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The Toshiba and Seagate NAS lines seem well organized and better alternatives these days. And I guess this is all the more reason to get one drive per manufactu

The Toshiba and Seagate NAS lines seem well organized and better alternatives these days. And I guess this is all the more reason to get one drive per manufacturer for the typical ~4 drives in a home NAS. Between Seagate/Toshiba/WD/HGST there should be enough variation to still protect against this stuff.

s9w 7y ago
HGST = WD. And with seagate being kinda shitty, there seems to be only Toshiba left.
- pedrocr 7y ago
  They're the same company but not (yet?) the same drives.
  - s9w 7y ago
    Do we really know? I see no reason to trust them
    - leetbulb 7y ago
      In the past year I've had these failures: 2x WD RED 4TB (EFRX), 2x WD RED 6TB (EFRX), 1x Seagate 4TB. I have a fairly even mix that includes HGST (and a few HGST He). No HGST failures yet. I won't be buying WD RED's for a while, if ever.
      - barrkel 7y ago
        To counter that, I've been running 11x 4TB WD Red (WD40EFRX) since 2013 and zero failures, with 10 drives in RAIDZ2 and 1 warm spare. I have them in a 4U chassis in the attic, with 5 case fans blowing through; two on the rear and three across all the bays. It's a 24 bay box, but I've not yet had pressing need to fill the rest of the bays.
        leetbulb 7y ago
        Lucky. Maybe I had a bad batch :(
  - linker3000 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I worked for HGST about 3 years ago (but in the Enterprise storage (flash)/Object store fields, not consumer/prosumer HDDs). At the time, WD was assimilating HGST's drive tech where there were cost/performance/reliability benefits to the point where quite a few 'WD' products were just relabeled HGST ones, possibly with minor firmware/logic board tweaks. I seem to recall that at the time some WD Black, and maybe Gold, models at least were rebadged HGST units. The aim at the time was to fade out the HGST brand so that everything was WD and I pretty much think that has since been done.
guitarbill 7y ago
Edit: Seagate is doing the exact same thing [0], although not confirmed for NAS drives... yet. HGST is owned by WD (although the 3.5" side apparently went to Toshiba). So that leaves Toshiba. It sucks to have to qualify drives (again?) in small businesses, thought this was a solved problem. It's more offensive they're doing it with the smaller capacities, too. (I should note SSDs don't stand up to manufacturer's claims in error scenarios, too. But that's fairly well known I think?) [0] https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-ba...
gsich 7y ago
I have a few Seagate Ironwolf 8TBs and I think (hope?) they are not SMR.
smcleod 7y ago
Seagate drives are notoriously poor quality, in addition to well published, large sample and long running studies by Backblaze - I ran a number of decent sized storage clusters for many years and by far found Seagate drives the most unreliable (including Seagate a rebranded as HPE etc...) - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ - https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/02/13/seagate-12tb-drive-failure-rate-backblaze/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/02/13/seagate-12tb-drive-fai...
- tfigment 7y ago
  Agreed. I built a synology with 5x Seagate and all failed within 18 months with light workload. I will never buy another Seagate. Replaced with mix of HGST and Toshiba which are working for several years with no bad sectors. Now will buy Toshiba only until they go down the low quality road.
  - jsjohnst 7y ago
    Buying the same brand / model drives is not a wise idea, especially if all are bought at once. Any manufacturing defects will be amplified and could cause a RAID array failure due to losing multiple drives in proximity to each other.
    - tfigment 7y ago
      You are not wrong and I knew better but I was build for first time and bought all at same time. Now it's a mix of HGST, WD, Toshiba. Some are 34000h, with no issues. The WD is slower when data scrubbing but I don't trust WD for many years and that one was because other vendors were out of that size. I don't really know who to trust in that space any more so it's Toshiba for me on any new replacements.
- pedrocr 7y ago
  They have a higher average failure rate but even backblaze still uses them. If you're defending against defects in product lines you want the most diverse set of drives possible to make the failures uncorrelated. Having to use drives with higher failure rates doesn't invalidate that benefit.

s9w 7y ago

HGST = WD. And with seagate being kinda shitty, there seems to be only Toshiba left.

pedrocr 7y ago
They're the same company but not (yet?) the same drives.
- s9w 7y ago
  Do we really know? I see no reason to trust them
  - leetbulb 7y ago
    In the past year I've had these failures: 2x WD RED 4TB (EFRX), 2x WD RED 6TB (EFRX), 1x Seagate 4TB. I have a fairly even mix that includes HGST (and a few HGST He). No HGST failures yet. I won't be buying WD RED's for a while, if ever.
    - barrkel 7y ago
      To counter that, I've been running 11x 4TB WD Red (WD40EFRX) since 2013 and zero failures, with 10 drives in RAIDZ2 and 1 warm spare. I have them in a 4U chassis in the attic, with 5 case fans blowing through; two on the rear and three across all the bays. It's a 24 bay box, but I've not yet had pressing need to fill the rest of the bays.
      - leetbulb 7y ago
        Lucky. Maybe I had a bad batch :(
- linker3000 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I worked for HGST about 3 years ago (but in the Enterprise storage (flash)/Object store fields, not consumer/prosumer HDDs). At the time, WD was assimilating HGST's drive tech where there were cost/performance/reliability benefits to the point where quite a few 'WD' products were just relabeled HGST ones, possibly with minor firmware/logic board tweaks. I seem to recall that at the time some WD Black, and maybe Gold, models at least were rebadged HGST units. The aim at the time was to fade out the HGST brand so that everything was WD and I pretty much think that has since been done.

guitarbill 7y ago

Edit: Seagate is doing the exact same thing [0], although not confirmed for NAS drives... yet. HGST is owned by WD (although the 3.5" side apparently went to Toshiba). So that leaves Toshiba. It sucks to have to qualify drives (again?) in small businesses, thought this was a solved problem. It's more offensive they're doing it with the smaller capacities, too. (I should note SSDs don't stand up to manufacturer's claims in error scenarios, too. But that's fairly well known I think?) [0] https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-barracuda-and-desktop-hdd-smr/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/04/15/seagate-2-4-and-8tb-ba...

gsich 7y ago

I have a few Seagate Ironwolf 8TBs and I think (hope?) they are not SMR.

smcleod 7y ago

Seagate drives are notoriously poor quality, in addition to well published, large sample and long running studies by Backblaze - I ran a number of decent sized storage clusters for many years and by far found Seagate drives the most unreliable (including Seagate a rebranded as HPE etc...) - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-q2-2019/ - https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/02/13/seagate-12tb-drive-failure-rate-backblaze/ https://blocksandfiles.com/2020/02/13/seagate-12tb-drive-fai...

tfigment 7y ago
Agreed. I built a synology with 5x Seagate and all failed within 18 months with light workload. I will never buy another Seagate. Replaced with mix of HGST and Toshiba which are working for several years with no bad sectors. Now will buy Toshiba only until they go down the low quality road.
- jsjohnst 7y ago
  Buying the same brand / model drives is not a wise idea, especially if all are bought at once. Any manufacturing defects will be amplified and could cause a RAID array failure due to losing multiple drives in proximity to each other.
  - tfigment 7y ago
    You are not wrong and I knew better but I was build for first time and bought all at same time. Now it's a mix of HGST, WD, Toshiba. Some are 34000h, with no issues. The WD is slower when data scrubbing but I don't trust WD for many years and that one was because other vendors were out of that size. I don't really know who to trust in that space any more so it's Toshiba for me on any new replacements.
pedrocr 7y ago
They have a higher average failure rate but even backblaze still uses them. If you're defending against defects in product lines you want the most diverse set of drives possible to make the failures uncorrelated. Having to use drives with higher failure rates doesn't invalidate that benefit.