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So I am looking for some storage as one of my drives is flaking out on me. Got me thinking.. with Data storage so cheap, Terabyte drives are not that expensive..but are they necessarily the best thing to go with. I wonder if you'd be better off with a few smaller drives than putting all your eggs in one basket as far as drive failures.? Its easier to get one big drive, but have you ever tried copying a terabyte of data to a new drive? not fun. My failing drive is 750 gbs, and thats a choir!.
al
If you're worried about drive failures you could go with Solid State Drives which have a much lower failure rate. Down side is they are not as cheap as a HDD. Samsung 850 EVO is a really nice SSD, I run 2 of these in RAID and no problems in 3 years of owning them. The 1TB Samsung 850 EVO is $318 on newegg.com. Speeds are much faster on an SSD so transferring a large amount of data after it's moved to the SSD should never be a problem after. I have a 4TB HDD Drive that I use for storage that also has never failed on me in it's 4 year service. If money isn't a problem SSD is the way to go but if money is an issue an HDD is a good option.
I rather get a cheaper hdd and create a multiple clone if data is critical. Never use SSD drive as your main storage because in my experience working in IT department recovering data is difficult.
Found an interesting article from a Data Storage company, BackBlaze... They documented their drive failure rates with the MFG they work with.
Attachment 100535
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...stats-q1-2016/
Failure rates for Seagate and Western digital are pretty high.
Of course these are HDs that used constantly..I wish there was data out there on External Hds that you store your data on , unplug and don't use for months. With moving parts I wonder if they are negatively affected.
al
Al, this might be an excellent question to ask on a photography forum. I will be interested in your final choice as I need another external myself.
Pat
I use a Buffalo storage network addressable storage (NAS) unit. I believe they are Toshiba Hard drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822165535
I have 2 x 2TB drives in it and they are mirrored (RAID 1) so if I lose one I can swap it out. I believe they are Toshiba drives inside but I really don't know. I have it powered by a Battery backup UPS with a automatic shutdown of the disk array in case of an extended power outage. It's a bit pricey but I have my research and dissertation files on it (along with some cloud storage redundancy) just in case. Every family member has a directory mapped to it and they also use it to store files. It is accessible over the web but I have that disabled as I'm a bit of a security worry wart. I've had it for 2 years and it's been great. It's pretty fast for an NAS actually. I ran cat5 throughout my house when I built it, so most everything is hardwired at 100/1000mpbs. Even over wireless (AC) it's pretty quick.
We use a bigger but similar system in our Fine Arts Lab at the College and the students use it to keep their large graphics files accessible for the faculty to grade. We haven't had any problems with them.
At my desk at work I use a 2TB Lacie external drive for backup purposes and it's been rock solid for years.
Adam
Another thought on solid state drives: realize that SSDs have a physical write limit to them. The manufacturers usually state the upper limit of writes and they are pretty high and would likely outlast a platter depending on what you do with them. The very best drives survive torture tests up to 1.5 Petabytes of data that are written/rewritten to them - which is way over the manufacturers stated limits - before they fail.
Most consumer models will fail after writing 600-800 terabytes to them. Most users would write no more than a few terabytes per year. Even 100TB worth of writing and rewriting is far more endurance than the typical consumer needs. I don't know about photography. If you copy thousands of RAW images to the drive and then delete them and copy thousands more over and over - it is conceivable that you could run up against the write limit. The SMART technology will mark bad cells and protect data but eventually the drive will literally just die.
The limit is a real limit but it's practically not an issue for a consumer.
Adam
Hey Adam,
Thanks For the info there.. I was leaning towards setting up a raid here ...that plus turning one of my old computers into a linux server.
Hope that PhD is going well! Say hi to Mary for me!
al
More would always be safer as far as loss prevention goes. And to be honest, if I went multiple route as I usually do If one does crash on me I'm likely to just destroy the drive rather than try to recover it. It would not be worth the hassle of paying for recovery or the headaches involved if I have the same data stored somewhere else. I'd rather just buy a new drive especially with their prices constantly dropping. I've personally had more Seagates fail on me than WD so I have used WD strictly for my external and internal HDD since and been happy. SSDs are the only time jump from the WD brand and that is to strictly Samsung.
If I could ever find some extra money laying around not being put into other hobbies I'd build myself a home file server or NAS system with WD Reds in a rack system with a UPS. It's a dream at the moment but I'm always on the lookout for used racks and server chassis to build in. Push comes to shove I have an old PC case large enough for the server.
I love my SSDs, I have more SSDs than I do HDDs (though not really for storage and some laying dormant at the moment). Super fast and quiet. They are becoming more durable and cheaper so they are becoming a more viable option but as pointed out they have a write limit to them if you ever think you will reach it. They also take far less physical space for storage, super easy to stick in a safe deposit box, fire safe box, etc or something like that. I want more actually LOL. My current working list of drives are as follows:
Samsung EVO 850 SSD 120GB - Computer Boot Drive
Samsung EVO 850 SSD 120GB - Computer Application Drive (Photoshop, Lightroom, Premiere Pro, etc)
Samsung EVO 850 SSD 500GB - Computer Applications/Games Drive
Western Digital Black 2TB - Computer Storage
Western Digital My Book External 1TB - Onsite File Storage
Western Digital My Book External 4TB - Offsite File Storage
Computer wise the next logical choice is to get an M2 once prices come down lol, lightning speed.
PhD is going - I'm not sure any PhD candidate would say it goes well... All of my course work is done and I'm about to go into dissertation and have no life at all for a year or two.Quote:
Originally Posted by brewmaster15
I had a Linux server in the basement for years with a bunch of old hard drives in it. I used a great product called FreeNAS (http://www.freenas.org/). I had an old really small drive (I think 40GB) that I used to run the OS and the rest were RAIDed drives. Every time I recycled a drive I stuck it in the case - so I fully expected them to fail but actually none of them did.
It's really a great product and provides lots of cool features from a free open source product. You can actually run the OS off a USB key if the bios can boot from the USB device. Then - everything in the PC is just storage. I ran that for years for the family but wanted something that was plug an play while I gutted through the PhD process.
I stop by here every now and then - and drool over the fish. Just a matter of time for me!
Adam
Thanks Adam,
That was one option I was strongly considering FreeNAS to do much like you did.:) I am a computer pack rat and have boxes of drives and old machines here doing nothing.
Matt, Seagate have been terrible for me. They make great paper weights though.:evilgrin: Seriously though, I look at SSD 's all the time....The only hang ups are the price and I still don't trust them completely. They still are really "new" technology and They are still trying to understand what affects their failure rates. They are more susceptible to temperature for example. I looked for tech papers on failure rates and came across this one...https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pu...gmetrics15.pdf ( very technical) , but this summarizes some of it in less" eyes glazing over and brain hurting " text.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebooks-ssd-experience/
al
Al, one of the reasons for the high Seagate failures was a 3TB drive that had miserable performance. Take those numbers out and Seagate approaches Hitachi.
As many above have noted, redundancy is the key. It is fine to have all your eggs in one basket if you have two or three identical baskets.
I have used a Drobo 5D for five years. It initially had 5 Seagate Barracuda 2TB drives, which is now filled. I am in the process of changing to 5 Seagate Enterprise 4TB drives. The nice thing is that you can just one by one "hot swap" them out. Yes Drobo has detractors because of it's proprietary RAID system and some complain about Drobo service. I have had no issues and have found them very helpful with any questions I have had.
Still I have a second complete copy of all that data stored at one of my kids house.
Then there is always this: http://ledgergazette.com/seagate-lau...vealed/114225/
Free NAS would be my choice when/if I go server/storage machine type of route. From what I read it's the best to use when doing this and not going with something like a Drobo.
I just have to wonder, that article second link was written a year ago. Obviously the study it's referring to sometime before that. You have to wonder if they've gotten better. In my experience they have, though over a number of years not just this one. I had some of the first OCZ Vertex branded SSDs out there on the market and they don't even hold a candle to these newer Samsung ones. And even within the Samsung brand, IMO the 850s are better than the 840s they replaced. One of the selling points of their Pro models is a longer life span too. I think the tech is getting there, it's a process. However with the introduction of the M2 drive I feel like SSDs might not ever become the same standard as normal HDDs are for external storage. It's only a matter of time before someone makes a viable external M2 drive (they are already putting them on video cards for dedicated onboard storage). I guess the only thing holding it back are transfer speeds through USB 3.1 vs PCIe lanes.
I want to like Seagate, they just haven't gained my trust back yet after having multiple of their drives fail on me.
Have to agree with you Matt, Seagates have been terrible for me.. I have three paperweight SATAs here right now and my failing drive that started this thread is a seagate.:( nothing like 750 gbs of Music on the brink of extinction to make you rethink your storage( except maybe if it was photos :) )
On the SSD's one thing I gleaned from the tech article is there is an improvement over the newer generation SSD and the first generation SSDs... so its moving in the right direction. I should also point out that the article is based on the more enterprise Drives, not the drives often encountered by us...http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebooks-ssd-experience/ which makes me wonder does that imply the non-enterprise SSDs may have a greater failure Rate... I haven't found anything out on that yet.Quote:
Unlike you, Facebook also favors maximum capacity enterprise SSDs: the most recent generation is 3.2TB. These aren't 35¢/GB SATA notebook drives, but over-provisioned PCIe SSDs, designed for high duty cycles.
Have you considered cloud storage? Amazon S3 offers extremely attractive rates:
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/