Which 6tb hard drive should I buy?

[Benny Profane]

Looking to upgrade two 2tb external drives in my OWC Thinderbay 4 to two 6tb drives. That should hold me for awhile. Sold state is expensive and low capacity, it seems. I don't do RAID. What 3.5 old school spinning drives are reliable these days?

[FabienP]

All remaining brands have currently decent offerings but be sure to avoid WD Blue / Red and Seagate Barracuda drives that feature DM-SMR technology. That will dramatically lower write performance once the 20 to 40 GB buffer is exhausted.

Another factor to ponder is the rotational speed of the drive. There are choices of either 5400 or 7200 RPM. The former will have longer access time but lower noise and lower thermal dissipation. If 5400 RPM is your choice, you will be limited to WD Red plus drives. 7200 RPM can be found in Seagate IronWolf or Toshiba N300 drives. Pick whatever is cheaper or has a longer warranty.

Helium drives are even less noisy but only available in the larger capacities (10 TB and above).

Cheers,
Fabien

[kers]

I like the cheap but robust offerings of Toshiba . My X300 works fine already two years. here 8Tb = 200€

[JeffSD]

Benny, I've been using a 6TB Western Digital Blue for the past two years. It's not as fast as a WD Black, but it runs cool and has been very reliable.

[Benny Profane]

thanks.

[Eric Brody]

Look at the Backblaze website. The use thousands of drives and regularly report on failure rates. They look at many brands and many sizes. It should give you some good starting points. Anecdotes are great but one person's experience is just that. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q2-2020/

Good luck.

[Benny Profane]

Cool. There's a website for everything.

[geneo]

If you are looking at Seagate, be careful. The larger drives in the Barracuda and all Ironwolf, IronWolf Pro, and Enterprise Exos (target for Archive)  line are SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and some 5400rpm. You probably don't want SMR - the write  performance can really tank. The Barracuda Pro line are Conventional Magnetic Recording  and are all 200rpm.  Look at the particular drive datasheet before you buy if this is a concern.

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/

[JaapD]

From the Interweb:

Q: Which brand of HDD is most reliable?
A: HGST was the most reliable of the hard drive providers and had an annual failure of only 1 percent. Toshiba had an annual failure rate of nearly 3.5 percent, Seagate ranked in at slightly more than that but still under 4 percent, and Western Digital topped the charts at just under 7 percent.

So there is a factor of 7 between the most and least reliable brand.

Cheers,
Jaap.

[kers]

From the Interweb:

Q: Which brand of HDD is most reliable?
A: HGST was the most reliable of the hard drive providers and had an annual failure of only 1 percent. Toshiba had an annual failure rate of nearly 3.5 percent, Seagate ranked in at slightly more than that but still under 4 percent, and Western Digital topped the charts at just under 7 percent.

So there is a factor of 7 between the most and least reliable brand.

Cheers,
Jaap.

I thought HGST was bought by Western Digital... (?)

[francois]

If you are looking at Seagate, be careful. The larger drives in the Barracuda and all Ironwolf, IronWolf Pro, and Enterprise Exos (target for Archive)  line are SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) and some 5400rpm. You probably don't want SMR - the write  performance can really tank. The Barracuda Pro line are Conventional Magnetic Recording  and are all 200rpm.  Look at the particular drive datasheet before you buy if this is a concern.

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/

From this Ars Technica article, it looks like Seagate IronWolf and IronWolf Pro HDDs do not use SMR. Of course, you have to accept Seagate's statement as valid…

[MDL_SD]

HGST was bought out by Western Digital, but the drives are still made and sold.

[geneo]

From this Ars Technica article, it looks like Seagate IronWolf and IronWolf Pro HDDs do not use SMR. Of course, you have to accept Seagate's statement as valid…

You are correct. I don't know what I was looking at on the Ironwolf , maybe someones word. The Seagate datasheets on the Ironwolf indicate CMR for the entire line.

[FabienP]

You are correct. I don't know what I was looking at on the Ironwolf , maybe someones word. The Seagate datasheets on the Ironwolf indicate CMR for the entire line.

All standard desktop (WD Blue / Red and Seagate Barracuda) and 2.5" drives are polluted by DM-SMR, hence my recommendation to use NAS drives (Seagate IronWolf or WD Red Plus) even in cases where RAID won't be used. Not sure about Toshiba X300, that might be the only remaining desktop drive available using CMR.

DM-SMR makes sense in use cases where data is written once and read many times. That might be the case for original RAW files but as soon as one writes to intermediate TIFF files, write operations will suffer on DM-SMR drives.

The sad thing is that DM-SMR should be cheaper than CMR drives if manufacturers were passing the savings to customers. Last time I checked they kept the savings for themselves and sold the newer, badly performing drives at the same price as previous models.

Cheers,
Fabien