time....I wouldn't be out my data as it stands today.

    With respect to #2....i could always go back and get the ISO's again. IT would just be a bandwidth hit to download them again. Sure, I might not be able to find some older specific versions, but then again, I probably don't need them.


    For my data that I find important, it's backups that matter. So, for example, my file server is small. It has 2TB of storage space on a single 2TB drive. This is not the OS drive. It contains digital pictures (irreplaceable), some of my music I ripped (can be replaced), and some document files (not easily replaceable).

    Since I am using a single 2TB drive, I installed a second 2TB drive and I have a robocopy job that runs each night. It duplicates my actual data (pictures and documents), and it keeps a 7 day rotation. So, I have the files from Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday on the 2nd drive. This way if I have a problem, I have a few days to discover it and can recover to a known good point in the last week.

    In addition, I use 2 external hard drives that I plug in about monthly, and that is a robocopy mirror job that copies my actual data as it sites today to the drive. I try to keep 1 of the external drives offsite in case my house burns down. (my sisters house did).

    So, my important stuff is on 4 drives. With one stored offsite. It's pretty safe.


    I haven't had a need to add space because 90% of our pictures and videos now come from our cell phones. I pay for Office 365, so that gives everybody in my family 1TB of space in the cloud where their cell phones automatically backup. so, their pictures are in 2 places. If their phone dies, is lost or stolen, they won't lose their pictures. I trust that Microsoft probably backs up the data in the cloud more diligently than I would, so I don't worry too much about it in the cloud. And if the cloud DID happen to get nuked, I would still have the pictures on the phone.

    ^ I am considering adding a 1TB volume to all 4 of our desktops (mine, wifes's, son's and daughters) and use that volume to sync with OneDrive so that I have the phone uploading to the cloud, and the cloud syncing with the desktop. This way, if the cloud did blow up and lost everything, we would have a complete copy of everything. And I can do this on a small spinner drive because speed is not an issue. My internet bandwidth is the limiting factor.

    Jaylob4 said:
    I'm of an age when 120gb HDDs was considered more the ample, of course things have moved on, data larger, more capacity requirement but putting everything on one large TB HDD, to my reasoning is asking for trouble.
    Having critical data that you cannot replace on only 1 drive is asking for trouble. Always have a backup. If you are using a 512GB drive, have something big enough to back it up. If you have a 4TB drive, make sure you have something big enough to back it up.
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  9. Posts : 1,203
    11 Home
       #19

    @jimbo45

    These days yes of course I would consider to grab the 8TB WD Purple Surveillance WD82PURZ (7200rpm, 256MB cache) for 219 Euros inc. shipping or the 8TB Seagate SkyHawk Surveillance ST8000VX004 (7200rpm, 256MB cache) for 214 Euros inc. shipping, but I already own an 8TB Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004 (5400rpm, 256MB cache) that I bought many years ago and that, in spite of the fact it's only 5400rpm, still has a respectable 190MB/s read speed, and I can get it for only 180 Euros inc. shipping, so still 34 Euros cheaper than the cheapest surveillance drive. Not really worth the added expense if you, like me, only access the drive very occasionally. As for your comment about RAID, I would still need to buy a separate RAID enclosure like I said. Those are just far too expensive for what I need.
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  10. Posts : 11,247
    Windows / Linux : Arch Linux
       #20

    hdmi said:
    @jimbo45

    These days yes of course I would consider to grab the 8TB WD Purple Surveillance WD82PURZ (7200rpm, 256MB cache) for 219 Euros inc. shipping or the 8TB Seagate SkyHawk Surveillance ST8000VX004 (7200rpm, 256MB cache) for 214 Euros inc. shipping, but I already own an 8TB Seagate Barracuda ST8000DM004 (5400rpm, 256MB cache) that I bought many years ago and that, in spite of the fact it's only 5400rpm, still has a respectable 190MB/s read speed, and I can get it for only 180 Euros inc. shipping, so still 34 Euros cheaper than the cheapest surveillance drive. Not really worth the added expense if you, like me, only access the drive very occasionally. As for your comment about RAID, I would still need to buy a separate RAID enclosure like I said. Those are just far too expensive for what I need.
    Hi there
    You haven't obviously undrstood anything on my Post about RAID 0.

    On Linux systems you don't need a separate Disk enclosure/ Just read up on MDADM and it all works.

    Cheers
    jimbo
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