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?
For hard drives Toshiba, though SeaGate would be my second pick. Fuck WD.
On SSDs I go on Wikipedia and look at a list of flash + controller manufacturers and pick one of those. (Samsung, Kioxia (I think), Sandisk)
SSD? Crucial.
They officially supported a non-standard setup I had, and they were totally there for me in a jam. Spinning rust I’ll go other names, but SSD is crucial-first. I don’t even care the cost.
I’ve seen L1Techs recommend Solidigm several times now. These are also often the cheapest drives around. If I were in the market I’d be having a close look at them.
With the very limited number of drives one may use at home, just get the cheapest ones (*), use RAID and assume some drive may fail.
(*) whose performances meet your needs and from reputable enough sources
You can look at the backblaze stats if you like stats, but if you have ten drives 3% failure rate is exactly the same as 1% or .5% (they all just mean “use RAID and assume some drive may fail”).
Also, IDK how good a reliabiliy predictor the manufacturer would be (as in every sector, reliabiliy varies from model to model), plus you would basically go by price even if you need a quantity of drives so great that stats make sense on them (wouldn’t backblaze use 100% one manufacturer otherwise?)
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.
