Hard Drive Selection - Reliability, Performance, Cost

If it’s not already, maybe this should be a sticky somewhere?

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on my old server i have 3 https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B003VIQIBI/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 hanging off it,they are only usb 2[would they be fast enough with rock nuc or pc roon server?
are these toshiba drives reliable https://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-X300-Performance-Internal-Drive/dp/B013J7I8WM/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1496419381&sr=8-10&keywords=toshiba+hard+drive

Yep I sell these to clients.

would the usb 2 icy cubes be fast enough or do i really usb 3 enclosures

I use a Fire Wire 800 for my music library connected to my Roon server. It’s fast enough for Roon. I would go with USB 3 if you need the speed.

I use the ICY Cube to back up my media files to 4 x 3TB HGST drives via the eSata 6G connection. eSata 6G trumps USB 3 for speed.

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My two cents after building computers, RAID arrays, and NAS for over 20 years: if the choice is between cheaper drives in a redundant storage setup (i.e. two independent NAS servers) versus more expensive and allegedly more reliable drives in a single device, I would go for the redundancy. Point being that reliable HDD’s are reliable until they aren’t, and the odds favor two independent devices over one with more expensive drives. Of course, best case scenario is good drives in two separate devices for reliable redundancy.

I recall one time I was just passing an ethernet cable through my rack and over an UNRAID server, and there must have been some static discharge because all the sudden I smelled smoke and the UNRAID server had 2 failed drives - right at that moment. My guess is, those expensive drives would have been better for me as double the number of cheap drives in multiple enclosures, not all hooked to the same network node.

I know the conversation got more specific than this, but still chiming in on the general topic.

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Exactly! I do multiple backup solutions. Raid 10, Raid 1 and disk images on single drives that I just pop in a drive dock one a month to update them. Every 36 months I replace my drives. This has been working well for me and have not lost data since 2005 because of failing drives!

A couple of points, I have worked in data centres for years and we have no preference for Seagate, HGST, WD, etc. They all work well and are reasonably reliable.

At home I am using HGST 2TB drives in my freenas that are almost a decade old, migrated from my primary RAID box. I am slowly replacing them with Seagate Ironwolf drives, nice price and low power consumption.

For my Roon I use a Kingston 250GB SSD for the O/S and the NAS for music. As someone mentioned above, backups are more important than the drive reliability. I currently have at least four current copies of my music library at any one time. I have lost the NAS (ill-advised freenas upgrade recently), my Mac/Promise RAID array (screws holding the drive cage loosening over the years) and my backups (crapped out drive - old Samsung).

Oh, the difference between a consumer Ironwolf and an enterprise one is the warranty, not much else.

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You make a very good points @HTTP_404 and @Rune. However, I’m not convinced that RAID is beneficial in the home server nowadays with much larger drives available than a decade or so ago … it may sound great having all those disks but it can take an eternity to recover data following a failure. That’s why I prefer mirrored pools and a cloud backup solution.

  • Storage efficiency is 50%, but disks are inexpensive
  • Read performance is excellent
  • Pool is minimally affected if one disk fails, and recovery doesn’t stress the remaining drive near as much as resilvering RAID
  • Resilvering mirrors is really quick
  • It’s easy to grow a pool of two mirrored pairs when you need more storage

BTW, I use ZFS with Ubuntu Server and ALWAYS backup my data offsite. And, returning to the original post, I’ve had my best experience with Seagate and WD in recent years. Currently my preference is WD Red (retail.)
.

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The Benefit of a Raid is when a drive fails you can still work off of it while it’s rebuilding. I DJ and do radio so if a drive fails I can still work off of the drive. My Backups are single disks stored in a fireproof safe and offsite.

My point is that the benefits of mirrored pairs (think RAID1) outweigh those of say RAID5, which also can only survive one disk failure. The more parity/ stripes the greater the cost and complexity, and the likelihood a hobbyist will get into difficulty following a failure.

For the home user greater redundancy may not be the right solution; it’s not a substitute for regular or continual backups. It’s much easier and less stressful to recover from failure in a mirror … well that’s my experience anyway.

@Martin_Webster Thanks for sharing your experience… One thing I have learned through out the years is that “The Home” use has been missed used and missed interpreted… The home use in the early 2k is different than the home use in 2017… Now days consumer products are so easy to use that alot of this home base NAS run RAID 5 (Software) default out of the box… 8 out of 10 have a tech savy family member in their home. I have learned never to assume that because is “Home” that they have no need nor are capable of having/running such devices… I dare to say that 75% of professionals in America have some “sort” of home office, Something that back in the 90’s and early 2000’s was unheard of and or reare… Is all about the needs and specifications of each case which in this era can no longer be assumed :slight_smile:

With that said RAID 5 In home’s have put the food on my family’s table :stuck_out_tongue:
Thanks Buffalo and QNAP!
LOL
RAID 1 or RAID 5 inside of a NAS enclosure/software is not easy to recover, Not if you do not know Linux… Oh and lets not forget LVM! HA!
Bring it on Synology and QNAP! :stuck_out_tongue:

@Tech_Whisky_Lab I started with a Buffalo LinkStation many years ago and hacked into it to install Squeezebox Server (the howto was on SlimDevices.) It failed and there was no easy restore, so I looked for another solution and lived with that for a while. But so many things don’t behave as you expect … and lots a layers of redundancy don’t alway help.

BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! That’s the most important lesson. :slight_smile: Then test your setup … just like BA didn’t!

I can see why @jazthedj needs redundancy when he’s on a gig. But for most of us it’s about securing our data and minimising the inconvenience when something fails. An eight disk array sounds great but it’s almost certainly overkill.

PS. I’m sure I read that RAID5 is neither recommended nor best practice for drives of 1TB or more.

Going to keep a close watch on this since I’m setting up a roon dabba and I live in your city :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Hi. I was wondering what application you have in mind for the drive. Are you planning to use it primarily to store music/multimedia files that you will be playing back from the drive or do you mostly stream Tidal etc?,
I own very few files and only use my drive for bootup and drivers. I prefer a smaller but quicker boot drive like an SSD. There are several factors to consider, read/write speed is probably not going to be a concern. SSD’s have their own issues also; some manufacturers drive memory has less read/write cycles before failure than others.

This is general one! My Opinion regarding Hard Drives (HDD, i m not referring to SSD) use case.

I m going External as I see good use of it and also I see value in Roon recommendation for external.

I m thinking the HDD (or SSD not sure) should be of low on capacity, like maybe 1TB x2 is better than 2TB single HDD. Why? it helps improves access time, and also reduce wear - AM I right ?

You are right but you also increase your risk of data loss. Lose one drive and you lose all you data in a 1+1 set up. You would be better off with a 2 x 2TB mirror which would have the read performance improvements and redundancy. I personally run on a 6-drive ZFS2 array, I can lose 2 drives and keep going.

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Two general comments on this thread.

It seems obvious in a discussion of any hardware, drives and CPUs and others, to look for improved performance. But just because something can be measured doesn’t mean it is relevant, or even desirable. The speed of the drive for the music files is not relevant. The same with CPU, once you are beyond a minimum bar. Higher performance beyond what is required just adds electrical or auditory noise, power consumption, heat… We are in the situation, depressing for the industry, where we have enough power and we look for improvements in price, physical size, power efficiency. While at Microsoft, I was in discussions with silicon vendors on metrics like MHz per milliwatt. Faster – that’s like shaving a tenth of a second off the 0-60 time of a Tesla, bragging rights but when do you drive like a hooligan?

Wrt 1+1 drives: RAID is not suitable for our purposes, because RAID doesn’t protect you from data loss, very well. It does protect, somewhat, from a catastrophic loss of a drive, but drives do not often have the decency to fail like that. There are many causes of data loss: small hardware glitches, power supply failures at an unfortunate time, software bugs (in drivers, OS, application), cosmic rays (bring your laptop on an airplane and the error rate goes up by an order of magnitude), theft, fire,water damage, and the most common of all: fat-finger fumbles. Many of these will damage both copies. So you need backup anyway, preferably offsite. RAID is not backup. The purpose of RAID is business continuity, not data protection, and that’s a corporate issue. And since you need backup anyway, just use a single drive. I once read a review of one of those gold-plated, $20,000 music servers with optically isolated ports and multiple power supplies and copper plated casework, and it had four spinning drives in the case! Idiocy.

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While you correct on the importance of backups, drive redundancy and an intelligent file system will protect your data from most of the hazards you mentioned. With a zfs array with two parity drives and four data drives, I can tolerate and recover from the loss of any two drives. I also run weekly scrubs which correct any data errors that might occur from cosmic rays, electrical noise, defects in the magnetic media, etc. In order to lose data, I would have to have catastrophic failure (house fire as an example), but I could still restore from my offsite backups onto a new machine.

Yes. I do that too (Windows Storage Spaces with ReFS). But I do that on the content managing machine in the office, I don’t want all that stuff in my music server. And in hindsight, I wouldn’t do it at all because I still have to have backup, ReFS and ZFS don’t protect against fat-fingers or bugs.

Nothing wrong with the technology. It’s great stuff (I was at Microsoft at the time, it came out of my group, very proud of it). But it’s an enterprise technology, not intended for this use.

Anybody who likes this stuff, go right ahead.
But for anybody starting out, I strongly recommend a single drive plus offsite backup. No RAID. Not even a NAS. Keep it simple.

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