Hard Drive recommendations for data storage

[katz]

I'm looking to upgrade my backup hard drives, since several are getting quite old at this point. Not one to use cloud storage, so I just purchase larger capacity drives every few years. I'm looking at 10+ TB drives on the egg.

Trying to work on a budget, so they don't necessary need to be the fastest thing out there. I've used Seagate & WD for years without issues. Problem is, since I don't like to throw any data away, I'm up 6-8 drives by now the largest is 4 TB.

Any recommendations, suggestions?

 

[HCHTech]

Here are the Backblaze stats from 4th QTR 2020. I'm only buying hard drives for NAS units these days, and I stick to either Ironwolf Pros, WD Red or WD Red Pros, whatever is both on the compatibility list from Synology and also listed as "in stock" @ D&H.

 

[Markverhyden]

Yep. I use Backblaze stats as well for helping to choose a drive. Just be aware that many models may actually be obsolete by the time they have high numbers. But I mainly look for the drives to NOT buy, the ones with bad stats.

 

[katz]

Thanks guys - I had forgot about Backblaze.

 

[sapphirescales]

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I've taken to just shucking low quality drives. They're usually half the price of internal drives if you can get them on sale and you should always have a backup anyway. I bought some 14TB external WD drives a few years back for a great deal, shucked them, and used them inside my main computer. They're still going strong after 3 years, while the higher end WD red NAS drives I bought around the same time for double the price have failed. I even use shucked drives in my server and I've never had a problem. Performance isn't great but my home network is only a gigabit anyway so it really doesn't matter.

If a drive fails, just replace it. Then recover the data from the cloud or from local backup.

 

[HCHTech]

They're still going strong after 3 years, while the higher end WD red NAS drives I bought around the same time for double the price have failed. I even use shucked drives in my server and I've never had a problem.

The WD Reds would have been under warranty, then - hopefully you got free replacements. Also, isn't WD the one that started using custom PCBs without SATA connectors to thwart the "shucking" community?

 

[sapphirescales]

The WD Reds would have been under warranty, then - hopefully you got free replacements.

Why would I bother? They're just going to send me someone else's used nasty hard drive and call it "refurbished" while offering me some worthless 90 day warranty (or whatever warranty is left on my original drive). If they would replace it with a new one it might be worth it, but if I wanted someone else's used garbage I'd go looking in dumpsters for my next hard drive. No thanks.

isn't WD the one that started using custom PCBs without SATA connectors to thwart the "shucking" community?

I've only seen non-SATA PCBs on portable hard drives. No, what they do with the desktop drives is they do something with one of the pins on the SATA power connector to make it so the drive won't spin up. Thankfully modern power supplies (except for Corsair for some reason) ignore this pin so it's not an issue. Even my Dell PowerEdge server recognizes these drives, as does my WD NAS.

 

[Markverhyden]

I've only seen non-SATA PCBs on portable hard drives.

Yeah, they've been doing that for years on their portables. First noticed it when I was doing a data recovery on a Passport some 5 years ago.