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Most reliable 6TB hard drive for NAS

L

Lil'John

Senior member
I need to get two 6TB drives for media storage (movies and music)

I will be streaming across a network. Potentially two consumers at once. No consumption on the local machine(rack in network room)

The OS will be on a SSD.

From a reliability standpoint, what is my best bet?
 
Wd red or hgst deskstar. Throw a dart and choose one. I like wd red because they're cooler and take less power. But you might want 7200rpm drives, if so buy the deskstar.
 
If you believe backblaze reliability surveys, you will probably want to stay away from WD drives, and RED drives in particular. If you want absolute best reliability, any Hitachi drive or Seagate 4TB drive will do, however anything else is a crapshot. You being in the market for a 6TB drive there is not much user feedback on those. If you want the best reliability I'd suggest staying with 4TB drives, otherwise just roll the dice I guess.
 
Everything is a crapshoot, and all drives fail. Some sooner rather than later, but what is that in the grand scheme of things?

Buy many hard drives, and keep your data in motion.
 
fleshconsumed said:
If you believe backblaze reliability surveys, you will probably want to stay away from WD drives, and RED drives in particular. If you want absolute best reliability, any Hitachi drive or Seagate 4TB drive will do, however anything else is a crapshot. You being in the market for a 6TB drive there is not much user feedback on those. If you want the best reliability I'd suggest staying with 4TB drives, otherwise just roll the dice I guess.
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lol. You must have read a different backblaze report than I did. From the report I read they rated seagate the worst. WD red drives are cool, quiet, and very reliable. Perfect for NAS use.
 
rchunter said:
lol. You must have read a different backblaze report than I did. From the report I read they rated seagate the worst. WD red drives are cool, quiet, and very reliable. Perfect for NAS use.
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You're looking at brand names and not specific models. WD generally has 6%+ failure rate across the board with WD RED 3TB for example reaching 12% failure. Seagate on the other hand is much more variable. The 3TB Seagate drives are absolutely horrible which pulls down overall Seagate reliability down, that's true, but the 4TB Seagate drives seem to be solid with only 3% failure rate which is half of the typical WD drive.
 
fleshconsumed said:
You're looking at brand names and not specific models. WD generally has 6%+ failure rate across the board with WD RED 3TB for example reaching 12% failure. Seagate on the other hand is much more variable. The 3TB Seagate drives are absolutely horrible which pulls down overall Seagate reliability down, that's true, but the 4TB Seagate drives seem to be solid with only 3% failure rate which is half of the typical WD drive.
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Yeah, I just realized that. I wasn't looking at individual stat's per model. According to their reports the 6TB drives are pretty much unproven with not enough data collected yet.
I've had really good luck (so far - knock on wood) with my 15 4TB red's so i'm kind of sold on them. I will keep adding more when needed. Since I have a 24 bay server case and I still have plenty of bays left I can afford to buy the smaller drives but for someone with limited amount of bays buying smaller drives might not be an option.
 
Please stop reading reliability reports from cloud-storage companies that use consumer-grade drives in a datacenter at far too high duty cycle as they have been designed for. You are betraying yourself by reading that crap -- it applies to cloud storage vendors, not to consumer usage at home. Those very likely would have totally different statistics.

WD Green 6TB is a perfect drive for a home NAS. Especially for ZFS. You would be immune to bad sectors as is a problem for all 1TB+ drives. Please read: Why RAID5 stops working in 2009.
 
HGST

i have 2 so far in R0 and ive been hammering them with file migrations to check reliability.
They are FAST!
I am getting about 100MB/s transfer rate on large files across my network.


Going to add another 3 after i finished hammering the first 2 for reliability.
Then going to have 5 of them on ZFS.
 
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It's too early to say which 6TB drive is the most reliable.
You can only try and see or go on info from other models.
 
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