HD Depression

[ronbo613]

Doing a lot of digital photography, negative/slide scanning and video production, I have quite a collection of hard drives for storage and backup. I usually buy another one or two every few months, but with the flooding/price increase, I've been waiting for prices to come down.
The prices are coming down, but the quality, warranties and reliability of hard drives really seem have dropped. My last couple drives have been Samsung F4 204UI 2TB units, despite the firmware flashing deal, they have been pretty good drives, think I got them for $80 each. I have a couple WD Green 1TB drives in my NAS, but I still am not sure about reliability on those, maybe I'm spoiled by the performance of my beloved 1001FALS Caviar Black.
Now there's only three HD manufacturers left; WD, Seagate/Samsung and HGST, I'm going to have to buy drives from one of these guys sooner or later. I've had good luck at one point in time with each of these manufacturers, but at this point in time, which one now?

 

[borisvodofsky]

Doesn't matter bro, it looks like all you do is put movies on them. This is all non-critical stuff. Use windows to spin down the drive when it's not in use, which will be nearly ALL THE TIME. They'll last forever..

 

[ronbo613]

Doesn't matter bro, it looks like all you do is put movies on them. This is all non-critical stuff. Use windows to spin down the drive when it's not in use, which will be nearly ALL THE TIME. They'll last forever..

Not movies, video files that are used to make movies; there's a difference. Also, more than 30,000 digital images that can never be duplicated or replaced. I take backing up my files seriously; there's more than thirty years of work there.

 

[TakeNoPrisoners]

You didn't mention if you had some sort of RAID based backup solution that would keep your data in the case of a drive failure. If you don't have one of those setups then you should look into it as the chances of two or more drives failing at once is extremely small.

I prefer Seagate drives at this point as their 1TB, 2TB, and 3TB drives all have 1TB platters which makes them quiet, reliable, and efficient. However I do not have as high standards for data reliability as you do so I will wait for someone more knowledgeable than me to step in.

 

[Revolution 11]

OP, if your data is that important, I hope you have two backups of that data, not just the normally recommended one backup copy. Preferably, have one of these backups stored in a different geographic area (maybe with your parents or siblings).

After having a Seagate fail on my cousin's computer and hearing all the other horror stories, I stay away from Seagate drives as much as possible.

 

[ronbo613]

You didn't mention if you had some sort of RAID based backup solution that would keep your data in the case of a drive failure. If you don't have one of those setups then you should look into it as the chances of two or more drives failing at once is extremely small.

I have digital photos and scanned images on at least five hard drives. Some in my workstation case, some in external enclosures and a NAS. These image files are very valuable to me, I'm willing to go a little overboard to protect them. It's "archiving" in the digital age. Not a big deal when 2TB drives were $80, more problematic now with the crap warranties and higher prices.
I'd like to get a couple 2TB drives for a Linux file server. Wish I would have got a couple more of those Samsung F4 204UI drives while they were still Samsung and not Seagate. I have a few Seagate drives, they've served me well, except I've had some problems with Seagate drives I've purchased in the last couple years, before that, they were my favorite drives. The WD Blacks are great, but expensive.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Disks are mechanical devices that are going to fail eventually. You can guard yourself against hardware failure by setting up a RAID array with drives from multiple vendors.

Since you have a large amount of data to back up, much of which is irreplaceable, you may want to look into using tape storage. LTO-5 can store 1.5TB of data on a single tape (more if your data is compressible), and while an LTO-5 drive is rather expensive, the media is pretty cheap and can be easily stored offsite.

 

[nk215]

Why not store them on the cloud? Use a reliable provider such as amazon and you can sleep easy at night. They are on the expensive side but if the data are that important then it's justifiable.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Storing terabytes of data in the cloud is pretty pricey. I just checked Amazon S3's pricing, and the annual cost of storing 2TB of data is $3,000 per year.

 

[KentState]

Why not store them on the cloud? Use a reliable provider such as amazon and you can sleep easy at night. They are on the expensive side but if the data are that important then it's justifiable.

That is similar to the approach I take. I have a 6TB NAS which is backed up daily to the cloud and then weekly to an external enclosure. I have a Synology which offers both Amazon and HiDrive as a cloud solution. HiDrive is $9/month for 100GB and Amazon is GB/month usage based.

Currently in my NAS, I'm using WD RE5 1TB drives and they have been very reliable. Unfortunately, the price has went through the roof on RE drives so I'm slowly replacing them with the Seagate 3TB ones.

 

[sgrinavi]

Aren't there pretty standard protocols for that? We used to run a tape nightly and once a week we put one in a fire safe off site.

 

[Elixer]

Doesn't matter bro, it looks like all you do is put movies on them. This is all non-critical stuff. Use windows to spin down the drive when it's not in use, which will be nearly ALL THE TIME. They'll last forever..

Nope, drives can fail at any time.

I know people who use lots of multiple USB sticks to do backups of some data, though, that is really slow, but pretty easy.

Best thing for the OP would be tape drives, or offsite backups.

 

[nk215]

I would consider 3k/year is reasonable to protect 30-years worth of work. Think about it as insurance and part of the cost of doing business. Heck, our cars is no where near that worth, definitely replaceable and nowhere near 30-years worth of work/effort.

 

[mikeymikec]

Hitachi GST is owned by WD btw

ronbo613 - If I were you, I would come up with a system for verifying data integrity across the backups. Comparison between backups is a reasonable idea, but I would add to that with some sort of verification system to ensure that, for example, the JPEGs are readable without decoding errors.

Does the old data need to be changed at all, or do all the files have ancient datestamps? Because if the data does get altered (files deleted/added/modified), then that's potentially the weak spot in your backup system, because you would use one source to update the rest. For example, what if there's a corrupted file in that one source but not in the others, then you've over-written the other copies with the corrupted version.

Until recently a customer was using a single backup that was overwritten each time. There was a document that hadn't been modified in years (according to Windows), but evidently during that time the document had become corrupted. Luckily there was an ancient backup that I had made during a machine swap with a good copy of the file there. Since then we've beefed up the backup system a bit so that there are many backups to refer to if necessary.

 

[borisvodofsky]

You say you take backup seriously, yet you don't have a professional disk controller?:\

 

[Charlie98]

These image files are very valuable to me, I'm willing to go a little overboard to protect them...

...The WD Blacks are great, but expensive.

If you are confident with your WD Blacks, even if they are expensive, there is your answer. The alternate would be to locate some used pre-merger Samsung drives off eBay or something.

Personally, I'm a Hitachi guy, but with smaller (500GB) drives. I have my irreplaceable data spread across 5 different hard drives and 3 different computers. Granted, it's not that much, but I can't afford to lose it.

 

[mikeymikec]

You say you take backup seriously ....

and insert any item there that requires a greater investment than the OP currently has.

 

[tweakboy]

Grab a WDC Black and your set. gl

 

[ronbo613]

Disks are mechanical devices that are going to fail eventually.

I agree 100%. With hard drives it is not a matter of "if", it's a matter of "when".

Why not store them on the cloud?

I can't really afford that right now. Using the money I have available to buy new hard drives seems to be a better value.

You say you take backup seriously, yet you don't have a professional disk controller?

My next large hardware investment will be a dedicated server with the ability to run RAID arrays and backup software. Unfortunately, disposable cash is a little low right now, so that project will have to wait.
I have used tape backups on some larger projects, it's a good backup method, one again, a little pricey.
What I've been doing is buying new hard drives, replacing drives in my workstation, then using the drives from the workstation in external, multiple drive enclosures. Most of them are JBOD setups, which is OK for archiving files. I usually do not overwrite old files, and it would be great to have some kind of verification software, but some of the RAW image files are a little tough for some mainstream software to handle. I do need to "clean up" my backup system, it's a constant project. Backing up files the way I am doing is pretty tedious, to be sure.
Right now, I just need to decide on which brand of hard drive to buy, probably 2TB. Like most people, I haven't had many hard drives fail on me, but the meager warranties offered by the main manufacturers have got me a little worried about reliability.

 

[thelastjuju]

Keep an eye out for used WD Blacks off ebay.

You can get a THREE year old used WD Black and it will still have a TWO year warranty remaining. That's twice the warranty you'll get with the majority of these BRAND NEW drives, on a drive that's three years old.

The higher the capacity, the more "green" the drive, and the lower the warranty offered = the sooner the drive will die.