Seagate Expansion 16TB External HDD (STKP16000402) - $499

Emporium wrote: ↑ I would say, buy and use it as a BACKUP for the NAS
RAID is not a backup, so mandatory to have a second copy of your important data if you want to be safe.

Sorry, but I am a backup-a-holic

lol ...I also became a "backup-a-holic" after I lost all my anime/manga/pron collection on a hard drive.
I miss those days of backing up on DVD, the feeling of burning a DVD.

FrancisBacon wrote: ↑ This is extremely unlikely if you run a monthly data scrub.

Typically when most people populate a NAS with drives from the same batch. So odds are high that when one fails the rest are not too far behind.
15yrs ago when I had my old Dlink DNS343 and it was in RAID 5, I thought I was safe. Well, when one drive failed, I replaced it and started rebuild. During rebuild (a lot of disk activity non-stop), second drive failed Bye Bye data. And I was using 4 Enterprise class drives, not even consumer grade.

That was the first and last time I lost data. Since then I have multiple copies of everything, and will not do anything less than RAID 6 on any NAS. Now I have 2 rackmount RS2418+ NAS units with 12x 12TB rives in each in RAID 6. Close to 100TB each. All in a small rack, with a 10GbE switch and a rackmount UPS. Instead of putting them in HA mode, I decided to just prep the second one as a hyperbackup destination (so no visible shares - and only accessible to the other NAS via direct link and a mini thin client), and the first unit backs up to the second unit, on partitions that are not shared. And with versioning enabled. So even even one unit gets attacked with any ransomware, the second unit is still safe. I for critical personal documents, my sister (who is in AZ) and I, cross backup to each others NAS for safe keeping of the critical stuff. That does not include a few USB drives, and even some desktop NAS devices (2x DS1817+ and 2x DS1618+). YEs I am a backup-a-holic now

So "unlikely" ? possibly.
Impossible ? Wouldn't count on it..

Paulmolive wrote: ↑ I wouldn't even consider this warm at that price. It was in stock from Dell not too long ago for $419 with another 8% rakuten.

You'd get much better value from the 14TB from Best Buy at $350. One thing to note is that the 14TB is likely a Ironwolf Pro instead of an Exos.

https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/se ... 0/15469301

Are those shuckable?
I know the WD are but wasn’t sure on Seagate?

FrancisBacon wrote: ↑ This is extremely unlikely if you run a monthly data scrub.

whats that

Emporium wrote: ↑ So "unlikely" ? possibly.
Impossible ? Wouldn't count on it..

I mean nothing is impossible, but the reason drives fail during a rebuild is the added stress of full time read/writes.

A monthly scrub means each drive is subject to this intense activity once a month so surprise failures are quite a bit less likely.

pvdv wrote: ↑ Maybe my advice was outdated - I don't know anything about Chia - but that's no cause for rudeness. I was trying to help a fellow RFD'er.

Actually the other guys is outdated. The last month of so Chia netspace growth has drastically dropped to a snails pace and is no longer creating a hardrive market drain. Cheaper prices will surface post October after Seagate catches up on backorders and starts accumulating storage stockpiles again from the increased factory production being greater than the new trending demand on large TB drives.

Suthek wrote: ↑ Are those shuckable?
I know the WD are but wasn’t sure on Seagate?

Can shuck

h8g7f6j9k0 wrote: ↑ whats that

Checking your hard drives for bad sectors (or other issues) is called 'data scrubbing.

Synology and QNAP at least have that feature and it can automatically scrub drives on a monthly basis and even email you the results. I' mentioned Synology and QNAP, but I am sure many others have a similar option.

Emporium wrote: ↑ Typically when most people populate a NAS with drives from the same batch. ...
So "unlikely" ? possibly.
Impossible ? Wouldn't count on it..

My first question is: did you run monthly scrubs?

Certainly you're right it's possible, but I think unlikely if you're scrubbing.

Still, this is why I (1) try to buy in different batches, and install new HDDs one month apart, and of course (2) back up.

h8g7f6j9k0 wrote: ↑ whats that

If you run synology NAS and see BTRFS, that's a feature that reads every single byte on every single disk and checks it against a checksum.

Benefits:
(1) any errors are corrected and mentioned to you;
(2) puts the disks through stress equivalent to a full raid rebuild. So it's unlikely that they'll fail during a rebuild if they just passed the test.


Last thing you want is to lose a disk and have to pray your untested disk is strong enough to survive a rebuild test.

FrancisBacon wrote: ↑ My first question is: did you run monthly scrubs?

Certainly you're right it's possible, but I think unlikely if you're scrubbing.

Still, this is why I (1) try to buy in different batches, and install new HDDs one month apart, and of course (2) back up.

15+ yrs ago, I don't recall if scrubs were even a thing on that crappy NAS But either way. Scrubs protect you against surface defects. Will do nothing for sudden failure of heads/actuators, bearings, and electronics.
And you are 100% correct about buying in different batches, but with current production runs, batches can run a long time. And most people want to buy all the drives they need to get started once they get their NAS So theory is 100% correct, but practice, it doesn't happen often, except in large companies.

Backups are of course key (like you mentioned). just because a NAS has RAID to protect against a disk failure (or 2), does not mean you don't need a backup of it's contents. Just takes one bad power supply in a unit to take out all the drives in the NAS.

Emporium wrote: ↑ 15+ yrs ago, I don't recall if scrubs were even a thing on that crappy NAS But either way. Scrubs protect you against surface defects. Will do nothing for sudden failure of heads/actuators, bearings, and electronics.

Yeah, I think BTRFS on Synology is relatively recent. Before that it might be RAID scrub only.

For the srub, you're right of course that it doesn't protect you, but it's more like that treadmill heart test your doctor runs.

If you pass, you're unlikely to have a heart attack in the next month.

So when one disk fails, what are the odds another will fail within days?


To anyone buying a new NAS, I'd recommend buying your disks slowly.

Eg: first disk, 10TB. Use SHR with no redundancy. Do use backups immediately.

Next sale at $20 per TB: buy another disk, convert to SHR-1 (ie RAID 5). Capacity stays at 10TB

Next sale: buy another disk, capacity increases. Etc

Also, more bays. Always get more bays. :-)

sandboxseb wrote: ↑ Higher capacities are great until they break, at that moment you find out how much data is really hold in 16TB haha ^^ I try to stay at 8TB, already takes a long time to fill out at max speed.

0.0311875$/GB isn't cheap

If you have 16TB of data it's usually not important. Most likely it's just movies, games, and porn.

WL1980 wrote: ↑ If you have 16TB of data it's usually not important. Most likely it's just movies, games, and porn.

That is a pretty generalist statement.
If you have a GoPro, and use it regularly for family events (vacations, kids events, etc..) your storage requirements can go up pretty quick. So Home movies do take up a lot of space. And with Cameras having multi-MP sensors nowadays, and you do any serious shooting with a DSLR in RAW mode, that will add significant space requirements.

I agree that a LOT of space is used for regular movies and music, but there are many legitimate needs for space, that are irreplaceable, and nowadays the size requirements are bigger and bigger.

10 TB Seagate CMR is currently $23/TB at Best Buy. $20/TB and below is a hot price but if you are desperate it seems $23/TB is the lowest I can currently find.
https://www.bestbuy.ca/en-ca/product/se ... h&adSlot=1

The best rule when it comes to buying hard drives is to buy cheap, and buy two of them.

Emporium wrote: ↑ Scrubs protect you against surface defects. Will do nothing for sudden failure of heads/actuators, bearings, and electronics.

More like data integrity but the core of the argument is drive failure.

A frequent scrub is akin to someone that runs every day vs a file system that does nothing until disaster happens is like a couch potato.
Both of them are gonna die, but the runner actually running is used to the workload unlike the couch potato who hasn't run a mile in their life.
So when a disaster happens, it's business as usual for the runner because they're running every month.
The couch potato having to face a marathon however now has to work overtime just to keep up.

So while you're technically right about a scrub not doing anything about sudden failures, a frequent scrub will expose issues more readily early on vs having a surprise when you surely need it.
If a drive has a "weak heart", killing it early with a scrub will expose an issue today rather than 5 years from now.

ConsoleWatcher wrote: ↑ The best rule when it comes to buying hard drives is to buy cheap, and buy two of them.

Or fat finger it and buy 23 of them

Yeah I belong in /r/datahoarder

Alfred25 wrote: ↑
lol ...I also became a "backup-a-holic" after I lost all my anime/manga/pron collection on a hard drive.
I miss those days of backing up on DVD, the feeling of burning a DVD.

death_hawk wrote: ↑ More like data integrity but the core of the argument is drive failure.

A frequent scrub is akin to someone that runs every day vs a file system that does nothing until disaster happens is like a couch potato.
Both of them are gonna die, but the runner actually running is used to the workload unlike the couch potato who hasn't run a mile in their life.
So when a disaster happens, it's business as usual for the runner because they're running every month.
The couch potato having to face a marathon however now has to work overtime just to keep up.

So while you're technically right about a scrub not doing anything about sudden failures, a frequent scrub will expose issues more readily early on vs having a surprise when you surely need it.
If a drive has a "weak heart", killing it early with a scrub will expose an issue today rather than 5 years from now.

I appreciate scrubbing of drives, and last December it detected 8 bad sectors on one of my Ironwolf Pro drives (obviously it was 3 months after warranty expired). Good thing, it has not grown ever since, but I do have a backup of the data elsewhere anyhow.
Your analogy has some flaws Drives are not like runners who keep in shape by running.

Exercising a drive, does not make it any healthier. If anything, you could argue that it puts unnecessary wear and tear on the drive. During the scrubbing period (typically once a month), it practically tortures the drive, and operating temperatures do rise typically, putting unnecessary stress on the bearings, and other components which it can not predict, when they will fail. Does it protect against failing media surface and identify weak and bad sectors ? yes.. But at the expense of other components. So it is a trade off.

Having a regular backup schedule for your data will also exercise the drives, and ensure that the source data is still readable every time it tries to back up.

I still remember the good old days where every couple of years, you would do a disk-to-disk clone, and then do a low level format on the HDD (SCSI, ESDI, MFM, RLL, etc.. drives) in order to refresh the sector/track information to ensure the drive was still properly addressable, and to map out any bad sectors.

I keep data scrubbing enabled, and it is more to detect data integrity errors early on, due to bad media, rather than disk failure. which unfortunately is unpredictable in "most" cases.
I don't go cheap on my drives so I don't really encounter many issues. All units go through a 1 week torture test before going into daily use environment, I buy decent quality drives. On my NAS collection, I have 1 with a set of WD Enterprise Gold, 2 units have Seagate EXOS drives, another 2 have Seagate Constellation ES3 drives, 1 has Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives.
I have an old DS1512+ and that one has the crappiest drives in it (old 3TB Barracuda XT units). Surprisingly, they have been working 24/7 for the last 8+ years, and I use it purely as a transfer dropbox for temporary stuff (so don't care if volume dies tomorrow). None of the drives have a single bad sector yet. They have surprised me. They are showing over 70k power-on hours.

The tools are there to test drives regularly. People need to decide for themselves what they want to do and at what frequency.