Topic: What is your favorite hard drive

[Joeski]

for backing up your recordings.

Thanks

[it-goes-to-eleven]

The one that doesn't fail.

There really is no such thing.  You'll hear horror stories about each vendor.   I tend to prefer western digital and tend to order from the same vendor, newegg (unless I pickup an external drive from costco).

A friend just bought a couple of segates and one of them was an OEM version with a non-standard firmware (despite being the same model).  He determined the firmware was non-standard after putting it through his normal extensive break-in/test process.  You probably wouldn't want that odd OEM firmware, though most people would not notice it.  So, it's really a crap shoot.

[Brian Skalinder]

The one two that doesn't fail.

FTFY    (Because at any given time, at least one of them may.  Not sure quite what you mean by "backup", but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

I'm with Fl on this one.  I also prefer WD, but yeah...it's a crap shoot.  FWIW, I've had better success with better spec / longer warranty models targeted to some degree for the business market than I have with the uber-cheap, low-end consumer-targeted HDDs.

[DigiGal]

I use external LaCie drives with a FireWire 800 connection in the Mac realm. 

One is configured for Time Machine which does automatic backups.  2 others are for file storage, so far no problems with any of them.

[Patrick]

I use external LaCie drives with a FireWire 800 connection in the Mac realm. 

Yep.

I've also had really good experiences with Glyph drives for intense multitrack sessions.  Not a good idea for long term backup (from a price standpoint)

[Scooter123]

Western Digital Green Cavaier.

I grabbed a 2tb Hitachi on sale for $150 and fired it up and it was frigginig hot, you could not grab it with your bare hands.  And it was noisy.

Then sprung $190 for the WD Green drives, and they are barely warm, and super quiet.  They are variable in RMP, and spin from anywhere from 5400-7200rpm depending on processing load. 

If you RAID a couple drives, your processing speed will increase, and the drives will run cooler because the 1's and 0's are being spread out over multiple drives. 

[live2496]

My current personal favorite is a 1.5 TB Western Digital SATA drive with one of these...

http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Product.aspx?C=1346&ID=1642

Prior to this I have been pretty happy with the laptop Scorpio drives in external chassis. But I am starting to use SATA as EIDE are less and less available.

edit: Yeah... the Green WD drives are super quiet and run cool.

[it-goes-to-eleven]

For many good reasons, I am very anti-raid on home systems.  Most people have no idea of the risk and the potential negative consequences..  Raid is for two things: keeping your system running when a drive fails, and potentially increasing performance.  It is in no way a "backup" solution.

Scooter brings up an excellent point on heat.. In general, you want to read the reviews and avoid drives that run hot (careful reading of specs can reveal some of that)... And you want to return any drive that runs abnormally hot. I also avoid new drive models, and drives that push the envelope on capacity.  You don't want to be on the bleeding edge without good reason.

I monitor my drive temps, and use case airflow to keep drives below 30C.  I think that heat kills drives, and anything over 40C is bad.

Unfortunately it can be hard to monitor temps on USB drives.  The WD external drive firmware idles drives when not in use because the cases do not allow sufficient cooling for continuous operation (especially when people cover them, etc).  I tend to prefer external drives that have well ventilated enclosures.

YMMV....

[rastasean]

Unfortunately it can be hard to monitor temps on USB drives.  The WD external drive firmware idles drives when not in use because the cases do not allow sufficient cooling for continuous operation (especially when people cover them, etc).  I tend to prefer external drives that have well ventilated enclosures.
YMMV....

After discussing RAID with David and reading about them, I don't think they are really suitable for at least me and I think the majority of home computer users. There's this one called RAID 0 (zero) which doesn't back up any data at all. From my understanding, it writes to the drives at the same time the same data. not backing it up because if one drive fails, all data is lost even though you may have 2 1 tb drives.
how impractical.

I don't like the idea of external USB/firewire drives so why not buy an exteranl usb/esata drive and an internal sata drive to install in that. you can choose the drive and the case does not always have to be on.

[live2496]

I use RAID at work, but never at home. I'm more hands on when it comes to protecting data related to my work at home.

I work on audio projects on my laptop and use external drives for backup copies. My intention is to have the same data on two different drives at any point in time. If any one disc fails I don't want to be vulnerable. Having data on two disc drives seems like a reasonable solution.

I did have a Passport drive that went bad on me, and so I tend to be really careful about backing up data to multiple drives just in case.

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

FWIW, I'm preferring the WD Caviar Green drives after having them for a few weeks.  I have two DLINK DNS323 bricks.  The one with the Seagate can be heard spinning up when I'm down the hall.  The WD drives don't make a sound when I'm in the same room. 

I've been using a DLINK box as a mirroring RAID for a couple of years and it kicks ass. 

[rjp]

I'm running an OpenSolaris server with one mirrored pair of drives for the operating system, and an eight-disk RAID-Z2 array (two drives worth of redundancy) for the main storage pool. All drives are 500 GB, half Seagate Barracuda and half WD Caviar Blue.

In my experience, both the Seagate and WD drives are very quiet - the case fans are noisier than the entire drive array. I'm not sure I'd go with the Caviar Green drives though - they have a tendency to go to sleep very easily, resulting in lots of start/stop cycles (bad for longevity). Which costs more - the extra electricity or the cost of replacing a drive?

Why OpenSolaris? ZFS. No need to worry about partition sizes, instant filesystem snapshots, and every block written to disk is checksummed. Corrupted data is detected automatically, and reconstructed if you run redundant drives or configure a single drive to write multiple copies of disk blocks. ZFS also integrates nicely with CIFS for Windows file shares, NFS for Linux/BSD/Solaris shares, and iSCSI for SAN-type functionality (sharing a volume that a remote system sees as a disk).

You still need a backup solution though - as many have pointed out, RAID is not backup. If your system fails catastrophically, or gets stolen, or is lost in a fire, you need something to fall back on.

In addition, OpenSolaris isn't exactly friendly to the average computer user, and Linux has better hardware support. Even if you're a Linux guru, it can be a bit of a culture shock, but I've found it worth adding to my home network anyway.

Here's a good starting point on setting up a home ZFS system.

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

I depends on the intended use. My WD Green drives are for long term storage of masters and periodic back up of personal folders. They spin up, get lots of action, and then return to low power mode for many days. For periodic bulk transfers the lifetime number of cycles is going to be pretty low. I don't think anyone would really use a NAS as a workspace. 

Solaris is a very nice option. You are right that its a little more effort to pull in and install all the packages for a general purpose work station but for the scaled down application server environment we run it's been awesome.  Are you using software RAID or a controller card?

[Joeski]

Thanks for all the good info.

As far as backup is concerned.  I mean to get the music or video off the recorder and place it some where safe,  I had 2 1TB Seagate hard drives poop the bed recently.  I am making DVDs of all my stuff that I know isn't on the Archive.  Then the stuff that is on the bt sites to DVDs because when one might want it. It may not have a seeder.

[it-goes-to-eleven]

As far as backup is concerned.  I mean to get the music or video off the recorder and place it some where safe,  I had 2 1TB Seagate hard drives poop the bed recently.  I am making DVDs of all my stuff that I know isn't on the Archive.

I hope you didn't lose anything.  While I would never wish such a failure on anyone,  it is usually something we learn hard lessons from... Lessons we otherwise might not believe.   I've experienced silent data corruption where data was corrupted as it was written to disk (friends have too)..

As another example, if you buy two of the same drives at the same time, you risk that they both might fail simultaneously due to a manufacturing issue... You reasonably think you have redundancy in your backups...  There really is something to be said for mixing up your drives.  Even if they are the same model, having them come from the same batches.   The same goes for DVDs..  If you burn two identical DVDs as "backups" (from the same spindle of blanks), doesn't it make sense that they'll both fail around the same time at some point in the future?

Anyone remember the IBM deathstar drive fiasco?  Huge numbers of drives were defective and doomed to fail...   So even if you bought your drives months apart, your data were probably screwed.  I have a number of 80 gig drives I need to copy off onto newer large capacity drives.  It is a chore I am not looking forward to..  On the one hand, the data is on a bunch of different spindles.  It will be nice to consolidate it onto larger drives, but then my eggs are in fewer baskets..

Reliable long term backups and archiving are a PIA..

What was the Jim Morrison quote?  "No drive here gets out alive!"