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One thing I've always wondered, are these drives what people would recommend that you stick in a desktop or nas or are these 'datacenter' drives that are overki

One thing I've always wondered, are these drives what people would recommend that you stick in a desktop or nas or are these 'datacenter' drives that are overkill for consumer use?

OldTimeCoffee 6y ago
I can only speak about the Exos drives, but the Ironwolf (Pro) drives are basically just the Exos drives relabeled for the consumer market. I'm actually about to buy 6 14TB Exos x16 drives to replace 7 6TB Exos 7E8 drives that are 5 years old. Frequently you can get the Exos drives cheaper than Ironwolf anyway.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > Frequently you can get the Exos drives cheaper than Ironwolf anyway. You can. I’ve been getting the 16s and they are great but with caveats. The size makes volume creation and expansion insanely long (like a week per added drive). Not Seagate’s fault I know. The noise. They are loud. They are either chirping away or grinding away.
robotmay 6y ago
I would definitely recommend skipping any current large WD drives for home use. < 6TB are SMR and problematic in a NAS, and 6TB+ have a very irritating noise that no-one seems to be able to diagnose (sounds like a scanner when idle). I bought some 8TB WD Golds, and I was expecting them to be louder, but they do something very weird when idling and it's an extremely penetrating sound. It seems to be present on most large models: https://community.wd.com/t/strange-noise-coming-from-10tb-drives-wd100efax/226467 https://community.wd.com/t/strange-noise-coming-from-10tb-dr...
elorant 6y ago
Backblaze has said in the past that they don't buy enterprise drives because they didn't notice any difference from consumer ones. I don't know if that's still their policy.
- dcm360 6y ago
  The large Toshiba drives they're using are enterprise drives. A couple of weeks ago these drives were among the cheapest (€/TB) drives to get here in the Netherlands, so I assume Backblaze just bought them because of their price.
bayindirh 6y ago
Disclaimer: This is my personal experience from being an HPC sysadmin and old school computer enthusiast. If there's one trend I've seen from using generations of HDDs, excluding some problematic generations like first SATA Seagate Barracudas and early WD Caviars which died for no reason at all, newer generation HDDs are always more reliable from previous generation, regardless of their class (datacenter / consumer). For the last 10 years or so (starting with the introduction of first WD Green / Blue / Black series), the HDDs are exceptionally reliable unless you abuse them on purpose (like continuous random read/write benchmarking). I've replaced two 11 year old WD Blacks w/o any problems this year to upgrade to two IronWolf Pro NAS drives, because I wanted something dense and PMR. At office, I changed an old Seagate Constellation ES.2 (aka Barracuda enterprise) drive since it started to develop bad sectors (which I removed from an old disk storage unit anyway). IIRC, it was around ~10 years old too with a much heavier workload history. Looks like the most differentiating factors between enterprise and consumer drives are the command sets they support and features they bundle. NAS and other enterprise drives have features to make them more reliable in harsher conditions (heat, vibration, operational knocks induced by hot swapping, etc.). If you're getting an enterprise disk with a storage unit, you're probably also getting disks with special firmware developed for this brand anyway, so they're not off the shelf enterprise drives. At the end of the day, for normal operating conditions, device class doesn't matter for the home user, but for density and speed, you might need to get an enterprise drive anyway.

One thing I've always wondered, are these drives what people would recommend that you stick in a desktop or nas or are these 'datacenter' drives that are overkill for consumer use?

OldTimeCoffee 6y ago

I can only speak about the Exos drives, but the Ironwolf (Pro) drives are basically just the Exos drives relabeled for the consumer market. I'm actually about to buy 6 14TB Exos x16 drives to replace 7 6TB Exos 7E8 drives that are 5 years old. Frequently you can get the Exos drives cheaper than Ironwolf anyway.

lostlogin 6y ago
> Frequently you can get the Exos drives cheaper than Ironwolf anyway. You can. I’ve been getting the 16s and they are great but with caveats. The size makes volume creation and expansion insanely long (like a week per added drive). Not Seagate’s fault I know. The noise. They are loud. They are either chirping away or grinding away.

robotmay 6y ago

I would definitely recommend skipping any current large WD drives for home use. < 6TB are SMR and problematic in a NAS, and 6TB+ have a very irritating noise that no-one seems to be able to diagnose (sounds like a scanner when idle). I bought some 8TB WD Golds, and I was expecting them to be louder, but they do something very weird when idling and it's an extremely penetrating sound. It seems to be present on most large models: https://community.wd.com/t/strange-noise-coming-from-10tb-drives-wd100efax/226467 https://community.wd.com/t/strange-noise-coming-from-10tb-dr...

elorant 6y ago

Backblaze has said in the past that they don't buy enterprise drives because they didn't notice any difference from consumer ones. I don't know if that's still their policy.

dcm360 6y ago
The large Toshiba drives they're using are enterprise drives. A couple of weeks ago these drives were among the cheapest (€/TB) drives to get here in the Netherlands, so I assume Backblaze just bought them because of their price.

bayindirh 6y ago

Disclaimer: This is my personal experience from being an HPC sysadmin and old school computer enthusiast. If there's one trend I've seen from using generations of HDDs, excluding some problematic generations like first SATA Seagate Barracudas and early WD Caviars which died for no reason at all, newer generation HDDs are always more reliable from previous generation, regardless of their class (datacenter / consumer). For the last 10 years or so (starting with the introduction of first WD Green / Blue / Black series), the HDDs are exceptionally reliable unless you abuse them on purpose (like continuous random read/write benchmarking). I've replaced two 11 year old WD Blacks w/o any problems this year to upgrade to two IronWolf Pro NAS drives, because I wanted something dense and PMR. At office, I changed an old Seagate Constellation ES.2 (aka Barracuda enterprise) drive since it started to develop bad sectors (which I removed from an old disk storage unit anyway). IIRC, it was around ~10 years old too with a much heavier workload history. Looks like the most differentiating factors between enterprise and consumer drives are the command sets they support and features they bundle. NAS and other enterprise drives have features to make them more reliable in harsher conditions (heat, vibration, operational knocks induced by hot swapping, etc.). If you're getting an enterprise disk with a storage unit, you're probably also getting disks with special firmware developed for this brand anyway, so they're not off the shelf enterprise drives. At the end of the day, for normal operating conditions, device class doesn't matter for the home user, but for density and speed, you might need to get an enterprise drive anyway.