Hard drive opinions please

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by NetworkGuy

SSD usually degrade over time instead of a hard fail. You can run a program Crystaldiskinfo which tells you the state of your SSD.

All of my drives on all of my systems are backed up nightly to my NAS.

I ran Crystaldiskinfo. All my 3.5” drives came back as “good”, 100%. My SSD boot drive game back at “good 99%”. Can that 1% be important?

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

I ran Crystaldiskinfo. All my 3.5” drives came back as “good”, 100%. My SSD boot drive game back at “good 99%”. Can that 1% be important?

It depends. It **might** refer to having only used 1% of the max. Wear Leveling cycles available. It's time to read the manual and learn about SMART. A good place to start is clicking on CDI's Help.

Take a look at ALL the attribute values that are reported, but especially Uncorrectable Error Count, EC Error Rate, CRC Error Count, Uncorrectable Sector Count, Reallocation Event Count and Current Pending Sector Count.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by JustFred

It depends. It **might** refer to having only used 1% of the max. Wear Leveling cycles available. It's time to read the manual and learn about SMART. A good place to start is clicking on CDI's Help.

Take a look at ALL the attribute values that are reported, but especially Uncorrectable Error Count, EC Error Rate, CRC Error Count, Uncorrectable Sector Count, Reallocation Event Count and Current Pending Sector Count.

thanks

[waynedunham]

I've been using WD Blacks in my main SageTV machine for many years. (I also have a backup SageTV Server)

I started with 1TB drives and when those were well past 5 years I swapped them for new 2TB WD Blacks.

On my backup SageTV server I am waiting for a long enough time with no upcoming recordings to swap out the existing drives for 2 new 4TB WD Golds that I just got yesterday. My only real reason for doing this is that I was running out of HD space.

I have 4 machines presently. My main PC, 2 SageTV Servers, and my laptop. I use VEEAM to back them up every night (full backup and then several days of backups of only new/changed things). I had an issue with VEEAM on my main SageTV server in that it wouldn't fire off automatically each night. I'd get an error saying the destination wasn't available, but if I fired off a manual backup it would work just fine.

I printed out my settings/jobs for each machine to see if I could see anything there and when I did I noticed that not all of the machines were archiving as many backups (i.e. x backups that then it would roll off the oldest one when it made a new one)

When I adjusted so all the machines were the same it took up a lot more space on my backup SageTV server which triggered off a "low disk space" warning. That is the main reason for the new drives. Going from 1TB to 4TB drives will surely fix the problem.

The VEEAM issue turned out to be in the backup job file somewhere. I ended up trying to uninstall and re-install VEEAM but forgot to delete the data folder for it in the system area. So the un/re-install didn't work. So I had to delete the backup job file and recreate it. Once I did that it works again. Looking at when it started failing that was when I had tried to upgrade that Win7 machine to Win10 and it kept failing. "Theoretically" it restored everything back when it failed. VEEAM is the only thing that wasn't working 100% after that process as it turns out.

[t4runnr]

I've been using Toshiba N300 6TB drives. I have 4 of them for my movies and TV shows.

So far so good. My controller card has 4 more slots for me to add more but the need is currently not there.

[wayner]

I don't know exactly what these means but it seems like people are ticked off at WD:

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/1...tic-recording/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder...tb6tb_are_smr/

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by wayner

I don't know exactly what these means but it seems like people are ticked off at WD:

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/1...tic-recording/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder...tb6tb_are_smr/

Because the "Red" drives are aimed directly at people setting up a NAS system with redundancy. These defective (purposefully or not) have the wrong type of read/write technology and when people are trying to add them to their NAS they are getting kicked out as "defective" because they can't meet the standards required for some (all?) types of redundancy. (Striped, mirrored, etc) Or at least that is how I understand the issue from reading a couple of these articles.

I just forwarded one of these messages to a friend of mine who has been buying WD Reds for his SageTV system and is about to build a NAS for storage of his SageTV and other files.
He had questioned my choice of going with Blacks or Golds over Reds for my SageTV system and I sent him a link with the stats for the various WD drives. The Blacks and Golds typically have larger caches and hence better data transfer rates.

I push mine relatively hard having 8 tuners on one server and 7 on the other (backup) server. In the past I had some issues with frame drops that were always occurring when all the tuners were being used. Between switching to Blacks/Golds, setting my tuners merit and the "Optimize for Bandwidth" option for my multiple recording drives I never see that any more.

[Tiki]

Wow, I had not read anything about that. I’m really surprised to hear WD is trying to push SMR drives for use in general purpose NAS applications. When shingled magnetic recording first appeared a few years ago it was made clear that it was not meant for normal hard drive use, but only for archival data storage applications where random I/O speed was not really important and the only thing that mattered was cramming as much storage as possible into a single hard drive.

The way these drives work blocks of data actually overlap like shingles on a roof. So it’s impossible to write one block of data without affecting the neighboring blocks. Therefore, when you want to write to a particular block, you first have to read the neighboring blocks and then re-write all of them. Because of this, random writes take like 3x as long as with a conventional drive. This would be really bad for something like Sage where you could be recording several shows at once while also playing back several others. It would be even worse for something like the parity disk in a RAID array.

[NetworkGuy]

I have has WD Red drives in my Synology NAS for years without a problem. My NAS is used for backups and archived media server. The only time files are written to the NAS is during the nightly backups and when I move media files to the archive. So the writing of overlapping data blocks has not been a problem.

My SageTV server uses WB Blue drives. (And maybe soon SSDs.)

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by wayner

I don't know exactly what these means but it seems like people are ticked off at WD:

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/1...tic-recording/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder...tb6tb_are_smr/

So from what these articles say, is it clear that the WD Reds were always this way, or just recently went SMR with a recent model # change?

[SHS]

Apparently Seagate also SMR on there drives too
Barracuda 2TB – 7,200rpm – SATA 6gig – ST2000DM008
Barracuda 4TB – 5,400rpm – SATA 6gig – ST4000DM004
Barracuda 8TB – 5,400rpm – SATA 6gig – ST8000DM004
Desktop HDD 5TB – 5,900rpm – SATA 6gig – ST5000DM000
Exos 8TB – 5900rpm – SATA 6gig – ST8000AS0003
Archive v2 6TB – 5,900rpm – SATA 6gig – ST6000AS0002
Archive v2 8TB – 5,900rpm – SATA 6gig – ST8000AS0002

https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/1...sktop-hdd-smr/

Even Toshiba

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

So from what these articles say, is it clear that the WD Reds were always this way, or just recently went SMR with a recent model # change?

My understanding is that this is something new. Again I haven't read the document that WD put out about this issue so I can't say if it was intentional or a screw up in labeling some drives.

[Tiki]

Originally Posted by tvmaster2

So from what these articles say, is it clear that the WD Reds were always this way, or just recently went SMR with a recent model # change?

No it’s something new. And it isn’t all WD Red drives, just some. And apparently it’s not just WD - Seagate and Toshiba are apparently doing it too.

When the HDD manufacturers first started selling SMR drives, they clearly labeled them as Archival drives. It was a trick to be able to cram more storage into a single disk platter. They appeared to be targeting the long term storage market. It’s great technology if you have stuff that gets written infrequently and mostly just read. But if fast frequent writes are required, it’s not very good.

It looks like they tried to make these drives more palatable for everyday use by adding a lot of higher speed cache memory. But if you are writing a lot of big files you will fill the cache and the drive will slow way down.

[jpwegas]

Has anyone seen a good list of non-SMR drives? Seems like it's impossible to figure out whether they are CMR/PMR or SMR.

--John

[SHS]

Originally Posted by jpwegas

Has anyone seen a good list of non-SMR drives? Seems like it's impossible to figure out whether they are CMR/PMR or SMR.

--John

You can always used this but he or she hasn't update pass 10TB
https://rml527.blogspot.com/

[sic0048]

My newest drive (non-boot) is also the only one that has failed me. It's a three year old WD. I have Seagates that are much older that are still running fine. It's made me want to shy away from WD, but I'll probably give them another chance.

[Malfunction]

Originally Posted by ThePaladinTech

I've got a couple toshiba 3tb never had an issue with them. but I stopped buying hard drives a while ago. I now buy WD USB drives and shuck them and save a bundle in the proccess. I'm running 7-8tb and 1-10tb drive. I've got a few old 3tb drives that I've swapped out (still good). https://youtu.be/24bS7a6rPoQ <-- video about shucking drives

10tb - $179 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/wd-easy...?skuId=6278208

I have an 8TB Red that I shucked. I've heard they're starting to solder the connections.

[tvmaster2]

Originally Posted by jpwegas

Has anyone seen a good list of non-SMR drives? Seems like it's impossible to figure out whether they are CMR/PMR or SMR.

--John

reviving a thread from spring. Has anyone heard anymore about this SMR drive rubbish? Is it as bad a problem as some of those reports say for things like a heavy read-write SageTV server box?

[wayner]

The Backblaze reports are always interesting, but they don't seem to be using WD drives these days: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backb...stats-q2-2020/

[KeithAbbott]

Hitachi wins!!!