Huge study done showing the most reliable HDs

[Kawboy12R 0]

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

 

Looks like the folks on here who didn't like "green" drives weren't wrong. Seagate in particular fared poorly. The quick lesson? The Hitachi Deskstar has come a long way since the "Deathstar" days. Also, it is hard to go wrong with the Western Digital 3TB Red (WD30EFRX).

[dustmop 0]

I'd believe it. I'm in an environment where there are well over 360 (enterprise-grade) drives spinning all the time. Seagate drives seem to have bad models, and it seems to hurt. My failure rate for 500gb drives is quite low: maybe around 3% over 6 years. 1tb Seagate drives on the other hand: closer to 60% over 5 years. I've had good experience with 3tb Hitachi drives, with no failures yet over ~13 months. 2tb Seagate are also treating me well.

 

That being said, I'm not surprised about the 1.5tb Seagate drives being crap. But their newer drives seem to have overcome MOST of their issues from before.

[shockwave199 0]

What's the deal with 4tb drives not being favored in nvr hardware units now? The dahua for instance, can take two 4tb drives for a total of 8tb but most vendors only offer 3tb now.

[dvarapala 0]

Also, it is hard to go wrong with the Western Digital 3TB Red (WD30EFRX).

 

Funny you should mention those drives.

 

I bought 4 of those exact drives (2 for my Synology NAS, and 2 for my ZoneMinder server machine). Every 2 weeks or so the ZoneMinder box would lock up completely, requiring a hard reset to recover. From the crash dump information the kernel was somewhere deep inside the filesystem code at the time, accessing one of the WD reds. On a hunch, I replaced the 2 WD reds with Seagates, and voila! Not one problem since.

 

I took one of those reds and put it into my desktop machine and it's been working fine so far; in addition, the 2 in my Synology NAS have been working fine for months. In both cases, the drives are used for bulk storage of ripped DVDs and video data. My conclusion is that the WD red drives are fine when used as storage drives but have problems when subjected to the constant 24/7/52 pounding of multiple IP camera streams being continually written to disk.

[Kawboy12R 0]

Dvarapala, it's just speculation on my part, but I'd probably guess either a bug in the Linux file system kernel, possibly something non-standard in the firmware of the red drive that gets accessed rarely, or a reaction to heat (insufficient ventilation perhaps?) over an extended period of time. Might be a Zoneminder issue as well, but it looks like you've isolated it to something hitting the hardware pretty directly. Whatever the cause, swapping drives fixed it so that's excellent detective work.

[Kawboy12R 0]

On an interesting note- be kind to your drives.

 

http://lildude.co.uk/effect-of-noise-on-disk-performance

[dvarapala 0]

Dvarapala, it's just speculation on my part, but I'd probably guess either a bug in the Linux file system kernel

 

Maybe, but I tried different kernel versions and still experienced the lockup, and the same kernel works fine with all the other drives in that system. If there is a bug, it's amazingly specific to WD RED 3TB drives.

 

or a reaction to heat (insufficient ventilation perhaps?) over an extended period of time. Might be a Zoneminder issue as well

 

Unlikely, because the conditions and software have not changed; all I did was replace the reds with 7200RPM Seagate Barracudas.

 

that's excellent detective work.

 

Mostly luck, plus some educated guesswork.