What's the Biggest Hard Drive You Have (and regularly use)?

[Sir Topham Hatt]

I generally have stuck to 2TB drives just in case of loss but out of the 6 or 7 I have, none have actually failed.

I wonder if 4TB is now quite safe and popular.

Pick the closest to you, 1TB is anything between 1TB and less than 2TB and so on...

[Xenon]

I use 4 Seagate 16TB HDD Exos X16 7200 RPM 512e/4Kn SATA 6Gb/s 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch Hard Drives for work. Two for actual use and Two as backup. Home I have a couple of 1TBs and a 2TB.

[+Warwagon MVC]

14TB .. new purchase, got it last year... it's on 24/7

[+Raze Subscriber²]

2 x WD Red 10TB NAS Hard Disk Drives - WD100EFAX in a Synology 2 Bay NAS DiskStation DS220+.

 

[Brandon H Supervisor]

I don't have anything on HDDs right now; all my media is SSD or flash

[+Jester124 Subscriber²]

Currently have 8TB drives powering my media center, but have a 10TB on its way to going them as I transition one of them to a household file share drive.

[Sir Topham Hatt]

Wow, even though it's early days, I am surprised 4TB seems quite low compared with others.

Perhaps bigger and less in number is the way to go  

[+Jester124 Subscriber²]

On 04/01/2022 at 15:23, Sir Topham Hatt said:

Wow, even though it's early days, I am surprised 4TB seems quite low compared with others.

Perhaps bigger and less in number is the way to go  

I would say if you are worried about possible data loss, building a small RAID setup is pretty cheap now days. you get size and security.

[Michael Scrip]

I had four 8TB WD Red drives in my Synology NAS.  But three out of those four have now been replaced with 16TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives.  A fourth 16TB is inevitable.

 

And I also have a 18TB WD MyBook as another backup drive.

[Mindovermaster Moderator]

I have 3 x 3TB. Not currently using it, but..

[ThaCrip]

5TB HGST

 

I got that in August 2016 for $179.99 which basically makes it I think the 2nd most expensive hard drive I ever bought as I think the most expensive one I had was a 80GB Maxtor back around 22 years ago off the top of my head. but I don't remember exactly what I paid for it but I want to say at least $200+, but it might have been closer to $300, which was a mistake to spend that much. but when your younger your a little unwise ; but I think in terms of hard drive prices in general it seems the sweet spot is $130 TOPS (although $90-130 is more typical) as even today I can't see spending more than the high $1xx range TOPS.

 

that 5TB_HGST along with a 4TB_Seagate/2TB_Hitachi are basically inside my primary PC (along with a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB SSD as boot drive) which is powered on pretty much 24/7 short of occasional reboots or power downs to blow the dust out of it etc. so naturally they see the most usage.

 

but damn, I can't believe I already had that 5TB HGST hard drive for more than 5 years already, time flies. but for the price I paid I had better get at least 10+ years out of it (I think it's been pretty much powered on just about all of the time since I got it given the 'Disks' on Linux Mint shows 5 years 4 months and 7 days of 'power-on hours' (my 4GB_Seagate is powered on for 3 years and 9 days but I know this is older as for a while it was not powered on all of the time)). but given my general luck with hard drives in the past there is a good chance it will happen as I only had two hard drives ever die on me basically which is a 40GB IBM (I think it was referred to as the 'Deathstar') and a 80GB Maxtor (the one I paid a arm-and-a-leg for back around 22 years ago, but thankfully it lasted a rather long time as at one point I was using it on my original moded XBox console).

 

but I do have a fair amount of external HDD's (but are basically internal hard drives)... 2TB_Samsung/1TB_Samsung and a fair amount of smaller hard drives (500GB and smaller) of the 2.5" and 3.5" variety (all which I connect from time-to-time through a USB 3 docking station as I just slide the 2.5" or 3.5" HDD's into it and power it up). but those 1TB/2TB Samsung HDD's are the oldest I have of 1TB or larger as those used to see 24/7 usage for years (these are probably late 2000's, maybe 2010 or so)) but I just use them for external backup now, so they only see light usage nowadays.

 

at the end of the day... while my storage space is starting to get a bit lower (see "p.s." section below), I suspect with my current storage I can probably get by for at least another 2-3 years minimum since I am not at the point I really got to start shuffling stuff around and micro-managing things a bit. so when space does start to get a bit tight I can probably delete some more luxury stuff I got to free up some odd GB's (maybe 50-100GB or something in this ball park off the top of my head) of storage space without much effort. but eventually will come a time where ill just flat out need more storage space. another thing... I suspect at this point in time I would rather avoid buying hard drives any smaller than 4TB and I suspect it's possible I could buy a 4TB range hard drive in the not too distant future if the price is cheap enough which would buy me more time.

 

p.s. currently my free space is... 5TB = 241.4GB free, 4TB = 302.5GB free, 2TB = 498.6GB free.

 

hell, I can't believe my main PC's motherboard will be 10 years old this May (and it's power supply (Seasonic 520watt) will be 10 years old in November) which is the longest I ever used a main PC as my previous high would have been 6 years and 2 months (March 2006 to May 2012).

Edited January 5, 2022 by ThaCrip

[Sulphy]

Home server - 3x Samsung 970 Pro (OS, Apps, general storage), 4x 14TB WD Red Pro, 10x 10TB WD Red Pro, 2x 6TB WD Red Pro all in my home server (plex, backups etc) using Drive Bender for a software raid with multiple pools (physical disks allocated individually to either Media, Work or Backup storage)

My main rig - 1x Samsung 980 Pro 1TB (OS & apps), 2 Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB (games & transcoded media), 1x ADATA SX8200 2TB

NAS - 4x WD Red 10TB

12 bay JBOD enclosure - 6x 6TB WD Red Pro, 4x 4TB WD Red Pro (attached to an RPi - backups

 

Multiple backup redundancy!  

[+E.Worm Jimmy Subscriber¹]

Wow.

Apparently I am pretty low in space using 512gb SSD and 2tb HDD that came with my PC - it's is laptop sized too not full size

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

I currently have 8x 4TB drives in my home server, if I was buying new drives today I'd go with 10TB drives minimum, or the largest I could afford at the time.

Eventually I plan to migrate over to a new build running either Unraid or TrueNas Core (pros and cons to each), so ideally starting out with the largest drives possible would make things easier long term.

On 04/01/2022 at 19:53, Sir Topham Hatt said:

I generally have stuck to 2TB drives just in case of loss but out of the 6 or 7 I have, none have actually failed.

How much data do you currently have? If you care about that data then it should be backed up regardless, so the size of the hard drive shouldn't really be really an issue.

[Nick H. Supervisor]

I have a 4TB External Hard Drive that is always attached to my laptop for things like media and games. Inside my laptop I have a 1TB SSD.

[Munyua44]

The biggest hardware drive I have is the 500GB. Although, am thinking of having a 1TB hardware for safety storage incase the one in the laptop crashes, I do not loose my data.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

The biggest single HDD I regularly have and use is a Western Digital 18TB model. 

 

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky
 

[Gerowen]

My main storage drive that I access daily is my home server that uses three 12TB Western Digital gold drives in encrypted software RAID 5 (mdadm, LUKS, Linux).  I have a total "usable" capacity of 24TB, but 36TB of raw disk space between them, but the individual drives are just 12TB apiece.  They've been fairly reliable with one exception.  I started out with two of them in RAID 1, and when I first purchased the second drive to make it a RAID 1 group, it seemed a little loud at first and only lasted a year or so before it failed.  They RMA'd the drive just fine, but I felt uncomfortable about not being able to wipe the drive before sending it back since it had tax documents and all kinds of other private info on it.  I left the drive plugged into an external enclosure for an entire day and it randomly started working long enough to shred about 90% of its contents, so I'm fairly certain it was cleansed, but later when I upgraded to RAID 5 for increased capacity, I also replaced the bog-standard EXT4 partition with a LUKS encrypted one so that if it happens again in the future, I don't have to worry about hoping and praying the drive can be wiped before shipping it off for warranty work.

 

The lifetime power-on hours on the three drives in the server right now are:

33,940

9,037

18,415

 

I'll probably stick with 12TB drives in the future for the sake of simplicity; much easier to just add a drive and grow an existing partition than to upgrade the entire array to bigger drives.  I've got two external 12TB drives in RAID 0 that are my off-site backup and they've done fine bouncing around in my pickup truck, the drives in the server have been fine except for that one I had to RMA, and WD was pretty responsive about squaring me away with a replacement for it, and their cost is coming down nowadays so you can get one for not that much money.

 

[spaceelf]

My biggest SSD in use is 2TB.  Can't say I'm using any hard drives at the moment.

[Jose_49]

Awesome post, OP! This is interesting because I used to buy the biggest available hard drive around $120 every year (1 TB, 2TB, then 4TB)... when I suddenly stopped doing that. I have one portable WD 5TB HDD that I haven't filled up (still has 4.4 TB free!) because most of my stuff is online. 

 

As Internet Speeds have dramatically increased over the years (I never thought on seeing a 100 Mbps connection in my house in my lifetime), there's little need for me to store info in my local PC. Most of content is streamable and readily available. It's not the same as several years back that you had to fight over the Internet (We don't use 4K and Internet speed seems plenty in my house). 

[Gerowen]

On 12/01/2022 at 02:29, Jose_49 said:

Awesome post, OP! This is interesting because I used to buy the biggest available hard drive around $120 every year (1 TB, 2TB, then 4TB)... when I suddenly stopped doing that. I have one portable WD 5TB HDD that I haven't filled up (still has 4.4 TB free!) because most of my stuff is online. 

 

As Internet Speeds have dramatically increased over the years (I never thought on seeing a 100 Mbps connection in my house in my lifetime), there's little need for me to store info in my local PC. Most of content is streamable and readily available. It's not the same as several years back that you had to fight over the Internet (We don't use 4K and Internet speed seems plenty in my house). 

Cloud storage and streaming really has done away with the days of hoarding hard drives for most people, unless you host your own Nextcloud or Plex or something.

[Steven P. Administrators]

Single 16TB in my NAS (which is primarily intended for a Home media server). My NAS is a two bay so I am not messing with RAID just yet.

 

[+JHBrown Subscriber¹]

4 x 14TB in a Synology DS920+. 

[JaredFrost]

On 05/01/2022 at 22:41, InsaneNutter said:

I currently have 8x 4TB drives in my home server, if I was buying new drives today I'd go with 10TB drives minimum, or the largest I could afford at the time.

Eventually I plan to migrate over to a new build running either Unraid or TrueNas Core (pros and cons to each), so ideally starting out with the largest drives possible would make things easier long term.

How much data do you currently have? If you care about that data then it should be backed up regardless, so the size of the hard drive shouldn't really be really an issue.

Yeah, go as large as you can, just make sure they aren't shingled drives, I use 10TB Ironwolf Pros myself.

 

My configs are in my signature.

 

Only thing to add is, my server is also backed up to the cloud, Backblaze.

[+JHBrown Subscriber¹]

On 12/01/2022 at 01:25, Steven P. said:

Single 16TB in my NAS (which is primarily intended for a Home media server). My NAS is a two bay so I am not messing with RAID just yet.

 

I originally had the DS720+. Loved it, but ran out of space with 2 x 14TB in Raid 1