best deal on large (3, 4 or more TB) storage?

zCypher

Diamond Member
Aug 18, 2002
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So what's up in the storage world? I still have my 240GB Mushkin SSD for boot+apps+games, two blacks for backup boot drives in case SSD dies + some storage, and two bigger Greens for more storage and backup space. Total storage on the spindle drives is 8GB. I'm looking to replace all of those with 4GB drives some time in the near future. Right now I see a deal on 4TB WD Red for $199.99. Seems to be the best deal unless you go Seagate.

That still seems a little steep. I guess it's not thaaaat bad at $50/TB, but I dunno. What are you all doing for storage?
 

IndyColtsFan

Lifer
Sep 22, 2007
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I've been buying the cheap Seagate 4 TB drive to use for backup storage. I've got 3 of them (#4 is on the way) in a Synology DS413j. I would've preferred the WD Red but it had not been released when I started buying these plus the Seagates are $30 to $50 cheaper per drive.
 

thecoolnessrune

Diamond Member
Jun 8, 2005
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Seagate has continued to have the best $/GB ratio of all the big hard drives for a while now. They also have near top performance thanks to sticking with 7200RPM spindles. They have not boded well for me however with reliability. I bought 6 drives last September for my array (all 3TB) and had 1 fail immediately (less than 24 hours, still silvering the array), and the the second just failed a week ago, just a little outside of warranty of course :p

Still bought another one to replace it though. Hope you get a Taiwan drive. They have, in an anecdotal sense, held up much better for me than the Chinese drives. Half of my drives were Chinese made, the other half Taiwanese. Both failed drives were from the Chinese manufacturing plant.
 

fleshconsumed

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Feb 21, 2002
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Like IndyColtsFan said Seagate is cheaper than WD right now. Of those the ST4000DM000 4TB drive is the cheapest, but I've read reports that it doesn't play nice in NAS enclosures, no idea if true or not, this is just what I read.

Hope you get a Taiwan drive. They have, in an anecdotal sense, held up much better for me than the Chinese drives. Half of my drives were Chinese made, the other half Taiwanese. Both failed drives were from the Chinese manufacturing plant.
I'm in the process of upgrading my file server and I'm on the look out for the 4TB Seagate drives. Is it purely luck of the draw if you get Chinese or Taiwan drive? Or can I up my chances by buying bare drive or enclosure based?
 

thecoolnessrune

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Jun 8, 2005
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Like IndyColtsFan said Seagate is cheaper than WD right now. Of those the ST4000DM000 4TB drive is the cheapest, but I've read reports that it doesn't play nice in NAS enclosures, no idea if true or not, this is just what I read.


I'm in the process of upgrading my file server and I'm on the look out for the 4TB Seagate drives. Is it purely luck of the draw if you get Chinese or Taiwan drive? Or can I up my chances by buying bare drive or enclosure based?

Nope, purely luck of the draw as far as the vendor giving you the drive. Ever since the flooding, most of the manufacturing in Taiwan for Seagate goes towards Enterprise drives. The only way to be sure of a Taiwan drive is to get a Constellation or TeraScale drive. It's the same with the other manufacturers as well. Enterprise drives take priority.
 

fleshconsumed

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Feb 21, 2002
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Nope, purely luck of the draw as far as the vendor giving you the drive. Ever since the flooding, most of the manufacturing in Taiwan for Seagate goes towards Enterprise drives. The only way to be sure of a Taiwan drive is to get a Constellation or TeraScale drive. It's the same with the other manufacturers as well. Enterprise drives take priority.

Sigh... That's too bad. I plan on using SnapRAID with 2 drives dedicated to parity, but I would prefer to minimize my chances of a failed hard drive in the first place. I guess one can always go to ebay and look for Thailand made drives...
 

IndyColtsFan

Lifer
Sep 22, 2007
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Like IndyColtsFan said Seagate is cheaper than WD right now. Of those the ST4000DM000 4TB drive is the cheapest, but I've read reports that it doesn't play nice in NAS enclosures, no idea if true or not, this is just what I read.

To be honest, if it were critical storage, I would've waited and bought the WD 4 TB Red drives. I've heard about Seagate's reliability issues and even though I've not personally seen any failures yet (I have one 2 TB and three 4 TB drives so far), my first ST4000DM000 (purchased in March IIRC) had some bad blocks last week was acting strangely. I only use Seagates in non-critical backup storage now.

I've got a Synology DS413j that I'm using for backups and FWIW, the ST4000DM000 is on that NAS' compatibility list.
 

fleshconsumed

Diamond Member
Feb 21, 2002
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To be honest, if it were critical storage, I would've waited and bought the WD 4 TB Red drives. I've heard about Seagate's reliability issues and even though I've not personally seen any failures yet (I have one 2 TB and three 4 TB drives so far), my first ST4000DM000 (purchased in March IIRC) had some bad blocks last week was acting strangely. I only use Seagates in non-critical backup storage now.

I've got a Synology DS413j that I'm using for backups and FWIW, the ST4000DM000 is on that NAS' compatibility list.

It's not that critical, and with 2 parity drives I should be pretty safe. WD REDs are 50% more expensive than ST4000DM000 of the same capacity and I really hate how WD puts a huge premium on the same drives that have slightly tweaked firmware (blue vs black and green vs red). I do not want to support that kind of crap. And if anecdotal evidence is to be believed both manufacturer's have poor reliability record anyway so it's all a crap shot...

Out of curiosity, the DM drive that had developed problems, where was it made? China or Thailand?
 

Carson Dyle

Diamond Member
Jul 2, 2012
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What are you all doing for storage?

In my main desktop computer I have an SSD for OS and applications and a 1TB HDD for additional data.

I have a network file server with an SSD boot drive and 13 storage HDDs (6 SATA headers on mobo, plus an 8-port controller card). They're all 2TB drives. When I need additional storage, which will most likely be six months to a year from now, I'll begin replacing the 2TB drives one at a time with whatever drives are the cheapest per TB, probably 3TB drives.
 
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fuzzymath10

Senior member
Feb 17, 2010
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If it makes a difference to you, the WD Red is also noticeably quieter than the 7200rpm Seagates. However, I'm pretty picky about noise, and the Seagates don't produce an annoying sound (e.g. buzzing), just a whispery hum. I have a mix of Barracudas and Caviars and I haven't lost any yet, including a 1.5TB 7200.11 that's nearing six years old.
 

IndyColtsFan

Lifer
Sep 22, 2007
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It's not that critical, and with 2 parity drives I should be pretty safe. WD REDs are 50% more expensive than ST4000DM000 of the same capacity and I really hate how WD puts a huge premium on the same drives that have slightly tweaked firmware (blue vs black and green vs red). I do not want to support that kind of crap. And if anecdotal evidence is to be believed both manufacturer's have poor reliability record anyway so it's all a crap shot...

Out of curiosity, the DM drive that had developed problems, where was it made? China or Thailand?

I'm not sure where it was made. I'll be doing some work on it this weekend and will look.
 

thecoolnessrune

Diamond Member
Jun 8, 2005
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For what it's worth, I just got my replacement 3TB Seagate from Newegg, and it too, is a Chinese made drive. At this point it's still 3 Taiwan drives, and 3 Chinese drives in my array, with 2 Chinese made drive failures thus far in 1 year, and 1 month.
 

IndyColtsFan

Lifer
Sep 22, 2007
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I checked -- I have 2 ST4000DM000 from China and 2 from Taiwan. I believe the one that had the issues with bad blocks was a Taiwanese one.