Cheap 6TB 3.5" drive

[Goi]

Hi,

I'm shopping for a cheap 6TB 3.5" drive. I've narrowed it down to the following. Prices are in local currency (not USD)

Toshiba 6TB 7200rpm (probably the X300) - $279
WD Blue 6TB 5400rpm - $340
Seagate 6TB 5900rpm - $338


Leaning towards the Toshiba since it's considerably cheaper and spins faster, but it also has a shorter 2 year warranty (compared to 3 years for the other 2). Any comments?

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easy...a3a6fb011e783ae76a70f53cfb20INT&skuId=5792401

External HD from BB, either in-store (unlikely for you) or maybe you can get an overseas ship? or possibly someone to buy for you.

Crack the lid open, it's a WD Red (not Pro), 256MB Cache. Solid disk on the cheap.

 

[Goi]

I'm not in the USA, so not a possibility.

 

[kalmquist]

Hi,

I'm shopping for a cheap 6TB 3.5" drive. I've narrowed it down to the following. Prices are in local currency (not USD)

Toshiba 6TB 7200rpm (probably the X300) - $279
WD Blue 6TB 5400rpm - $340
Seagate 6TB 5900rpm - $338


Leaning towards the Toshiba since it's considerably cheaper and spins faster, but it also has a shorter 2 year warranty (compared to 3 years for the other 2). Any comments?

Backblaze doesn't buy many Toshiba drives, but their latest data shows an average failure rate of 2.07% for all drive models currently in use over the last four years, and a statistically identical failure rate of 2.12% for the Toshiba drives. I don't think that warranty periods are an indication of reliability of consumer drives. Drive manufacturers change the warranty period on their consumer drives based on marketing considerations. So with the price differences shown, I'd go with the Toshiba. The Toshiba should win on performance, and I don't know of any reason to believe it will lose on reliability. The longer warranties on the WD and Seagate drives are nice, but not worth anything near $60.

 

[Goi]

Backblaze doesn't buy many Toshiba drives, but their latest data shows an average failure rate of 2.07% for all drive models currently in use over the last four years, and a statistically identical failure rate of 2.12% for the Toshiba drives. I don't think that warranty periods are an indication of reliability of consumer drives. Drive manufacturers change the warranty period on their consumer drives based on marketing considerations. So with the price differences shown, I'd go with the Toshiba. The Toshiba should win on performance, and I don't know of any reason to believe it will lose on reliability. The longer warranties on the WD and Seagate drives are nice, but not worth anything near $60.

Thanks. That's good to know. You mention backblaze, I'm not familiar with that, do they have data on drive failure rates? If so where? a quick Google shows that they're a cloud storage company.

 

[Dahak]

Thanks. That's good to know. You mention backblaze, I'm not familiar with that, do they have data on drive failure rates? If so where? a quick Google shows that they're a cloud storage company.

Backblaze is a online storage company that uses 1000s of consumer drives. They usually have quarterly reports of drive failures on their blog

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/

Two thing I will note that should be kept in mind.
1 - The way they use the consumer drives is not quite the same way that average users would uses them. Meaning that they then to have pods full up to 46 drives, which may slightly raise the failure rates.

2 - When looking at failures look at the volume of drives as well, so if a Seagate 4tb drive has 1% failure over 1000 drive, this is a bit different than say a 1% failure of 4TB WD drives of 500 drives. So its not quite a apples to apples comparison. (numbers are made up)

But overall it does give a general idea. If you see a high drive failure rate on a low drive count, I may avoid those.