http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OP2PKH2/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?tag=slickdeals&ascsubtag=91464c65d11546a58b5940bfb43512eb&ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

 

Temp out of stock, but if you order they will ship it when they have it available

 

I know some of the externals are cheaper, but this has a 3 year warranty and you dont have to remove it from an external case and lose your warranty.

That is an Unbelievable deal!!!

Anyone have any experience or reviews (pro or con) on these drives? I remember something about Toshiba being bolstered by another company - can't remember if it was Seagate, WD, or HGST.

Surviving hard drive manufacturers are Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital.

 

Toshiba only has the manufacturing aspects of the HGST for 3.5" drives. WD has the 2.5" and minor aspects of 3.5" HGST.

 

"Hitachi Global Storage Technologies – 2002 merger of Hitachi and IBM disk drive businesses, sold to Western Digital in 2012 with part of 3.5? manufacturing facilities going to Toshiba"

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers

 

smart screenshots from webgui

 

5TB Canvio Desktop External Hard Drive HDWC250XK3J1

more...

Anyone have any experience or reviews (pro or con) on these drives? I remember something about Toshiba being bolstered by another company - can't remember if it was Seagate, WD, or HGST.

This Toshiba is made by Hitachi. Says it right on the label. My bet is that all latest Toshibas are.

I'd agree these are likely made in the Hitachi facilities that Toshiba acquired a couple years ago.

 

Certainly a VERY good price ... $32/TB is tough to beat.

 

 

Thanks to  interwebtech for posting a smart report from his Toshiba 5T (see a few posts up).

 

I merged his topic in here.

 

Seems like a good deal on drives with Hitachi roots.

... Certainly a VERY good price ... $32/TB is tough to beat.

Call me cheap, but I consider $25/TB as good price. They all are aging faster then they die. 

$25/TB is an unrealistic price for high quality drives.  Price isn't the only factor I consider when buying drives -- a few extra $$ for high quality NAS-rated drives seems like pretty cheap "insurance" for my data.  I'm quite happy with WD Reds at $35-40/TB ... that's plenty cheap enough.

 

 

Paying 40% more for storage {$25/TB vs $35/TB}? When the potential difference in reliability is less than 3%?

 

To quote BackBlaze;

"Where are the WD 4 TB Drives?

 

There is only one Storage Pod of Western Digital 4 TB drives. Why? The reason is simple: price. We purchase drives through various channel partners for each manufacturer. We’ll put out an RFQ (Request for Quote) for say 2,000 – 4 TB drives, and list the brands and models we have validated for use in our Storage Pods. Over the course of the last year, Western Digital drives were often not quoted and when they were, they were never the lowest price. Generally the WD drives were $15-$20 more per drive. That’s too much of a premium to pay when the Seagate and HGST drives are performing so well".

Paying 40% more for storage {$25/TB vs $35/TB}?

 

All depends if that's 1 year warranty vs 3 years or 5 years, as well as slow 5900rpm or fast 7200rpm.

 

Any drive that has less than 3 year warranty is a non-starter for me regardless of the price. Assuming the drives only live until their warranty runs out, you'd possibly be paying $25/TB + $25/TB (purchased replacement for dead 1st drive) to have a working drive for 2 years versus $35/TB for 3 years.

Paying 40% more for storage {$25/TB vs $35/TB}?

 

All depends if that's 1 year warranty vs 3 years or 5 years, as well as slow 5900rpm or fast 7200rpm.

 

Any drive that has less than 3 year warranty is a non-starter for me regardless of the price. Assuming the drives only live until their warranty runs out, you'd possibly be paying $25/TB + $25/TB (purchased replacement for dead 1st drive) to have a working drive for 2 years versus $35/TB for 3 years.

 

I agree in principle. Buy drives that will last a long time, even if the price is higher. Cheaper than buying twice or losing data.

 

Warranty, for me, is not the basis. I put a lot of stock in reviews, studies, and personal experience. My experience with Seagate has been quite poor from 2T on.  Hitachi and HGST have been rock solid for me, and they get the best BackBlaze ratings too. If these are Hitachi's in Toshiba clothing, seems win win for price and reliability. Note that these drives are well priced from several sources, including Toshiba direct.

I agree in principle. Buy drives that will last a long time, even if the price is higher. Cheaper than buying twice or losing data.

 

Warranty, for me, is not the basis. I put a lot of stock in reviews, studies, and personal experience. My experience with Seagate has been quite poor from 2T on.  Hitachi and HGST have been rock solid for me, and they get the best BackBlaze ratings too. If these are Hitachi's in Toshiba clothing, seems win win for price and reliability. Note that these drives are well priced from several sources, including Toshiba direct.

 

Exactly, warranty has nothing to do with actual drive reliability. Reality is most drives last 4+ years, even the troublesome Seagate 1.5TBs. You're better off investing in additional EC (parity) than paying higher drive costs.

I dont know, I've had bad experience with drives that only have 1 year warranties. Granted they were not in my array but in the desktops that I get roped into supporting for friends and family. Now its not a primary driver but I find the reliability of those drives are lacking, the correlation is extremely high. Theres a major reason the manufacturer doesn't extend them to 3 years.

I agree in principle. Buy drives that will last a long time, even if the price is higher. Cheaper than buying twice or losing data.

 

Warranty, for me, is not the basis. I put a lot of stock in reviews, studies, and personal experience. My experience with Seagate has been quite poor from 2T on.  Hitachi and HGST have been rock solid for me, and they get the best BackBlaze ratings too. If these are Hitachi's in Toshiba clothing, seems win win for price and reliability. Note that these drives are well priced from several sources, including Toshiba direct.

 

Exactly, warranty has nothing to do with actual drive reliability. Reality is most drives last 4+ years, even the troublesome Seagate 1.5TBs. You're better off investing in additional EC (parity) than paying higher drive costs.

 

I could agree, if cost were the only driver. But I am not interested in RMAing disks and rebuilding on a frequent basis. I am willing to pay a premium for reliability. A business that's buying drives 2000 as a time and has a tech support dept that handles these on a regular basis is very different than me, buying 2 at a time and dealing with issue during my recreational time!

BackBlaze is focused purely on cost -- NOT on reliability.    They've indeed only got one pod of 4TB WD Reds ... but their latest update (Jan 2015) shows they've had ZERO failures in this pod -- so they've been by far their most reliable 4TB drives.

 

The LEAST reliable of their 4TB drives are the Seagates => but guess which drives BackBlaze buys the most of 

(Yep ... Seagates)    Despite their low reliability statistics, BackBlaze says "... We love Seagate! This is a common misconception about our hard drive stats posts. ...  the price of the Seagate drives cannot be beat ... This goes back to the price to density to failure-rate ratio that Backblaze likes to use, and in it, Seagate often comes out on top! "

 

In other words, with as many drives as they buy, swapping out drives and doing rebuilds isn't considered a big deal and their stats show it's less expensive to do that than buy more reliable drives.

 

One thing to consider vis-à-vis comparing this to use in UnRAID:  The BackBlaze pods use RAID-6 ... i.e. they are dual fault-tolerant; so a 2nd drive failure during a rebuild isn't a big deal.  They also have complete backups (as we all SHOULD but I know a lot of UnRAID'ers do not).    Given that use case, going for the lowest cost is understandable.

 

UnRAID is a far different use case.  Only single drive fault tolerance (so much more risk during a rebuild), and most of us only buy a few handfuls of drives (if that) per year.    $10-15/drive adds up to a  lot when you're buying hundreds/thousands of drives per year;  but for a typical UnRAID user that's not a lot of $$ => getting more reliability and an extra year of warranty is easily worth it in my opinion.    Independent of the higher reliability, which is worth something by itself,  if you replace ONE 4TB drive in the 3rd year of warranty (not an unlikely scenario), you've just saved the price difference for 10-12 drives.

 

I dont know, I've had bad experience with drives that only have 1 year warranties. Granted they were not in my array but in the desktops that I get roped into supporting for friends and family. Now its not a primary driver but I find the reliability of those drives are lacking, the correlation is extremely high. Theres a major reason the manufacturer doesn't extend them to 3 years.

 

Yes, and that reason is cost vs price. Extending the warranty raises costs (mostly material handling, not engineering), which in turn raises the price (see why WD is not purchased by BackBlaze). It has nothing to due with reliability. You can find ST4000DM000 offered with 1year, 2year, and 3year warranty. Does the price make the drive more reliable?

 

 

BackBlaze is focused purely on cost -- NOT on reliability.    They've indeed only got one pod of 4TB WD Reds ... but their latest update (Jan 2015) shows they've had ZERO failures in this pod -- so they've been by far their most reliable 4TB drives.

 

The LEAST reliable of their 4TB drives are the Seagates => but guess which drives BackBlaze buys the most of 

(Yep ... Seagates)    Despite their low reliability statistics, BackBlaze says "... We love Seagate! This is a common misconception about our hard drive stats posts. ...  the price of the Seagate drives cannot be beat ... This goes back to the price to density to failure-rate ratio that Backblaze likes to use, and in it, Seagate often comes out on top! "

 

 

Even your quote shows they are not purely focused on cost. Backblaze focuses on price and density and failure-rate.

 

Unfortunately, the true failure rate is not known at purchase time. That would make the problem too simple.

I dont know, I've had bad experience with drives that only have 1 year warranties. Granted they were not in my array but in the desktops that I get roped into supporting for friends and family. Now its not a primary driver but I find the reliability of those drives are lacking, the correlation is extremely high. Theres a major reason the manufacturer doesn't extend them to 3 years.

 

Yes, and that reason is cost vs price. Extending the warranty raises costs (mostly material handling, not engineering), which in turn raises the price (see why WD is not purchased by BackBlaze). It has nothing to due with reliability. You can find ST4000DM000 offered with 1year, 2year, and 3year warranty. Does the price make the drive more reliable?

 

No, the drive being more reliable makes it more expensive. I'm willing to pay for reliability.

Independent of the higher reliability, which is worth something by itself,  if you replace ONE 4TB drive in the 3rd year of warranty (not an unlikely scenario), you've just saved the price difference for 10-12 drives.

 

The price difference, for a additional year of warranty is $15-20. You can buy it on NewEgg, and that figure is confirmed in the Backblaze blog.

 

But you have the math backwards, pay the additional cost up front, to maybe get a "free" drive in year 3, when it's value is diminished. Considering the data, 1-4% failure rates, it's a bad investment. The chances are unlikely, even at 4% failure rates. And more unlikely with more reliable drives.

 

To meet your forecast of saving the difference on 10-12 drives in year 3, you need a failure rate of about 8-10%.

 

I agree it's not likely -- I was just noting that IF you end up replacing a drive in year 3 you've had at least some benefit.

 

Personally, I could care less about the price ... within reason.  I'll gladly pay an extra $10-15/TB for more reliable NAS-rated drives, but won't pay the much higher differential for enterprise class drives.  Considering I once paid $173,000,000/TB for a hard drive, I think today's drives are pretty inexpensive, regardless of the price  :)

 

For the # of drives a typical UnRAID user is likely to buy, the cost differential is simply not significant relative to the higher reliability.    Having more reliable drives is much more important on a system with single fault tolerance than it is on a RAID-6 pod, where a 2nd drive failure during a rebuild doesn't matter.

 

 

I'll gladly pay an extra $10-15/TB for more reliable NAS-rated drives, but won't pay the much higher differential for enterprise class drives. 

 

Where is the data showing the NAS drives are more reliable? The Backblaze data has WD Reds showing only median failure rates (not good, not bad). With WD's pricing, Backblaze may never get good data on them.

 

 

Backblaze only has one pod of 4TB WD Reds => and as of their latest update (January) they'd had ZERO failures on that pod.    Only 45 drives, of course, so not a very good statistical sample ... but hard to complain about the reliability 

 

I've bought fewer than that -- about 25 or so -- but have also had ZERO failures with Reds (in my case, both 3TB and 4TB units) except for a couple "infant mortality" issues where drives failed my initial testing => and I think those were caused by very poor packing by the shipper (Newegg).

 

They may/may not really be better -- but the manufacturers' claim the NAS units are designed for higher reliability; they back that up with longer warranties;  intuitively the lower rpm, lower power, cooler temperature factors all seem to support this; and my personal experience with both the Seagate NAS units and WD Reds has been exceptionally good (i.e. perfect), so I'll keep buying them.    As I noted, the price differential is simply not significant for the number of drives I buy.