Hi everyone, I am currently looking for a new hard drive to add to my media server and want to buy a 20TB drive. Now the question is what manufacturers would you recommend or avoid?
As far as I can see it’s either Toshiba, Seagate or WD.
Just one tech’s opinion but I’ve worked in storage for almost 20years. WD Ultrastar (formerly Hitachi) has the most consistent reliability historically. The current series of WD Gold’s are Ultrastar’s with a different sticker and often cheaper than the Ultrastar stickered version.
They are a little more expensive than their competition but worth it.
2nd Exos, 3rd everything else.
I can’t remember the last time I had one of my Ultrastar arrays having a failure. If my clients need to choose a cheaper drive on price I have tried Ironwolfs and have replaced a bunch of 10tb Ironwolfs a few 12’s.
In the consumer space the Backblaze drive failure releases are good to pay attention to.
Performance wise all SoHo CMR drives are pretty similar in the 7200rpm models.
LoL I’m trying to figure this out too. I found server part deals.
But I don’t have the whole setup figured out yet. I have my jellyfin media drive in just an external enclosure and is just an 8tb which is backed up (sorta not really) on a couple 4tb external drives I have that I copy stuff too and from. Don’t even have a backup of my PC but that’s cause it really doesn’t take much to re set it back up from scratch and I have a second PC running the proxy and stuff…
I’m definitely not the best at this and just accept that I’m doing more than average and nowhere near the people who have this all figured out.
Kodi & Plex are just ways to manage, organize, and browse a multimedia collection.
If you’re talking about accessing a specific server that has a large collection of multimedia on it, accessing it is fairly simple
Step 1: Have a friend who is hosting such a multimedia collection on their server Step 2: Ask that friend if you can have a login to access it.
To my knowledge there aren’t really any people hosting such servers that are giving away access to people they don’t personally know. Certainly not for free.
In the USA, you can usually find Seagate Exos X20 for around $270 for 20TB, brand new. Great drives with a good warranty. See if stores in your area stock it.
I went with the Seagate Exos X20. That was three months ago, and so far so good. A lot of reviews said it was super noisy, but I haven’t noticed much difference between it and other hard drives. It’s a bit more noisy when it spins up, but then it’s fine.
It just sits in a server at my in laws’ house and backs up the RAID array at my house, so it’s basically always writing data, but at throttled network speeds (~2MBps).
IMO just get whatever the cheapest one is of those big manufacturers. You should be running some sort of redundancy for your disks anyway, and disk failures are always a gamble no matter what you do to pre-emptively stop them. Personally I buy cheap refurbished drives and throw them into my RAID with the foregone conclusion that I might need to replace them sooner than a new drive, but I’m also saving so much money by buying refurbished that replacement cost will be cheap. Check ebay or ServerPartDeals if you subscribe to this line of thinking.
Edit: This would be sort of similar to “cattle not pets”, where you strategize for failure instead of trying to prevent it from failing.
Do they not still intermingle their stock? Last I remember, if a 3rd party seller lists a product that Amazon also sells, the stock is all put together in the Amazon warehouse. I’ve gotten counterfeit electronics even when it says “ships and sold by Amazon”. I’ve started buying from B&H.
B&H are the best. No Amazon-style marketplace sellers on their site (even Walmart and Target have started doing that). They actually know about all the products they sell. Their OEM hard drive packaging is by far the best I’ve seen from any store - I’ve gotten some from Newegg that were only wrapped in bubble wrap.
I’ve gotten some from Newegg that were only wrapped in bubble wrap.
You got the VIP treatment! I swore off NewEgg for 20 years because they packed 1200 CD-RWs poorly, which caused the product to be mostly ruined by jostling around in the box. They wanted me to pay return shipping or no refund at all for the useless product.
Good to hear they haven’t changed the shipping department.
Wow, that sucks.I didn’t realise they were bad at shipping even back then.
In my experience, Newegg used to be good but they’re pretty bad now. I only bought a drive from them because it was cheap.
ServerPartDeals’ packaging was good. They had the drive wrapped in bubble wrap, in a small box just the right size for the drive, then that box was wrapped in a lot of bubble wrap and placed in a larger box.
B&H’s was the best though. The inner box was exactly the right size and they used pieces of flexible plastic on each side of the HDD to hold it and essentially make it ‘float’ in the middle of the box, ensuring the hard drive never directly touches the walls of the box (and thus never receives any shocks directly). This box had some padding in it too. This inner box was then tightly wrapped in bubble wrap and placed into another box.
B&H also sometimes have retail drives for the same price as OEM drives. These are great because they come in a regular retail box instead of just the drive itself (so it’s pretty much guaranteed that it’s packed properly), and often come with a free SATA cable.
co-mingled inventory is a thing, yes, but i think you get better support from amazon for items they sell, even if from that inventory, if there's a problem.
I have data I don’t want to miss on mirrored WD red drives. Oldest set is from '14, but are more in sleep mode then active. (Also 2TB drives, newest are 4 TB, I’m not even close to 20 TB)
I’m personally avoiding WD due to their various issues. First there was the whole SMR thing where they were selling SMR drives as “NAS drives”, even though they’re not appropriate for use in a NAS, without telling anyone. More recently they were flagging drives with a warning just because they had been in use for three years: theverge.com/…/western-digital-three-years-warnin…
They make good drives and used to be the best, but as a company they’re kinda sketchy and I’d rather not give them my money. I’d rather trust the Seagate Exos or Ironwolf Pro drives since they haven’t tried doing anything sketchy like WD have.
Quick note - HGST enterprise drives are great but those fuckers are LOUD. I’ve had one in my PC for a number of years and it’s done great, pretty quick too - but I can hear it across the room.
Refurbished is the word. I got a Ultrastar DC HC520 (12 TB) with zero hours from eBay for 130€. I guess it was originally intended as a replacement but was never used then and just collected dust. So basically brand new hardware. Sometimes you can even catch one that has still manufacturer warranty. One i saw had 5 years left on it.
its a verified seller with over half a million positive reviews and a registered company in germany. so i am quite sure its legit. but yes, the possibility always exists of course.
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