Quote from NudeRaider
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.
It is unlikely you would have seen sustained speeds of 200MB/s on a single drive. It looks like I was well over a decade out of date with my figure of 40MB/s, but this recent review is showing sequential reads of around 155 MB/s on a 4TB HDD: http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_desktop_sshd_4tb_review
Probably you should just go post on their forums and get their opinions; but if you do then be clear about your requirements up-front
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
The nature of these products is that the data is never going to be available until the products are old and not worth buying any more - although I do wonder if the published MTBF for the 3TB Seagates was lower than other comparable drives (which makes you wonder how useful that nubmer is anyway)? While previous HDD reliability from a company is a good guide to future reliability, this particular Seagate drive case shows that it really can't be 100% relied on - other Seagate models aren't nearly as bad as the 3TB one.
In short, the best you can really do is pick the drive with the longest manufacturer warranty that is at a price you find affordable. Adding RAID and other systems like automated backups can further minimise the risk of failure substantially, but come at a cost.
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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.
I've got a 60GB SSD (my old system drive), a 500GB SSD (my current system drive) and 2x 1 TB HDDs in RAID 1. Basically I went with RAID 1 because I'm lazy and didn't mind the cost. I have very little data that I'd be super upset if I lost it, although I probably should really back it up somewhere.
None.