Thanks, this is useful. The 'editing of movies' is a requirement I hadn't expected, and that really does rule out a cloud storage application as the primary storage.

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 It looks like I was well over a decade out of date with my figure of 40MB/s, but this recent review is showing sequential reads of around 155 MB/s on a 4TB HDD: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

As mentioned above, Windows can do RAID 5 anyway, so this isn't an advantage of a NAS.

Sure, but from your original post, you talked about wanting a solution that would last 8 years. To have that sort of confidence, you'd really need RAID. But as discussed, I don't really think RAID suits your true use-case (wanting to minimise cost, while storing 3TB+ of data).

Yeah, I did a quick google for cloud storage and was surprised at how expensive it was; I figured it'd be cheaper by now. Amazon have recently announced a $60 annual plan for unlimited storage, with 3 months free trial, but that still isn't cost effective in your scenario. Now, if you were wanting to store 10TB, that'd be a different story.

Absolutely. But you're not really going to get any good data on this. Longevity information for hard drives has been notoriously hard to get; BlackBlaze have been the recent vanguard in providing useful information, but even then they're talking about data-center operating conditions. Incidentally from BlackBlaze, they found a shockingly high failure rate of 3TB Seagate hard drives (something like 40% in year 4), much higher than other brands. So I think you just got unlucky with this particular purchase (and 'luck' is the correct word, since the data was simply not available until recently). https://www.backblaze.com/blog/3tb-hard-drive-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.

I think that's how I'd go in your case.

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.

You really shouldn't trust a company that uses desktop HDDs in a server based high heat/vibration 24/7 situation. It's unfortunate because people will continue to suggest that these are terrible drives due to a company who doesn't invest in high quality products. Backblaze at least disseminates their data, but you can't expect desktop drives to survive well outside its designed environment. The fact that others do is pretty impressive, but not indicative of a serious problem with the seagates.

Another thing: home raid is stupid and you shouldn't use it. Its better to use cloud backup or redundant backups rather than a raid solution, as raid performance isn't all that useful anymore and decent raid cards cost more than motherboards. You'll likely have more issues with your Raid than with your hard drives failing. I have experience with the onboard raid 5 (currently running one because I have 3 160 GB hdds, and why the hell not, it's fine now, but very slow, I will decommission later) and onboard raid 0 (no issues again, but gave up when it wasn't helping me). As far as raid 5 is concerned, nobody uses it professionally anymore. Most use raid 10, raid 1, or raid 6, and even raid 6 has its problems considering we now have these ginormous 10 TB drives that take days to rebuild after a failure.

As far as cloud storage is concerned, I'd recommend separating important documents and non-important (I don't really care who looks at them) and use any of the myriad of free unlimited/multi-terabyte cloud backup solutions with a paid/more trusted cloud backup solution for the important things.

I'm also currently having a problem with Hitachi drives (They've released a firmware update for ~20k drives and expect us to update all of them...). No company is perfect, even on the enterprise level. Let's also not forget that Hitachi has the 20 GB "deathstar" line which you can just look at wrong and it will die. They used glass platters and had a tendency to shatter under heavy vibration.

I would recommend incremental backups and complete backups on multiple drives and in multiple locations. My router actually has a spot to put a hard drive in it for a built in NAS, and I have all of my ISO images on a cloud server in china (tencent weiyun, which IMO is pretty trustworthy).

I recommend buying the cheapest drive you can find for home use.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 3 2015, 7:08 pm by rockz.

I'm still not convinced the CPU load is also neglibile when running a RAID 5 instead of a RAID 1.

I've googled various reviews and found 3 where one puts my drive at 155 MB/s, one at 188MB/s and one at 210 - 120 MB/s (outside to inside of platter). I guess there's a big spread in the speeds or they just measure at different physical points of the platter.

Yeah, that's what I thought all along, but I wasn't sure as I haven't followed current RAID tech very closely and I would've been willing to fork out a few extra bucks if it made sense meanwhile. I'm glad you helped me be confident in my choice against RAID. (that's for everyone that posted)

That's my current focus.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 4 2015, 5:55 am by NudeRaider.

Fair enough, I don't know for sure. But it is a parity operation, which is not mathematically complex; only the number of them that it is doing would be an issue. But modern CPUs are way overpowered for every-day desktop tasks anyway, so even if it's "expensive" I doubt you'd notice any performance degradation, and that's what ultimately matters, right?

I've just ordered the 4TB HGST Deskstar NAS for just under 165 €. It seems to have good performance while still being geared towards longevity* at a decent price:
http://www.storagereview.com/hgst_4tb_deskstar_nas_hdd_review and http://www.anandtech.com/show/8743/hgst-deskstar-nas-4-tb-review/8
Only drawback seems to be power consumption which really isn't an issue in my tower. Secondary attributes like sound, vibration and 3 years warranty all seem okay and it even is 24/7 certified, which may not an advantage in my use case, but it won't hurt either.

* Though that may mean 24/7 operation, and not how many years it lasts. Only time will tell. Thanks to 3 years warranty I can be sure it will last longer than my last one, at least ()