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Hi All. I am looking for an internal 8TB backup HDD.

Two questions - 1) brand and type recommendations - should I avoid NAS/SMB models. (I like HGST and WD)
2) Given vendors like Amz and Egg sell thru unknown third parties - where's a good place to buy one?

Thanks.

Avoid refurbs. Avoid anything branded as "Seagate Barracuda Compute" (IME these tend to be SMR drives).

I see no reason to avoid NAS drives. Not sure what you mean by an SMB drive; did you mean SMR?

If you buy through Amazon make sure you get one that shows Amazon as the seller; that way at least they will stand behind it and RMA should be painless if you need it.

If you decide to go B&M (Microcenter, Best Buy) make sure you buy retail boxed product. I don't know if BB sells any OEM-packaged drives but Microcenter definitely does, and from what I've seen they are not handled well.

Don't forget Toshiba, they make some good drives too (I believe they are actually based on HGST tech).

Yeah - typo SMR meant

You parallel my own thoughts. For my simple needs I assumed many world work fine.

Other viewpoints?

https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-H ... 073BLV4W5/

I would recommend that if you value your data. It's Helium based so a sealed drive and the enterprise focus should ensure somewhat better reliability and longer life.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

https://www.amazon.com/HGST-Ultrastar-HUH721010ALE604-0F27454-Enterprise/dp/B073BLV4W5/

I would recommend that if you value your data. It's Helium based so a sealed drive and the enterprise focus should ensure somewhat better reliability and longer life.

Rather pricey, and only available from 3rd party sellers.

I've had a couple Toshiba 8TB NAS drives (mirrored) in my Mac Pro at home for the last year and a half. They serve as network backup and fileserver storage drives (main machine is on SSD naturally).

No issues; no complaints.

just brew it! wrote:

Rather pricey, and only available from 3rd party sellers.

Thanks for that. Found a cheaper one with even more capacity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PF1TVND/

Data sheet: https://documents.westerndigital.com/co ... -hc520.pdf

Don't trust any single drive as a backup (especially if you leave it plugged in / online constantly).

That said, the only particular models to avoid would be what jbi already mentioned - Seagate Barracuda Compute and Seagate Archive drives. They're shingled, and while that's not inherently a bad thing, the performance variance depending on workload is pretty dramatic. Reliability-wise they're fine (I run them in my read-mostly NAS share and have tens of thousands of them at work).

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

Rather pricey, and only available from 3rd party sellers.

Thanks for that. Found a cheaper one with even more capacity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07PF1TVND/

Data sheet: https://documents.westerndigital.com/co ... -hc520.pdf

Still a 3rd party seller. And one without a long history on Amazon.

Edit: I guess some of the other sellers have a deeper Amazon history. Still all 3rd party though, so if you need an RMA it's potentially a crapshoot.

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/m4Nv6h ... wf180xzsta

$188, delivered. New 7200 rpm 8 TB drive in retail box. Sold and shipped by Amazon. You could literally buy two of them for less than the cost of one of the drives that Igor recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074BTZ2YJ

JustAnEngineer wrote:

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/m4Nv6h/toshiba-x300-8tb-35-7200rpm-internal-hard-drive-hdwf180xzsta

$188, delivered. New 7200 rpm 8 TB drive in retail box. Sold and shipped by Amazon. You could literally buy two of them for less than the cost of one of the drives that Igor recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074BTZ2YJ

@OP - There you go. Assuming you have two 3.5" bays available, get a pair of these and do RAID-1; this will be more robust than a single enterprise-class drive. Or if you don't care about RAID, just one of them should be fine. Toshiba makes decent gear.

Am I the only one in the universe who's wary of having a device with 0.64*10^14 bits and an specified read-error rate of 1 in 1*10^14 bits ?

Topinio wrote:

Am I the only one in the universe who's wary of having a device with 0.64*10^14 bits and an specified read-error rate of 1 in 1*10^14 bits ?

Sure, it's a concern. Like most things in life, it's a tradeoff. A few things to consider:

1. OP in this case stated that the use case was an "internal backup". So a secondary copy of data which he has another copy of. Furthermore, this method of "backup" has some inherent insecurities regardless (e.g. user error, power surge, failing PSU, or malware taking out both the original and backup); so in the grand scheme of things the unrecoverable read error rate is probably not increasing the risk of catastrophic data loss by that much. Any truly valuable data should also be backed up elsewhere.

2. The 1*10^14 figure seems to be a worst-case. TBH I don't think I've ever seen rates that bad in practice on a drive which wasn't demonstrably flaky (i.e. its reallocated sector count was growing). At home, my server runs a RAID-6 array with 28TB raw capacity (before RAID overhead). It does a full scrub once a month, which checks that every block on every drive of the array is readable. This means the scrub has been reading 2.2*10^14 bits every month. I have had no unrecoverable read errors in many months of operation (so far... fingers crossed).

3. The (comparatively) lousy unrecoverable error rate of current drives relative to their capacity is why any serious application of HDDs for storing critical data needs RAID-6 (or more sophisticated forms of erasure coding), and a robust backup and disaster recovery plan utilizing external or (better yet) off-site storage.

But... at the end of the day, you can't beat the cost per byte stored of HDDs, unless your use case is amenable to tape (which has a high up-front hardware cost, but the lowest media cost, and arguably the best archival characteristics).

Western Digital has surreptitiously infected even their Red drives with nasty shingles. The extreme slowness of writing to SMR drives causes them to timeout and fail if you install them in a RAID array like a NAS or if you try to use them as a system drive. Drive-managed SMR is really only usable in a scenario where you record to single drives infrequently and at a low transfer rate, but hard-drive manufacturers are using it because it lets them get higher capacity more cheaply than other options.

https://www.techpowerup.com/265889/seag ... too-report
https://www.techpowerup.com/265841/some ... s-and-raid
https://www.techpowerup.com/266101/west ... or-wd-gold
https://pcper.com/2020/04/seagate-says- ... be-nas-ty/
https://www.techpowerup.com/266207/west ... ls-use-smr
WD SMR list: https://pcper.com/2020/04/western-digit ... ntroversy/
Toshiba SMR list: https://www.techpowerup.com/266366/tosh ... technology

For now, Seagates's Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro drives are guaranteed to be uninfected with shingles, so maybe I made a good choice for my NAS array.