There are quite a few choices of brands when it comes to purchasing harddisks or ssd, but which one do you find the most reliable one? Personally had great experiences with SeaGate, but heard ChrisTitus had the opposite experience with them.
So curious to what manufacturers people here swear to and why? Which ones do you have the worst experience with?
If you want real data instead of feels, look at the BackBlaze report they publish every year. Even within a particular manufacturer varying models can have widely different failure stats.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2023/
buying tech products by brand allows brands to sell you a shitty product at premium price points. companies will always shit out bad eggs at times, and its your job to know which product line are bad and not let brand loyalty bypass that.
at the bare minimum, if you are buying by brand, buy it solely based on customer support, as some companies are significantly better at that than others, which is an objective trait.
I learned a long time ago that the manufacturer doesn’t matter much on the long run. They all have a bad model occasionally. I have 500GB Seagate drives that still work, and some 1TB drives that died within a year. I’ve had good luck with recent WD Red 4TB drives, but my 2TB Green drives have all died on me. I had a some of the Hitachi Deskstar drives that worked perfectly for years when no one would touch them because of a bad production run. I currently have a Toshiba 8TB that I had never heard of before, but seems to be rock solid for the last year.
Pick a size that you want, look at what’s available, and research the reasonably priced ones to see if anyone is complaining about them. Review sites can be useful, but raw complaints in user forums will give you a better idea of which ones to avoid.
Can confirm the statistics: I recently consolidated about a dozen old hard disks of various ages and quite a few of them had a couple of back blocks and 2 actually failed. One disk was especially noteworthy in that it was still fast, error-less and without complaints. That one was a Seagate ST3000DM001. A model so notoriously bad that it’s got its own Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ST3000DM001
Other “better” HDDs were entirely unresponsive.
Statistics only really matter if you have many, many samples. Most people (even enthusiasts with a homelab) won’t be buying hundreds of HDDs in their life.
With spinning disks, I preferred Seagate over Western Digital. And then move to HGST.
Back in those days, Western Digital had the best warranty. And I used it on every Western Digital. But that was still several days without a drive, and I still needed a backup drive.
So it was better to buy two drives at 1.3 x the price of one Western Digital. And then I realized that none of the Seagate or HGST drives failed on me.
For SATA SSDs, I just get a 1TB to maximize the cache and wear leveling, and pick a brand where the name can be pronounced.
For NVME, for a work performance drive, I pick a 2TB drive with the best write cache and sustainable write speed at second tier pricing.
For a general NVME drive, I pick at least a 1 TB from anyone who has been around long enough to have reviews written about them.
An analogy is writing everything on one piece of paper with a pencil. When you need to change or remove something, you cross it out, instead of erasing, and write the new data to a clean part of the paper. When there are no more clean areas, you use the eraser to erase a crossed off section.
The larger the paper, the less frequent you come back to the same area again with the eraser.
Using an eraser on paper slowly degrades the paper until that section tears and never gets used again.
In general and simplifying, my understanding is:
There is the area where data is written, and there is the File Allocation Table that keeps track of where files are placed.
When part of a file needs to be overwritten (either because it inserted or there is new data) the data is really written to a new area and the old data is left as is. The File Allocation Table is updated to point to the new area.
Eventually, as the disk gets used, that new area eventually comes back to a space that was previously written to, but is not being used. And that data gets physically overwritten.
Each time a spot is physically overwritten, it very very slightly degrades.
With a larger disk, it takes longer to come back to a spot that has already been written to.
Oversimplifying, previously written data that is no longer part of a file is effectively lost, in the way that shredding a paper effectively loses whatever is written, and in a more secure way than as happens in a spinning disk.
I thought you meant 1 TB as a sort of peak performer (better than 2+ TB) in this area. From the description, it’s more like 1 TB is kinda the minimum durability you want with a drive, but larger drives are better?
Afaik, the wear and tear on SSDs these days is handled under the hood by the firmware.
Concepts like Files and FATs and Copy-on-Write are format-specific. I believe that even if a filesystem were to deliberately write to the same location repeatedly to intentionally degrade an SSD, the firmware will intelligently shift its block mapping around under the hood so as to spread out the wear. If the SSD detects a block is producing errors (bad parity bits), it will mark it as bad and map in a new block. To the filesystem, there’s still perfectly good storage at that address, albeit with a potential one-off read error.
The larger sizes SSD just gives the firmware more extra blocks to pull from.
Assume your hard drives will fail. Any time I get a new NAS drive, I do a burn-in test (using a simple badblocks run, can take a few days depending on the size of the drive, but you can run multiple drives in parallel) to get them past the first ledge of the bathtub curve, and then I put them in a RaidZ2 pool and assume it will fail one day.
Therefore, it’s not about buying the best drives so they never fail, because they will fail. It’s about buying the most cost effective drive for your purpose (price vs avg lifespan vs size). For this part, definitely refer to the Backblaze report someone else linked.
