Storage Solutions Hard disks running 24x7 : In your experience, what models last the longest/shortest?

deusExMachina

Disciple
I'm curious about your experiences with running platter hard drives 24x7 (like in a NAS for example). What models took the longest to develop defects/die? and which ones gave the most trouble?

Also, please do suggest good places online to buy hard disks from.
 
I don't have direct answer to your query here and many people suggest not to buy odd (number) size HDD but I still went ahead and bought the Western Digital 5TB Portal USB Powered HDD back in July 2021 and it was bought only for using with Raspberry Pi 4 where it is connected 24x7 and my RPi is ON all the time. I am having no issues as of now with it but then I have not checked health of the HDD in any way (no idea how to even check while it is connected to Pi). My usage of this HDD is just storing media files and downloading through torrents and consuming through fire stick / iPad over wifi network to watch the videos.
 
I'm curious about your experiences with running platter hard drives 24x7 (like in a NAS for example). What models took the longest to develop defects/die? and which ones gave the most trouble?

Also, please do suggest good places online to buy hard disks from.
One thing need to be made sure if you're running your drives 24x7 - ensure proper cooling/ventilation. This impacts the life in the long run.
 
I don't have direct answer to your query here and many people suggest not to buy odd (number) size HDD but I still went ahead and bought the Western Digital 5TB Portal USB Powered HDD back in July 2021 and it was bought only for using with Raspberry Pi 4 where it is connected 24x7 and my RPi is ON all the time. I am having no issues as of now with it but then I have not checked health of the HDD in any way (no idea how to even check while it is connected to Pi). My usage of this HDD is just storing media files and downloading through torrents and consuming through fire stick / iPad over wifi network to watch the videos.
Same experience, I didn't check for anything before I bought a 1.5TB seagate expansion external HDD and threw it together with a Pi and its only used for seeding torrents and streaming media. Been working since April 2020, I know seagate drives have a reputation for failing early but honestly there's a 5 year warranty on these so as long as you don't use them for storing important information you can get it replaced.
 
Keeping your pc on 24x7 doesnt mean the drive is spinning 24x7. His use case in the NAS is different, I would say go with WD, lower RPM and keep it cool and ventilated.
 
There was a time I had to keep running my desktop for 30+ days non stop and then it had 8 hdds connected. These hdds are still in use currently and no signs of wear whatsoever. Cooling should be proper and the psu rail current should be clean/pure.
 
There is no “best” long term harddrive that you could buy from Amazon. They all SUCK for this purpose. There is not a single harddrive on Amazon which is suitable for long-term storage. Never store anything important on a harddrive without a backup. Any hard drive can - and will - fail without warning, regardless of age, brand, make, or model. You can buy a RAID appliance on Amazon which is SOMEWHAT suitable for this purpose - it has several harddrives, and redundantly stores the data, so that if one fails (or more, depending on the configuration) you can just pop another drive in and nothing is lost (though too many failed drives destroy the array). However, such a system is still useless if your house burns in a fire or has a massive power surge.

BUT You probably already have the absolute best archival hard drive in the world, which is absolutely guaranteed to NEVER lose data (even if your computer is physically destroyed). This drive (which you probably already have) offers absolute 100% assurance of reliable data recovery “forever.”

Of course, I’m talking about Google Drive, or Dropbox, or Azure, or any of the many online storage services. You probably already have a basic account on at least one of these types of services (they’re free, and fairly generous).

You cannot lose data stored in these cloud drives. Your data is stored under pristine conditions (perfect power, temperature, etc) in massively distributed and redundant datacenters, in RAID-10 storage racks which are constantly and diligently monitored and serviced 24x7 by skilled professionals.

Your data is absolutely safe and secure. Nobody but you can possibly access it. It is stored in encrypted form, and only you have the decryption keys. Your computer decrypts the data as it reads it, and encrypts it as it writes it. Anybody who is able to access your data in the cloud (or in-transit) without the decryption keys will see only gibberish which is impossible to unscramble.

You can make these drives appear just like any other hard drive, with a drive letter and everything else. Performance will be reduced due to internet latency, but you don’t care about that if you’re just doing long-term storage. It can take all night (and it might), but you don’t care.

You would obviously not want to install a game onto an internet storage device. The game performance would be abominable.

If you don’t care about the convenience of having the storage available as a drive-letter then you can use one of the many online backup services, such as Carbonite. They offer the same level of data protection and security, though it is more of a hassle if you want to actually recover anything. They are really designed more for backups then archival storage. And those services are much better than using your own backup media, since your own media can still be destroyed in a house fire (or otherwise lost/damaged), and the long-term stability of your own media is probably doubtful (a DVD-RW, for example, is NOT good for archival storage; it’s not like a real DVD).
 
There is no “best” long term harddrive that you could buy from Amazon. They all SUCK for this purpose. There is not a single harddrive on Amazon which is suitable for long-term storage. Never store anything important on a harddrive without a backup. Any hard drive can - and will - fail without warning, regardless of age, brand, make, or model. You can buy a RAID appliance on Amazon which is SOMEWHAT suitable for this purpose - it has several harddrives, and redundantly stores the data, so that if one fails (or more, depending on the configuration) you can just pop another drive in and nothing is lost (though too many failed drives destroy the array). However, such a system is still useless if your house burns in a fire or has a massive power surge.

BUT You probably already have the absolute best archival hard drive in the world, which is absolutely guaranteed to NEVER lose data (even if your computer is physically destroyed). This drive (which you probably already have) offers absolute 100% assurance of reliable data recovery “forever.”

Of course, I’m talking about Google Drive, or Dropbox, or Azure, or any of the many online storage services. You probably already have a basic account on at least one of these types of services (they’re free, and fairly generous).

You cannot lose data stored in these cloud drives. Your data is stored under pristine conditions (perfect power, temperature, etc) in massively distributed and redundant datacenters, in RAID-10 storage racks which are constantly and diligently monitored and serviced 24x7 by skilled professionals.

Your data is absolutely safe and secure. Nobody but you can possibly access it. It is stored in encrypted form, and only you have the decryption keys. Your computer decrypts the data as it reads it, and encrypts it as it writes it. Anybody who is able to access your data in the cloud (or in-transit) without the decryption keys will see only gibberish which is impossible to unscramble.

You can make these drives appear just like any other hard drive, with a drive letter and everything else. Performance will be reduced due to internet latency, but you don’t care about that if you’re just doing long-term storage. It can take all night (and it might), but you don’t care.

You would obviously not want to install a game onto an internet storage device. The game performance would be abominable.

If you don’t care about the convenience of having the storage available as a drive-letter then you can use one of the many online backup services, such as Carbonite. They offer the same level of data protection and security, though it is more of a hassle if you want to actually recover anything. They are really designed more for backups then archival storage. And those services are much better than using your own backup media, since your own media can still be destroyed in a house fire (or otherwise lost/damaged), and the long-term stability of your own media is probably doubtful (a DVD-RW, for example, is NOT good for archival storage; it’s not like a real DVD).
Google and iCloud run OCR and AI based categorization on every single image and file you ever upload, without your permission, and sort them based on recognized objects/text etc. even if you opted out of it in which case it just doesn't show you those categorizations. Google's paid Drive for Business is more or less the most '''private''' cloud storage service. You can imagine how much worse other cloud services get. Can't run NAS software or media server interfaces off Gdrive or any free/cheap cloud storage solution either, bandwidth limitations, 15GB restriction without recurring payments and so on.

I really don't recommend cloud storage unless none of your data is sensitive or needs to be accessed quickly/often which is a very hard thing to achieve. Rather just buy a suitable hard drive and a cheap SBC.

You skipped over slow internet/ISP outages or mobile data in most locations making your stored data basically inaccessible, not to mention things like the AWS outage which can actually lead to data loss. These are more common than house fires lmfao

There's a lot of good things about cloud storage but hardly enough to make it worth buying a subscription instead of just buying complete physical access to all your stored data permanently for a fair price. Wildly overstating the upsides of cloud storage in an HDD longevity discussion thread is pretty weird lol
 
Thanks guys! got lotsa inputs.

@Decadent_Spectre Aren't the Ultrastars one of the more expensive drives. Seems to be or close to enterprise grade stuff.

@distroquerim Wow! 5 year warranty on a platter drive? I haven't seen that in a while. All the regular stuff seem to be warrantied for 2 years. Got a link?

@tech.monk I've heard of it before but atleast the 2.5" drives seem to be rated for 0-60C operational temperature as per the datasheet. I think (maybe it was in the Backblaze disk data) running them slightly above room temperature correlated with the longest running drives. Need to check again.

@JMP I've seen that data before but I wonder if there's a qualitative difference between what they get vs what we get from say Amazon India.
 
5 year warranty on a platter drive? I haven't seen that in a while. All the regular stuff seem to be warrantied for 2 years. Got a link?
My bad I stand corrected on this one, had gotten used to the Toshiba spinning rust in my desktop which turned out to be an old enterprise drive from 2018
Those cost a fair bit more than normal hard drives and I believe their warranties don't carry over if they're sold used which sucks but here's the list regardless

These do have 3 years of warranty so thats a little more I guess :banghead:
 
These do have 3 years of warranty so thats a little more I guess :banghead:
So, this is something which I found a bit odd. They slashed the warranty on the 2.5 internals from 3 to 2 years but retained the old 3 year warranty period on the externals (some of which use the same disk but with a SATA-USB bridge). Is there something about the externals that makes them less prone to failure?

The only thing I could think of is that externals probably dont' get used as much on average, so there is a delay on the curve.
 
So, this is something which I found a bit odd. They slashed the warranty on the 2.5 internals from 3 to 2 years but retained the old 3 year warranty period on the externals (some of which use the same disk but with a SATA-USB bridge). Is there something about the externals that makes them less prone to failure?
I don't really know the real reason but if one wanted to use the external hard disk like a normal drive, kept bare in a pc case with no extra protection or damping, they'd have to rip the drive out of the plastic body which by itself is irreversible by design and voids the warranty so it might have something to do with that.

The only thing I could think of is that externals probably dont' get used as much on average, so there is a delay on the curve.
This is probably the actual reason though lmao
they've also outsourced the warranty services to a poorly rated third party which i guess all comes down to making it cheaper for them while making it look like a better deal to everyone.
 
I know this thread is very old. My experience with WD drives are better than Seagate ones.
Have two WD drives , 1TB Blue and 2TB Red and a 500 GB Samsung 970 EVO plus for boot. The PC runs 24x7 almost round the year.
Previously i had faced many HDD failures, but after some research i found a small trick to increase the life span.
I have a dedicated fan for cooling the hdd. this tries to keep the temprature in check.
The HDD is one such part where the price reform never came. cost per GB is nothing better to what it was before 10-15 years.



WD Blue 1 TB
rd.red.2tb.png



WD Red 2TB

rd.red.2tb.png
 
From my personal experience if you buy enterprise drives and keep them under 40c in operation they will last a long time...I have drives conks off after 5-7 years which is generally the time they get replaced... Most of the times the drives are fine but anyways replaced due to criticality of data.
 
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