MillionVoltss Posted November 11, 2014 Share Posted November 11, 2014 Which models should i look at buying for a backup to pop files on such as media and pictures. So some people say Hitachi and Samsung are the best, but also most expensive. Seagate are cheaper, but don't have the best rep, is that still deserved. This would be the Barracuda ? The West Digitals GREEN are ok, RED better for a 24/7 system and Black more aim towards a HD with OS on. Anyway, what people recommend ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Praetor Posted November 11, 2014 Share Posted November 11, 2014 Which models should i look at buying for a backup to pop files on such as media and pictures. So some people say Hitachi and Samsung are the best, but also most expensive. Seagate are cheaper, but don't have the best rep, is that still deserved. This would be the Barracuda ? The West Digitals GREEN are ok, RED better for a 24/7 system and Black more aim towards a HD with OS on. Anyway, what people recommend ? for backup? buy two drives and do a RAID 1, minimum. Since it's for backup a WD Green drive is OK; Seagate have bad rep but interestingly i only had problems with the enterprise grade drives from them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MillionVoltss Posted November 11, 2014 Author Share Posted November 11, 2014 ok lets reclassify as Storage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason S. Global Moderator Posted November 11, 2014 Global Moderator Share Posted November 11, 2014 Synology DS214 + (2) WD RED 4TB = $635 (and peace of mind) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
francescob Posted November 11, 2014 Share Posted November 11, 2014 Absolutely nothing Seagate, Samsung (now rebranded Seagates) or WD Green/Blue/Black. Either Hitachis or WD RED (the least worst). Remember that the WD RED may need a firmware upgrade to stop that annoying obsessive constant parking of the drive heads that WD can't refrain from putting everywhere (and that many point as the cause of many of their dead drives). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason S. Global Moderator Posted November 11, 2014 Global Moderator Share Posted November 11, 2014 Absolutely nothing Seagate, Samsung (now rebranded Seagates) or WD Green/Blue/Black. Either Hitachis or WD RED (the least worst). Remember that the WD RED may need a firmware upgrade to stop that annoying obsessive constant parking of the drive heads that WD can't refrain from putting everywhere (and that many point as the cause of many of their dead drives). Hard drive preference varies from person to person. it's like the weird allegiance to SSDs these days. Personally, i have nothing against WD or Seagate. I'd avoid Hitachi with a 10' pole. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Praetor Posted November 11, 2014 Share Posted November 11, 2014 ok lets reclassify as Storage. you got a old computer? if yes then you can buy cheap RAID controller, some disks, FreeNAS/NAS4Free/XPEnology and you got yourself a homebrewd NAS. Even better, you can get a HP microserver G7 N54L + XPEnology with a better CPU, more RAM and low wattage consuming then a Synology. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
francescob Posted November 11, 2014 Share Posted November 11, 2014 Hard drive preference varies from person to person. I don't have a brand preference, they're all garbage to me. Statistics just make things clear. Statistically the only decent manufacturer was Samsung but they sold their HDD line to Seagate years ago so we're stuck with nothing but overpriced garbage now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Praetor Posted November 11, 2014 Share Posted November 11, 2014 Hard drive preference varies from person to person. it's like the weird allegiance to SSDs these days. Personally, i have nothing against WD or Seagate. I'd avoid Hitachi with a 10' pole. I had a couple of Hitachi drives die on me but they sustained 6+ years; on the other hand Seagate Enterprise drives are complete rubbish; every couple of months i have a dead drive, in average (Lenovo-EMC and Dell uses them for their storage and server solutions). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToneKnee Posted November 11, 2014 Share Posted November 11, 2014 Stay away from Seagate, ever since they merged with Maxtor (who were one of the worst at the time), the quality went down hill. If I remember right, it went something like this: * Hitachi/Maxtor (both pretty bad but Hitachi have improved a lot over the years) * Seagate were the quietest but not the fastest * WD reliable + speed but quite loud. Me personally from my experience believe WD is the best brand to go with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Praetor Posted November 11, 2014 Share Posted November 11, 2014 Stay away from Seagate, ever since they merged with Maxtor (who were one of the worst at the time), the quality went down hill. If I remember right, it went something like this: * Hitachi/Maxtor (both pretty bad but Hitachi have improved a lot over the years) * Seagate were the quietest but not the fastest * WD reliable + speed but quite loud. Me personally from my experience believe WD is the best brand to go with. That is also my idea, but experience also says that whatever the brand, having a good RAID solution for storing backups is more then enough and the brand wont matter much. Also the fact that vendors improve / go downhill over time, so what was true in the past isn't necessary true today. suprNOVA 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted November 12, 2014 MVC Share Posted November 12, 2014 "for backup? buy two drives and do a RAID 1, minimum." What?? Sorry raid is not a BACKUP.. If this is his "backup" drive I would assume that he has a working copy of the files on some other drive(s).. If critical hopefully multiple drives in different systems, with off site copy as well. There is no reason for raid 1 in backup, and to be honest I will debate the need of that in a home setup anyway. Other than hobby and techo babble word to amaze your computer illiterate friends ;) Because if you told me you were running raid 1, first thing I would ask is why? it is not cost justified in a home setup with home files, that better be backed up correctly anyway, etc.. So clearly your buying the beers with all that cash burning a hole in your pocket to waste on making sure your pictures on online in case of a disk failure.. Critical data requires multiple backup/copies - one drive failure is meaningless if data was correctly secured. Why would you have to mitigate hardware failure by running raid in a home setup?? Here is my suggestion - wait a couple of weeks. Black Friday and Cyber Monday is right around the corner - pick up something then at good price most likely. Brand names are pointless if you ask me.. What is the warranty on the drive? What is the cost per GB? As mentioned already no matter what brand you mention someone is going to say they hate it, while others love it - someone is going to come up with stats that say that one fails more often, etc. etc.. Who cares!! They all FAIL!! It is a backup disk in a home, its not storing data for trip to the moon, etc. Get something with 1, 3, 5 year warranty -- whatever you feel better with. And then monitor the drive via smart and other tools for any sign of failure. In most cases there should be signs, not always but hopefully you get some warning and move your files off. Or you just update anyway because now the 8TB are half the price you paid for that 4 in a few years, etc. My suggestion is get whatever is on sale and meets your requirements for size and speed, warranty. Don't look at brand.. It is what I am going to do -- I am in the market for a 2TB disk myself to go into my drive pool. But I can wait til black fri and cyber monday for sure.. MillionVoltss, Anibal P and DConnell 3 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MillionVoltss Posted November 12, 2014 Author Share Posted November 12, 2014 Good idea Budman and thanks everyone that took the time to reply, ill have a look around. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Haggis Veteran Posted November 12, 2014 Veteran Share Posted November 12, 2014 I was always told not to use Raid on 4tb drives (or big drives) as there is a massive risk of corruption and the risk of not being able to recover when rebuidling Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason S. Global Moderator Posted November 12, 2014 Global Moderator Share Posted November 12, 2014 So, Budman, what are you suggesting exactly? If i read that right it sounds like youre suggesting a single, large hard drive... that, to me, sounds like a single point of failure. Sure, there are multiple ways to backup - Cloud, Disc, Hard drive, but a single large hard drive sounds like a bad idea. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
francescob Posted November 12, 2014 Share Posted November 12, 2014 Just pay for an Office 365 subscription and backup everything on OneDrive? You get unlimited space now and they also allow changing the OneDrive folder position. That of course if you have a decent upload speed, otherwise it will take an eternity to sync. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted November 12, 2014 MVC Share Posted November 12, 2014 "but a single large hard drive sounds like a bad idea." He stated this drive is for BACKUP.. So who cares if it fails? He has his critical files on his C or some other storage, etc. It is a storage/backup disk.. Who cares if it fails??? Where did I say he should store his critical files on 1 disk? Even if he put them in RAID 10, that is NOT a backup.. Raid 6, 5, 1 any raid you want to use that has parity is NOT a BACKUP!! PERIOD!! It is a method of mitigating down time on hardware failure this is ALL it is!! Does his computer have multiple power supplies, does his computer have multiple nics, does he have more than 1 internet connection? These are all single points of failure - we are not talking the enterprise where if data is not available online $$ is lost every minute. We are talking a HOME, if his backup of pictures is offline for a few days who gives a ######!! Why would you spend money on raid 1?? Cost just went to 2X for 1 copy of the file.. I have my computers disk, and my backup disk.. I store/backup files to my storage/backup disk - do I care if loose my downloaded copy of linux flavorZ? So I keep this on my storage disk. There really is little in the home environment that even requires backup to be honest. You need a backup of pictures, home movies. Files you create, etc. Anything that can not be recreated is all that requires backup with DR. Everything else is just junk if you ask me.. I have a copy of install media, worse case I can get it again. My music library, movies, etc. All can be reripped - redownloaded, repurchased even on fire/flood/tornado/etc.. Now pictures I just took while in Paris -- hmm lets see I have these on my C drive, I have these on my storage/backup disk. I have these in the cloud - I should prob have a multiple copy outside of my house, etc.. But it does not matter if 1 copy is gone.. I have multiple other ones on different disks, in different locations. If I had them on a raid1 and the controller took a dump and corrupted the array - now what? What if house caught on fire? What if someone broke in and stole my NAS.. What if got hit with ransomware and all my files encrypted.. What good does your raid 1 do you then? What good would raid 5, 6 do you then? Raid is NOT a backup! It is away to keep data online when hardware fails - it has no use in the HOME.. The only raid that makes sense in the home setup is 0 - performance! Now if you have the money to burn to mitigate hardware failure so you don't have to re download/rip whatever it is your storing - good for you.. But I don't see the need.. I would suggest you spend whatever money spent on raid 1 on extra disk as another backup! Pay for cloud storage, mdisc burner and media so you can have multiple copies out of sync of your "critical" data.. When you give me an example of something in the home that requires to be online 24/7/365 or money is lost then we can start talking methods to mitigate all your single points of failure that could take that data offline - disk is only 1 part in that puzzle. If your spending money on RAID in the house - unless its 0 SSD so games load in .3 seconds your wasting your money IMHO!! Andre S. 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Praetor Posted November 12, 2014 Share Posted November 12, 2014 "for backup? buy two drives and do a RAID 1, minimum." What?? Sorry raid is not a BACKUP.. For what i understood this is for storing the backups. But yeah, RAID for large drives is a risk (MTBF is freaking high during rebuilds), that's why is said RAID 1 minimum, since the best is a RAID 10 for that kind of setup. Of course this is overkill for a home setup and a waste of money in redundant drives that will spend their time doing nothing and there are alternatives to that. I myself have a Drivepoll with multiple drives storing my backups in multiple drives AND the flexibility of having storage for other stuff. But then again it's a personal choice: some people will be better off with RAID, others with pools of drives. The important thing here is to have some sort of redundancy of the backup store, either by using a RAID / Pools or a second backup (another array, Cloud, etc.) and to test those backups in a periodic fashion. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MillionVoltss Posted November 12, 2014 Author Share Posted November 12, 2014 Guys, I was just after a large storage drive which i can put files on whilst I'm not using them, I don't need a speedy statup, would be nice if i can watch the media files ( 1080p ) from it though. Its not family photos, work / important. Just rather have them on hand then plug an external disk to retrieve them. Nas isnt what im after. Also, is there a Widget or Tray thingy that can read the HEALTH of disks / can warn, i think that would extremely handy to for reassurance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted November 12, 2014 MVC Share Posted November 12, 2014 I use https://stablebit.com/Scanner actually just bought another copy for my pc vs my storage box since I moved one of my backup disks to this machine and I was a bit concerned with this disk, etc. and its $15 to a company I think just rocks - Their support is nothing but fantastic.. Their current new version changed the way it reads smart, and I was having issue with my raw disk maps in esxi to my vm seeing the smart. I opened a ticket, couple of hours later had an actual response from a human, that gave me all the details I needed to get it working again - with detailed instructions, etc.. It has multiple alert features, I have it just email and text me. So I got an email like this Can do speech alerts, pushover, twitter, etc. etc.. Like a said wait til black friday or cyber money and sure you will find a good deal.. Not sure if 4TB is sweet spot for size currently to get most GB per $ Price the different sizes, 3 might be better priced per GB.. I will be getting a 2 because seems esxi and raw map disk on my n40l seem to not get along all that nice. The notification you got was for my 3TB drive I had in my pool. I could read data off it just fine but something was not right with the filesystem. Said it was full but it wasn't - was giving write errors to the log when trying to run chkdsk - so I migrated its data to other disks via a click of a button in the pool software by stablebit. Then wiped it, re did the gpt table, did a reformat -- but just couldn't get windows to see file system clean.. It passed all the tests, linux showed it fine - but any time windows touched it would show a issue with gpt in gdisk, etc. So I just took the 1TB disk I had in my PC that I used for junk files with this 3TB.. Everything shows fine on it now, smart is good, makers tests all show good - file system shows good, etc. So now just going to use it a junk and another backup of my pictures and home movies, etc. So what the hell got another copy of scanner for $15. But would rather have a bit more space free in the pool - so will pick something up here when the sales hit.. I am not looking for 4, but if I see any great deals will let you know. here is another notice I got a while back, I had this disk RMA'd it hit LCC of over 300k in like a year - and there was no firmware update. I was actual fairly impressed with the seagate support and return policy. Cost me $10 in shipping to get a replacement disk, etc. Email to support about the issue - and they at first suggested a firmware, that was not for my actual model. But after that walked me through rma process - they ship you replacement, you put the old one in a the box and attach the label they send in the box and you stop by a ups store. Easy Peasy!! Hassle free. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
suprNOVA Posted November 13, 2014 Share Posted November 13, 2014 That is also my idea, but experience also says that whatever the brand, having a good RAID solution for storing backups is more then enough and the brand wont matter much. Also the fact that vendors improve / go downhill over time, so what was true in the past isn't necessary true today. Spot on. I deal with consumers on a daily basis, and many of them think that once they have a backup, they will ALWAYS have their data. I try to make sure they understand about RAID and how this solution will really save them the hassle, time and frustration of not having a backup. Just pop in a new HDD if your old one fails and you're good to go again. Good stuff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted November 13, 2014 MVC Share Posted November 13, 2014 "RAID and how this solution will really save them the hassle, time and frustration of not having a backup" What? What part do you not understand about raid not being a backup.. I have gone over multiple points already.. So what happens when - "just pop in a new hdd" doesn't work because their controller took a crap? Or when both of their disks die in a raid 1, or 2 in a 5 die because they bought the same maker, the same model from the same batch that had a problem? And they didn't repair the array in time, or for that matter even notice that a disk has died in their array. What happens when they overwrite their file with something else, or get hit with ransomware that encrypts all their files. Or take a power surge and fry all the disks in the array.. What happens when the array rebuild fails and crashes the array because of bit read error that is very possible as the disks in the array get bigger and bigger and bigger. Your key word here is "hassle" yes raid can mitigate down time "hassle" of a drive failure -- but it is NOT a BACKUP!! And doesn't remove the hassle of having a good DR plan to ensure the safety and integrity of your critical files. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DKAngel Posted November 13, 2014 Share Posted November 13, 2014 "RAID and how this solution will really save them the hassle, time and frustration of not having a backup" What? What part do you not understand about raid not being a backup.. I have gone over multiple points already.. So what happens when - "just pop in a new hdd" doesn't work because their controller took a crap? Or when both of their disks die in a raid 1, or 2 in a 5 die because they bought the same maker, the same model from the same batch that had a problem? And they didn't repair the array in time, or for that matter even notice that a disk has died in their array. What happens when they overwrite their file with something else, or get hit with ransomware that encrypts all their files. Or take a power surge and fry all the disks in the array.. What happens when the array rebuild fails and crashes the array because of bit read error that is very possible as the disks in the array get bigger and bigger and bigger. Your key word here is "hassle" yes raid can mitigate down time "hassle" of a drive failure -- but it is NOT a BACKUP!! And doesn't remove the hassle of having a good DR plan to ensure the safety and integrity of your critical files. raid is justr a pain, i had setup a raid for my dad and low and behold boom both drives gone , hell if this guy is backing up it means he allready ahs the files elswhere so he only needs 1 drive, just go with what ever, it isnt going to make a difference, i just ordered 3x4tb wd blacks =] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason S. Global Moderator Posted November 13, 2014 Global Moderator Share Posted November 13, 2014 "RAID and how this solution will really save them the hassle, time and frustration of not having a backup" What? What part do you not understand about raid not being a backup.. I have gone over multiple points already.. So what happens when - "just pop in a new hdd" doesn't work because their controller took a crap? Or when both of their disks die in a raid 1, or 2 in a 5 die because they bought the same maker, the same model from the same batch that had a problem? And they didn't repair the array in time, or for that matter even notice that a disk has died in their array. What happens when they overwrite their file with something else, or get hit with ransomware that encrypts all their files. Or take a power surge and fry all the disks in the array.. What happens when the array rebuild fails and crashes the array because of bit read error that is very possible as the disks in the array get bigger and bigger and bigger. Your key word here is "hassle" yes raid can mitigate down time "hassle" of a drive failure -- but it is NOT a BACKUP!! And doesn't remove the hassle of having a good DR plan to ensure the safety and integrity of your critical files. your 'what ifs' here are completely valid, but also completely valid for a single hard drive. What if the hard drive controller dies? what if your house burns down? what if a power surge takes out the ext hd? same thing, right? IMHO - a single hard drive as a backup source is a start, but not a complete solution. we could 'what if' til next week, but i still think a single hard drive is the least protective backup solution. and i think we'd both agree that the best solution would be backups in multiple locations over multiple formats - cloud, disc, hard drive, thumb drive, etc. actually, come to think of it - what is a backup? perhaps ive been completely mislead and confused all these years... sorry OP - as per usual on Neowin we've got waaaay off topic! Praetor 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Praetor Posted November 13, 2014 Share Posted November 13, 2014 actually, come to think of it - what is a backup? perhaps ive been completely mislead and confused all these years... Now that can generate more flames than a philosophical debate.. :laugh: :rofl: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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