My main storage drive failed today, warranty is just a couple months over, so I'm gonna have to buy a new one.

I'm looking for an internal drive with at least 3 TB. No set budget, but keep it reasonable.

Since I'm a bit disappointed in the meager 2.5 years my 3TB Seagate Barracuda lasted, I'm wondering whether I should consider models with a longer warranty or 24/7 certificate. Usually my computer is used a few hours at a time, or a few days at a time. On rare occasions it'll have to endure to run a week or two straight.
Is there anything else I should consider for my next drive to be more reliable? Aiming for at least 5 years, ideally more than 8.

Thoughts? Specific models to recommend? Are Intensos or Toshibas even worth looking at?

I wouldn't expect a HDD to last 8+ years. At least, not a high-speed one. If you go for a 5,400 RPM or 'green' drive with slower spindle speed, that'd probably up the survivability.

According to this article, you should go with Hitachi. Maybe the Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000.

This seems to sum up the development the last ~5 years:

It's backed by the numbers of the graphs and my personal experience. My Samsung Spinpoint F3 is still going strong, while the Seagate 3TB successor failed far too quickly. Heck, even my super old (forgot how old actually) 0.5TB Samsung is still doing fine within my old computer I gave to my family ~4 years ago where it's still used a couple times a week to this date.

Since I'm under the impression that speed is not an issue anymore since the 7200 RPM drives are all pretty close together across the board I'm probably indeed going for a Hitachi. Now I just need to decide if I buy 3x 2TB for a RAID 5 or a single 3-4 TB drive. And, if the former, whether I put it in a GBit NAS. Gonna lose roughly half my sequential read speed, but ~100 MB/s still good enough in most scenarios, right?

Anyone has experience with NASes or internal RAIDs by the motherboard controller? (No software RAID, that much is certain.)

You should consider getting a 1TB SSD drive for about 500 bucks. It's got much faster read/write speeds, has no moving parts so should theoretically have increased durability and longevity, and makes no noise as well.

Only downside is dollar per gigabyte is pricey compared to mechanical hard drives.

Solid state drives are to mechanical hard drives as DVDs are to VHS. Should completely replace them once costs come down enough.

Pretty much agree with everything. Problem is I need 3 TB or more. And with SSDs that would be way more expensive than I'm willing to spend.

If you're concerned about longevity, which you clearly are, and not so concerned about performance, which you clearly aren't (or you'd get a smaller SSD and make it work - eg renting cloud storage might be an option), then why would you ever consider getting a single drive instead of a RAID setup?

Personally I use RAID 1. Cheaper and simpler than RAID 5.

At 50 MBit/s my connection to the cloud wouldn't be nearly fast enough to get comfortable access. Also no streaming (maybe some can do that?) and no downloading right into the cloud are show stoppers each.


Because I've never done it before and I'm not sure what the best way to go for it would be, or if there are downsides I'm not aware of. I'm not even sure if my mobo (or any mobo for that matter) would be all I need. So any pointers in that department would greatly help my decision. Not to forget adding a RAID controller or a RAID capable NAS could be pricey.

EDIT: Scratch that last paragraph ... partially. Apparently mobo RAIDs are a deadly sin because of shit reliability. And software RAIDs tend to be somewhat unstable as well, which defeats the whole purpose of high availability. So anyone know their way around RAID controller cards? I'm wondering how big the CPU impact of the cheaper cards actually will be. If I need to spend 200+ Euros to not be disappointed I'm probably scratching the whole idea.

Which brings me to my other idea: Any NAS systems doing a good job at price, performance and reliability?


RAID 1 halfes the HDD capacity while a RAID 5 at most cuts a third, making it actually cheaper (unless the controllers are more expensive?) and is easier to expand. The added complexity of RAID 5 is what the controller is there for, right? Or are there also consequences for the user?

Post has been edited 2 time(s), last time on Jul 28 2015, 5:56 pm by NudeRaider.

So I take it no RAID or NAS experience on SEN? Yeah, me neither...

From what I could get from google RAID 5 capable devices are way to expensive.
The only viable solution I found is 2 of these shitpots http://www.computershopper.com/storage/reviews/wd-my-cloud-2tb (3 TB variant) and buy a cheap JBOD controller. But that's kind of a messy "solution" so I might end up just getting a single internal drive again and hope Hitachi hasn't secretly gone to shit too.

Not gonna rush the decision because I didn't find a satisfying one, so I'm still open to suggestions.

I'm using two 2TB Western Digital "Green" HDDs for storage. The one that I got with the computer is four years old and the other is two and they're working fine so far. Think you can get them up to 6TB now.

50Mbit is faster than probably 98% of people on the internet. If you really need real-time access to these terabytes of the data, sure, cloud storage may not be for you. But if you're archiving movies / TV series / linux distros do you really need instant access to all this stuff? At 50Mbit sustained download, you can transfer 10 gigs in 26 minutes. Allowing for overhead your real world speed could reasonably be 40 minutes to download 10 GBs. Or 4 minutes for 1 GB. Doesn't sound too onerous to me.

It depends on how expensive this cloud storage is of course, but since you *do* have fast internet, you should really consider this. It gives you off-site backup, access to the data from multiple locations, it is likely only going to get cheaper over time. You don't have to pay for disks that you should expect to die within 10 years and replace after 5. You may discover that actually you are perfectly fine with 500gb - 1 TB of local storage and you didn't really need all that extra storage after all. I know I've got several hundred gigs of TV shows stored that I may watch again in 2-3 years time, but I am starting to get a little low on storage space, so I'll probably just end up deleting them and then if I do want to watch them in the future, re-download them or perhaps I'll have signed up to a legal TV streaming service by then so it won't matter.

Short summary: motherboard RAID - avoid like the plague. OS RAID (Windows): good. Hardware RAID - way overpriced for your use-case and effectively has the same downsides as motherboard RAID.

Motherboard RAID - this uses special drivers for the RAID controller on the motherboard in order to talk to your hard drives. There is no (or very little) special hardware to actually perform the RAID functions and calculations; the bulk of it is offloaded onto the CPU. But the key thing here is that your hard drives have data in them that requires a specific driver to be able to read the data from. If your motherboard gets destroyed for some reason but your hard drives are intact, this means you need to install the hard drives into another machine that has the same RAID drivers in order to read from them. Nowadays the motherboard RAID is likely to be one of a fair few standard chipsets (likely Intel or Marvell), so finding a compatible motherboard should usually not be too hard. But it is an extra step you have to deal with should you ever need to do this sort of thing, and since the motherboard RAID is not actually giving you any performance advantage, there is really no benefit in motherboard RAID. It used to be the case that Windows couldn't do RAID (ie, Windows XP) so motherboard RAID was your best choice, but that is no longer the case.

Operating system RAID - uses a standard storage driver that is part of the operating system to perform RAID functions. Naturally 100% of the work is done by your CPU, but it truly is not a significant workload; any CPU from the last 15 years will handle RAID without adding any perceptible decrease in performance in the rest of your system. Windows 7 can do (at least) RAID 0, 1, 1+0, 5 and 6, so you don't need anything fancy to get the most useful RAID levels. The key difference between this an motherboard RAID is that the standard disk drivers in the operating system can do RAID. That means you can plug your hard drives into any other computer running the same operating system, set up the RAID volume and read the data off them. One limitation of OS RAID is that if you're doing it on your system drive, you can only do RAID 1 not RAID 0 or 5; RAID 0/5 on a system drive requires motherboard RAID as that has its own separate bios and basic drivers that are loaded before the OS is loaded.

Hardware RAID - uses hardware to do all of the calculations and management of the RAID volume, meaning your system has very minimal to nil CPU overhead when dealing with the RAID. This level of CPU overhead only matters in datacenter applications with high disk load; in your home system you are very unlikely to have these access patterns. HW raid controllers are expensive and suffer a similar problem to motherboard RAID - if your controller dies, then in order to get the data off your hard drives you will need another controller of the same model and firmware revision to read the data off. This might be fine if your controller dies within a year of purchase; but if it dies after 6-7 years, it could be difficult/expensive to find the same model RAID controller again, although I guess HW RAID vendors would allow backwards compatibility between RAID controllers to help avoid this problem for their customers. HW raid controllers are where you're going to get access to the more exotic RAID types, but of course you don't need these for home use. Since they're an enterprise product, they'll tend to have fancy management tools to manage the data and partitioning and access patterns etc, but again you don't need this for a home application - which is precisely why these are enterprise features because they're supposed to be 'value-added' and enterprises will pay the premium for the extra functionality.

I have no experience with NAS, but the very name for it - network attached storage - suggests you should only consider this if having your storage on a network actually provides an advantage for you. If you want to access content from several different devices on your network, is there another way to achieve the same outcome? If you have a 'main' desktop PC that is always on (or maybe your media center is always-on), you could configure your network to simply make the hard drives on that machine shared to other devices on the network - then there's no need for a special NAS. One advantage from a NAS that home users could find useful (YMMV) is since they're external boxes that just run storage and nothing else, they are easy to hook up to small and cheap UPS. So if there is a powercut or something like that, your NAS can keep running for 30+ seconds in order to safely power down and not damage the drives / data. Personally I wouldn't find that useful. Otherwise there really isn't much in the way to recommend a NAS for the average home user; you can get fancy data backup programs off the internet and don't need to buy a NAS to get that stuff.

Here's a no-nonsense white paper I googled comparing SW to HW raid, which covers other considerations I haven't talked about above: https://www.adaptec.com/nr/rdonlyres/14b2fd84-f7a0-4ac5-a07a-214123ea3dd6/0/4423_sw_hwraid_10.pdf

RAID 5 requires 3 disks. Say a disk costs $100. This means you pay $300 to get $200 worth of storage. RAID 1 requires 2 disks. This means you pay $200 to get $100 worth of storage. So yes, RAID 5 technically gives you a better efficiency for storage; but it also costs 50% more than RAID 1. Windows 7 can do RAID 5 and RAID 1, so 'controller cost' is not a consideration here.

Another consideration is that if you have 3 disks instead of 2, then you also have a 50% higher chance of a drive failing. When a disk in a RAID 5 dies, then the volume is 'degraded' and runs at reduced performance until the volume is rebuilt (a replacement drive added). If one of the remaining 2 drives dies, then you've lost all of your data anyway. You might think "how likely is it for 2 out of 3 drives to die close together?" but actually it is quite likely: if the drives are all from the same batch (likely) then any defect in production has a shared risk for the drives; if your house gets hit by lightning then all your drives could be fried together; if your computer overheats and that kills off one of the drives, then one of the remaining drives is also likely to have been damaged from the heat load and could die soon as well, etc. The rebuilding process requires all of the parity data to be re-built on the new drive; this necessarily requires many hours to complete on large drives, and induces very high read loads on the existing drives during this time - which can be enough to push a fragile disk (see previous sentence) over the edge and cause it to die. So you've gone from having 1 dead drive and a degraded RAID system, to 2 dead drives and all your data is lost anyway.

In a RAID 1 scenario, each drive can be independently read as a regular drive; if you unplug it from your system with RAID set up, and just install 1 of the drives into another system, that other system can immediately read the data without any special set up needed. In a RAID 5 situation, you would have to unplug at least 2 drives and put them into the other system, and that system would have to initialise them as a RAID set before data could be read out - not sure how long this process would take or if there would be any gotchas in it, but there is absolutely 0 special steps to take when putting a RAID 1 drive into another system. So if my house were struck by lightning for example, I'd leave my computer turned off and go out and buy a new hard drive, with the expectation that both of my drives are dead or damaged and may soon die. I would then plug the new drive in, and then plug in only one of my RAID 1 disks, and try and copy data off it - if it all goes well without failures, job done. If the first drive fails, I can then try and use the 2nd drive to copy data off. If both drives are fucked, then RAID 5 wouldn't have saved me anyway.

So in my opinion, RAID 5 doesn't offer a big enough benefit over RAID 1 to consider. There's no reason to do RAID 0 anymore - just get an SSD.

Post has been edited 9 time(s), last time on Jul 31 2015, 9:10 pm by Lanthanide.

Unless you're that guy that RAID Zeroes his SSDs.

Thanks for your elaborate post, Lanth. Though this is mostly theoretical information and ignores the flaws and bugs of the actual implementations it at least helps me in figuring out what I want, ideally.

I'll address it in more detail later. In the meantime any experience with RAID or NAS products would be welcome.

My experience is from RAID systems - motherboard RAID, where I had the above-mentioned problems with drivers, and software RAID which I use in Windows 7 and have not had problems with, and HW RAID, that my ex used in a server.

I'm not sure what "flaws and bugs" of actual systems you're talking about, but there is a lot of clueless lemming-speak around storage topics in general which you'll find in forums on the internet.

For example this. The level of detail he put into it suggests to me that it's legit.

I wouldn't wanna have to go through all that trouble with customer support. Not to mention, not all problems will be addressed that well by all companies.

Right, but that is for a specific NAS device, which as I suggested may not actually suit your requirements anyway.

I was mainly thinking about your comments up thread: In general I don't think there's any problem with either solution (although motherboard solution is more likely to go wrong / have problems, simply because fewer people would use any particular motherboard implementation). It's like everything in tech really - the farther you stray from the popular, well-trodden path, the more likely you are to encounter problems that (practically) no-one else has seen before. So in that sense, using any sort of RAID is more exotic than just using regular hard drives. But RAID in itself is still pretty mainstream.

It actually would. It's decently fast at 100 MB/s, allows streaming and directly downloading to it and I have 2 flatmates which occasionally access my shared files anyway. I'm also hoping to find one that does a cheap raid for me without needing CPU usage. Non-RAID NASes would make no sense in my case as I could just use Windows file sharing as I've done before.

However a NAS costs some performance and I'd have to find barebones that I equip with hand picked drives, trust the device to function well while being relatively cheap. This sounds difficult to achieve, if at all possible.

Getting an internal RAID 1 wouldn't be too useful for me as I could do periodic backups as before instead. That way I can keep my small backup drive that only holds the important data. A flexible, manual RAID 1, if you will.

A RAID 5 seemed like a good way to minimize wasted space and thus save money, while maintaining real-time redundancy. But the cost and/or hassle involved just doesn't seem worth it.

That seems to suggest that the cheap, yet effective way to keep my data safe, while having a lot of instantly accessible storage capacity would be what I did before: Have a data drive and a backup drive and do backups manually or scripted. But while I'm at it I could offload the backup drive to an external enclosure so it's not powered all the time and not tied to the fate of the whole computer should something bad happen.

That being said I'd like to steer the focus on one of the initial questions: Do I need 24/7 drives if the computer is running regularly for a few hours, sometimes many hours a day and occasionally many days at a time?

What do you need 100MB/s transfer speeds for? The entire transfer is only as fast as the slowest component; typical spinning disk drives can get about 40 MB/s sustained write speeds. So if you're copying data off the NAS to your HD (why?), you wouldn't get 100MB/s, only 40MB/s. If you're copying to an SSD then you would be able to achieve the 100MB/s of course, but why are you copying files off the NAS? Copying onto it I could see (especially when you've just bought it and are copying everything over), but you're also talking about 'downloading directly to it', so that would be limited by your internet connection speed anyway, which still isn't 100MBs.

It's only if you were accessing multiple different files off the drive simultaneously that you would need 100MB/s. Note that streaming a video from a disk is something on the order of 5MB/s, unless you're watching uncompressed blu-ray or 4k video or something nuts like that.

You really haven't properly laid out your actual use cases or requirements anywhere.

You could use Windows file-sharing on a RAID volume in your computer, too. You don't need an external NAS for that.

So far you haven't given any good justification for a NAS over installing the hard drives in your computer and sharing them.

If your periodic backups are not automated/scripted (and it sounds like they aren't), then a RAID 1 gives you something you don't have right now: reliability and consistency. And if you already have been using a system where you do ad-hoc backups, purely as a backup then again you should consider cloud storage. Just buy a single 3-4TB drive for your PC and sign up to a cloud storage service and do scripted backups to that. It will likely work out cheaper than the alternatives you're considering. This is why carefully considering your requirements and use-cases is important, because a full set of requirements can result in unexpected conclusions when they're examined in detail.

If your requirement is 3 TB of storage, than RAID 5 is more expensive than RAID 1. RAID 1 requires 2 drives of equal size, so 2x 3TB drives gives you 3 TB of storage. Cheapest non-refurbish 3TB drive on newegg was $89.99 = $179.98 for 3TB of storage. For RAID 5, you need 3 drives and get 2/3 as usable space, so you'd have to get 3x 2TB drives to get 4 TB of storage. Cheapest non-refurbish 2TB drive on newegg was $65.95 = $197.85 for 4TB of storage. So yes, price per TB is better, but you're paying more for RAID 5 over RAID 1, and if you requirement is 3 TB of storage and not 4, then you've spent more money than you needed to. Also to be fair you should also factor in the cost of the extra SATA cable for 3 drives


I think you're optimising for the wrong thing, here. Like I said, you should expect a platter drive to need replacing after 5 years - I'm not saying it'll be dead after 5 years, just that the rate of failure for a drive starts increasing significantly after that length of time. If you're not writing to the drives constantly, then I doubt whether it is 'on' 24/7 or just for days at a time would make any difference to longevity in reaching the 5 year mark - keeping the disks alive for 5-10 or more then the amount of time it's on could be a factor, but the storage space in that amount of time is going to be so puny that you'll want to replace it anyway, even if it hasn't died - assuming your use-case and requirements haven't changed (maybe cloud storage will be more convenient in your future?). Also I suspect power-cycling drives is worse for them than simply leaving them powered up all the time; an anecdote I came across once was saying there does seem to be a little trend in people who leave their computers running 24/7 for years without problems, then they turn it off for 2 weeks (eg, go on holiday) and when they turn it back on the hard drives have died.

Another thing you should consider - 1-2 terabytes of SSD space might be expensive now, but it will likely be affordable in 2-3 years time, and be much more reliable and faster than your HDDs.

Post has been edited 4 time(s), last time on Aug 2 2015, 5:26 am by Lanthanide.

I've carefully read and considered all you've written so far. But I haven't put up all the details of these considerations because I figured there's so many details it would only derail the topic, so I concentrated on the results. But I'll give some (non-exhaustive) pointers below.


Unzipping downloaded archives. Reading movies into an editor and editing it there. Copying movies or games over to a thumb drive. And more. Note how this regards only large files and thus read or write speeds at 150-200 MB/s have not been uncommon on my dead drive.


After digging through all the cons and pros just one remained: Cheap RAID 5, which I admitted I don't know if it would be plausible.


But also doubles my storage cost. Keeping an old drive as backup costs me nothing, and keeping a small new drive costs not as much. I might see this differently if I had forgotten to backup regularly and lost important stuff, but luckily that didn't happen. Might gonna automate it though.


I'm already doing that for the really important stuff. The less important stuff amounts to about 0.5 TB which seems to cost ~ $100 per year which is far more expensive than replacing dead drives. And a lot less inconvenient when I want to access it. And I don't feel I need the added security against total failure for the less important stuff.


It does seem to boil down to that, at that point.Automated scripted backups to my free cloud storage sound interesting. I will consider that. But not a paid one, as detailed above.


I need at least 3, but would be more comfortable with 4.


What I'm trying to optimize is disk life. And while I'm aware that failure rates increase exponentially over time why would it be a bad focus to try to find a drive that has a better chance of lasting longer? In both cases I need to put measures in place that account for failure.


This makes sense.


Yeah this also favors my current plan to buy a single internal drive now. As soon as I am willing to pay for SSD storage I would get that and use the internal drive as backup, possibly in an external enclosure.

At risk of erroneously correcting you, Windows can already do RAID 5, no different than a NAS RAID 5. NAS RAID would actually always be more expensive than Windows RAID – because of the additional component in NAS (the NAS itself) and the lack of any sort of additional components required in Windows RAID, of course.

If complete data redundancy of your entire storage drive is not necessary, then you are correct and there is no reason to consider RAID 1 over manually backing up your data periodically using a separate drive, since you don't seem to desire the real-time redundancy.