8-TB Drive for RecordedTV: Anybody using?

[PeteCress]

My NAS box is getting tight on space and it seems logical to move RecordedTV from the NAS to my 24-7 PC that runs the SageTV server.

I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work Windows 7-wise - just format the partition as GPT and make sure the block size is the one that SageTV likes (64k?).

Are there any if's, and's, or but's to this?

GigaByte Z87X-UD3H-CF with 6 "Intel-Controlled" SATA ports that support 6 GB/s SATA.

I figure access speed (one humongous drive vs multiple drives on the NAS) sb a non-issue considering Sage is currently happy going across my LAN to the NAS box.

I can live with a drive failure - RecordedTV being a throwaway commodity in my scheme of things.

Am I missing anything?

[JustFred]

Originally Posted by PeteCress

My NAS box is getting tight on space and it seems logical to move RecordedTV from the NAS to my 24-7 PC that runs the SageTV server.

I've been Googling and it *sounds* like it should work Windows 7-wise - just format the partition as GPT and make sure the block size is the one that SageTV likes (64k?).

Are there any if's, and's, or but's to this?

GigaByte Z87X-UD3H-CF with 6 "Intel-Controlled" SATA ports that support 6 GB/s SATA.

I figure access speed (one humongous drive vs multiple drives on the NAS) sb a non-issue considering Sage is currently happy going across my LAN to the NAS box.

I can live with a drive failure - RecordedTV being a throwaway commodity in my scheme of things.

Am I missing anything?

You're not missing anything.

I've got a Sage (Win7 x64) box that's been using an 8TB drive for Sage recordings for over 6 months. There was nothing magic about making it play nice w/Sage. It's an HGST 8TB NAS drive (in a non-NAS configuration) direct-attached to the MoBo SATA port (AHCI). Formatted GPT w/64K cluster size.

The HGST 8TB disk is 7200 rpm and has a pretty big internal buffer (128MB) so coupled with it's higher aerial density, access speed isn't an issue for Sage.

Yes, I know there's some debate about the wisdom of using a NAS disk in a non-NAS environment (due to the less-aggressive error-recovery nature of the disk f/w), but this doesn't seem like a big deal for storing something like recordings. Anyway, I've had enough experience with the HGST series of high-capacity disks to have a pretty good level of confidence in their reliability.

Friendly advice: avoid (like the plague) any of the following for Sage (regardless of capacity):
* "Surveillance" drives (e.g. WD Purple)
* "Archive" drives (as found in the Seagate 8TB external drive box)

[Telecore]

I've been running a couple of seagate 4TB 2.5" hdds which I removed from their usb enclosures in both my Sage and wmc servers. They are a bit thicker than most 2.5" drives - have served me well for almost 2 years now. They can be purchased for around $109. I got the idea from servethehome.com. I've also used these for multiple desktop machines due to the low cost and small form factor. No failures yet.

[newyankee]

I built a new server to celebrate my conversion to v9. I'm recording to a 2T SSD, and enjoying my first system with no spinning disks. Most recorded shows are deleted, but I move shows that I want to save to a NAS.

[Monedeath]

Originally Posted by JustFred

Yes, I know there's some debate about the wisdom of using a NAS disk in a non-NAS environment (due to the less-aggressive error-recovery nature of the disk f/w), but this doesn't seem like a big deal for storing something like recordings.

I buy NAS drives simply because the h/w specs are more rugged in general. They're designed to take more heat, run 24/7, and also deal with the vibrations caused by neighboring drives. (Not that a good case/mount shouldn't be addressing much of that anyway) Anyhow, between the warranty and the advertised MTBF for the NAS vs regular desktop drives, I haven't purchased anything but NAS for network drives since then, even for JBOD use.

Although I'm still holding at the 4TB drive size at present myself, probably won't go beyond that until the SSD tech provides a larger/cheaper option. Might revisit it in about a year, as other considerations may come into play first, but it is where I drew my proverbial line for now.

[dleany]

I recently started using a 5-bay Synology NAS with 4 8TB WD Red drives in a RAID 5 configuration, (giving me around 24TB of storage space), and so far, it's working great. As a bonus, I don't have to worry about explaining to my wife what happened to her episodes of, "Dancing With the Stars," if a drive goes bad.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Monedeath

I buy NAS drives simply because the h/w specs are more rugged in general. They're designed to take more heat, run 24/7, and also deal with the vibrations caused by neighboring drives. (Not that a good case/mount shouldn't be addressing much of that anyway) Anyhow, between the warranty and the advertised MTBF for the NAS vs regular desktop drives, I haven't purchased anything but NAS for network drives since then, even for JBOD use.

Although I'm still holding at the 4TB drive size at present myself, probably won't go beyond that until the SSD tech provides a larger/cheaper option. Might revisit it in about a year, as other considerations may come into play first, but it is where I drew my proverbial line for now.

If regular drives are good enough for Backblaze then they are good enough for me as well.

It is interesting to note that Seagate drives have often done poorly in these reports but the 8TB drives seem much better.

And enterprise drives are no more reliable than regular consumer drives:

The enterprise drives have 363,282 drives days and an annualized failure rate of 1.61%. If we look back at our data, we find that as of Q3 2016, the 8 TB consumer drives had 422,263 drive days with an annualized failure rate of 1.60%. That means that when both drive models had a similar number of drive days, they had nearly the same annualized failure rate. There are no conclusions to be made here, but the observation is worth considering as we gather data for our comparison.

Here is the latest Backblaze report: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/wp-co...ly-Q2-2017.jpg

[Cooper]

Right before summer I moved all Sage recordings and pointing to 2 8 TB drives I have on my network and works out well.

[Monedeath]

Originally Posted by wayner

If regular drives are good enough for Backblaze then they are good enough for me as well.

It is interesting to note that Seagate drives have often done poorly in these reports but the 8TB drives seem much better.

I'm generally more concerned with odds of a DOA drive(and the time it takes to properly test them), although size/scope of a single drive failure also factors in. The other end of it is the tech for drives beyond 4TB is newer(but not so new now) and different, so it wasn't going to be until around now that I'd even start to trust any (long-term) reliability stats on them.

Also large scale hosting providers like blackblaze operate in a completely different environment than most home users. When I have data mirrored on multiple different drive arrays, and a 24/7 tech staff proactively monitoring and managing things. The calculus of buying cheaper consumer grade drives that I'll probably retire long before I reach the (lower) MTBF number it provides becomes something worth pursuing. In the end, for them it probably is cheaper.

But for a home user who isn't aggressively managing and monitoring their system, where reactive rather than proactive is expected and data redundancy(and thus recovery) is not assured, and further the drive may very well still be in use 5+ years from now, that MTBF number starts to matter a lot.