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3TB WD Reds -- 4 for $399.99 ONLY UNTIL 9:59AM Pacific Time Today (8 Oct)

garycase

By garycase
in Good Deals!

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garycase Grand Master

garycase

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I've had it with 3tb drives Smallest I'll buy this bf will be 4tb. But I'm hoping to find $150 deals on 6tb.

 

Don't hold your breath waiting for $150 6TB drives  :)

I'll jump in for a few at $240 or less ($40/TB is plenty good enough for me ... especially for NAS rated drives).

 

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c3 Collaborator

c3

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I've had it with 3tb drives Smallest I'll buy this bf will be 4tb. But I'm hoping to find $150 deals on 6tb.

 

Don't hold your breath waiting for $150 6TB drives  :)

I'll jump in for a few at $240 or less ($40/TB is plenty good enough for me ... especially for NAS rated drives).

 

 

I think this hope is for a black friday/cyber monday door buster type sale. Definitely a loss leader...

 

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SSD Mentor

SSD

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3TB Reds got bad reliability ratings from the latest BackBlaze study. These are too expensive and poorly rated. I'd steer clear.

 

If you need a drive right now, buy a 4T Seagate ST4000DM000 for $142 at Amazon. Best value out there at the moment IMO.

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garycase Grand Master

garycase

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Black Friday prices are usually pretty good, but I think $99 4TB drives or $150 6TB drives are way too optimistic.    And if any drives ARE at those price levels, they won't be the higher quality NAS rated units ... so I'd pass anyway.    In addition, there will almost certainly be quantity restrictions.

 

In the great scheme of things, it's pretty irrelevant whether storage costs $25/TB, $35/TB, or even $45/TB.    These costs pale in the face of the total cost of building a high-quality server, populating it with TB's of data, and setting up a good backup system to keep the data backed up.

 

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SSD Mentor

SSD

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Black Friday prices are usually pretty good, but I think $99 4TB drives or $150 6TB drives are way too optimistic.    And if any drives ARE at those price levels, they won't be the higher quality NAS rated units ... so I'd pass anyway.    In addition, there will almost certainly be quantity restrictions.

 

In the great scheme of things, it's pretty irrelevant whether storage costs $25/TB, $35/TB, or even $45/TB.    These costs pale in the face of the total cost of building a high-quality server, populating it with TB's of data, and setting up a good backup system to keep the data backed up.

 

My black Friday experiences have not been stellar. You might find a deal but usually limited to 1 or maybe 2 per customer. A 4t for$99 seems much more realistic than a 6T for $150.

 

Drives are the single highest cost part of my servers. Not understanding this "pale in comparison" statement. While paying a premium on A drive may not be material, doing it on 15 or 20 of them is real money. A backup solution which doubles your storage needs makes those costs even more material. My advice is watch the sales closely and buy highly reliable drives when the prices are good. Much better than waiting until the need is critical and then trying to find a good deal on a good drives then.

 

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garycase Grand Master

garycase

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... Drives are the single highest cost part of my servers.

 

That's true for most of us in terms of the HARDWARE costs ... but the cost of my media FAR exceeds the cost of the server that's holding it.    Pick your price point ... but for example let's say $40/TB.  A TB can hold from 40 to over 200 movies, depending on whether you're storing uncompressed BluRays or DVDs.  The cost of the drives certainly pales in comparison to the total cost when you factor in the cost of the media you're storing -- what do you pay for BluRay or DVD disks?    And if you're averaging less ... perhaps $30/TB ... then the difference is even more striking.    Note that a $10/TB difference in average cost/TB is only $200 difference in a 20TB server ... that's hardly a significant difference relative to the total cost of the server and the media it holds.

 

 

... buy highly reliable drives when the prices are good.

 

Certainly agree -- with a strong emphasis on the "highly reliable" aspect.  I think that's far more important than focusing on the lowest possible cost/TB  (although clearly if you can get the drives on sale that's a good thing)

 

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SSD Mentor

SSD

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... but the cost of my media FAR exceeds the cost of the server that's holding it

In your way of thinking, paying an extra $50 / gallon of gas is not a big deal because your $50,000 car costs so much more than the gas. You save money where you can.

 

I consider hard drives "the gas" in the media server. Drives age and small drives become obsolete. I've gone through an initial set of drives (G1 drives [<1Tb] which I don't use in a server any more), and refreshed them twice (G2 drives [1TB-2TB] are now in my backup server and G3 drives [3Tb-4Tb] are in my main server). Saving $10-$20 per Tb can save hundreds even over a thousand dollars depending on the server size, even if a person stopped buying media altogether. People have better uses for those dollars than overpaying on drives.

 

Certainly agree -- with a strong emphasis on the "highly reliable" aspect. I think that's far more important than focusing on the lowest possible cost/TB  (although clearly if you can get the drives on sale that's a good thing)

At this point there is no evidence that less expensive desktop drives with shorter warranties are less reliable than more expensive NAS and enterprise drives with longer ones. It is a model by model, manufacturer by manufacturer issue, and our best tools are studies like are done by BackBlaze.

 

WD Greens and Reds have not faired so well as far as I can see. They are currently at the bottom of my list, and my last WD drive was a 2T that failed under warranty just before 6 years. The WDs were awesome in the 1T days with EACS/EADS drives, which is most of my 1T G2 inventory.

Seagates were awesome in G1, lousy in G2, and are making a little resurgence with their 4T in G3. I have 2 of the 4T units. The future is a little murky with the shingled technology. Time will tell.

Hitachi (now HGST) were bad in G1 (think Deathstar) and G2 until the 2T drives, where they took the reliability lead which they have not given up to date. Besides the 2 Seagate 4T, all my other drives 3Tb+ are Hitachi or HGST.

 

I have no brand loyalty. My decisions have all been based on price and reliability.

 

Paying a little extra for a warranty makes little sense for me, as all my failures have come with initial testing or well after 4 years, with the vast majority of G2 and G3 drives (going back over 7 years) still working perfectly. And with 5 year warranties (6 with CC) being a thing of the past, I am not willing to pay a premium on warranties that still expire in the "sweet spot" of drive lifespan.

 

A totally different way of thinking is to buy less reliable drives and plan for wholesale failures under warranty. Might be nice to have ALL your drives fail within the credit card warranty, meaning the drive usage was totally free and now your are able to leverage those same dollars into buying new drives. This isn't for me. Drives don't fail on queue, and drive failures are, at best, a stressful PITA to recover from. I prefer few failures and for my drives to last as long as possible. And your credit card company would certainly be looking skeptically at you if this were the case!

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c3 Collaborator

c3

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Sounds like you think of hard drives more like tires on a car, not gas. As gas, most fully expect to put more in each week, and it is not a pita. Few people stress over buying gas, even fewer pay a premium.

 

For me, storage is like gas, I expect drives to fail and when they do, there is no impact, just add more each week, try not to run out of gas/storage.

 

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SSD Mentor

SSD

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So I suppose your used storage is like a tire, that has to be replaced as the mileage (age) increases.

 

And unused storage is like gas, the gets used up over time and needs to be replenished.

 

But my point was, that you don't throw away money on drives, regardless of the value of the material stored on it.

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garycase Grand Master

garycase

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But my point was, that you don't throw away money on drives, regardless of the value of the material stored on it.

 

So to continue c3's tire analogy, do you consider it throwing away money to buy higher quality tires when cheaper tires are rated for the same # of miles?

 

Nobody advocates "throwing away money on drives" => it's simply a question of whether or not the lowest cost/TB is a good metric, or if it's worth a bit more to have drives with longer warranties, better vibration control, and that are designed for NAS environments.    I don't consider spending a bit more for these characteristics "throwing away money" -- it's more like a bit of extra insurance.

 

 

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SSD Mentor

SSD

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But my point was, that you don't throw away money on drives, regardless of the value of the material stored on it.

 

So to continue c3's tire analogy, do you consider it throwing away money to buy higher quality tires when cheaper tires are rated for the same # of miles?

 

Nobody advocates "throwing away money on drives" => it's simply a question of whether or not the lowest cost/TB is a good metric, or if it's worth a bit more to have drives with longer warranties, better vibration control, and that are designed for NAS environments.    I don't consider spending a bit more for these characteristics "throwing away money" -- it's more like a bit of extra insurance.

 

Except the facts don't bear any of it out.

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garycase Grand Master

garycase

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Except the facts don't bear any of it out.

 

Depends on what you consider the "facts".  The BackBlaze study has been rather severely criticized by many very knowledgeable folks, e.g. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/02/17/backblaze_how_not_to_evaluate_disk_reliability/

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/26-home-theater-computers/1515424-dispelling-backblaze-s-hdd-reliability-myth-real-story-covered.html

 

In particular, the Backblaze contention that enterprise drives are less reliable than consumer drives is based on a sample size (of enterprise drives) that's 0.025 the size of their consumer grade sample ... with a total of 17 failures in the enterprise drives.    Not exactly a good statistical comparison.

 

Backblaze's buying pattern is (and always has been) to buy the cheapest possible drives, even if that means harvesting drives from external enclosures;  offering payments to folks to take advantage of the low price sales at various retailers (Costco, Frys, etc.); buying up RMA returns from folks who will sell them cheap; etc.    So their statistics reflect the performance of THOSE drives ... not exactly a typical mix of drives purchased by the average UnRAID user  :)    ... AND, those drives are installed in enclosures with 45 or more drives/enclosure => where they're subjected to more heat and vibration than almost any UnRAIDer would tolerate for their drives.    These all skew their results away from what a more objective analysis of the various drives might show.

 

 

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tr0910 Community Regular

tr0910

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Still it's the best data we have. Until Google shares their drive experience we'll have to make do. 

 

There is enough data there on the drives that we can compare the non enterprise drives quite well.  Like you I'm not ready to throw the enterprise drives under the bus quite yet. When you are cooking up statistics you always need to watch for bias.  Backblaze is biased against enterprise drives.

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c3 Collaborator

c3

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But my point was, that you don't throw away money on drives, regardless of the value of the material stored on it.

 

So to continue c3's tire analogy, do you consider it throwing away money to buy higher quality tires when cheaper tires are rated for the same # of miles?

 

Nobody advocates "throwing away money on drives" => it's simply a question of whether or not the lowest cost/TB is a good metric, or if it's worth a bit more to have drives with longer warranties, better vibration control, and that are designed for NAS environments.    I don't consider spending a bit more for these characteristics "throwing away money" -- it's more like a bit of extra insurance.

 

Like I said, it depends on how you operate storage. If hard drive failure is disruptive, it's more like tires. The cost of disruption, can be a factor. Since hard drive failure is non disruptive for me, paying more is just paying more, i got nothing for that added expense. It's more like the gas analogy. I don't even have emails sent for hard drive failure, as I am not going to react to them.

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