Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

Here wizards, magicians, sorcerers and everybody can rest a bit and talk about anything they like.

Just remember to respect the rules.

Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

Postby jiml8 » Dec 28th, '20, 10:14

I have a total of 12 HGST NAS hard drives that are between 6 1/2 and 7 1/2 years old. They all run 24/7/365.

Eleven of them are 4 TB; one is a 3 TB. The 3 TB and one 4TB are in my workstation. The other 10 4 TB drives are in my NAS.

None show any signs of aging or failure. One drive got kicked out of the NAS array about 2.5 years ago. I removed it from its hot-swap bay, and plugged it back in. It was recognized and rejoined the array. Other than that, there have been no incidents and no evidence of drive aging or failures. The NAS array is a RAID-6 and is scrubbed for errors once a week. No evidence of bit-rot (or if so, the scrubbing fixed it).

I would not have expected to go this long with zero failures. But I have. So, if you are looking for reliable drives, might want to look at HGST NAS drives.
jiml8
 
Posts: 1253
Joined: Jul 7th, '13, 18:09

Re: Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

Postby filip » Dec 30th, '20, 20:47

Did you check SMART status and run HD tests? I use GsmartControl for that.
Last edited by filip on Jan 2nd, '21, 15:05, edited 1 time in total.
filip
 
Posts: 474
Joined: May 4th, '11, 22:10
Location: Kranj, Slovenia

Re: Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

Postby jiml8 » Dec 31st, '20, 18:45

Yes, of course. Given their age, monitoring their status has moved up my priority list and I look at them frequently.
jiml8
 
Posts: 1253
Joined: Jul 7th, '13, 18:09

Re: Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

Postby filip » Jan 2nd, '21, 15:10

So they appear healthy! Good. I guess 24/7 helps to reduce startup stress significantly. I had some old HDs and I had one dying just months before warranty ended. For now no significant loss as I have multiple drives copies.
filip
 
Posts: 474
Joined: May 4th, '11, 22:10
Location: Kranj, Slovenia

Re: Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

Postby morgano » Jan 4th, '21, 16:57

A tip on the subject:

I have rescued the data from one SSD and one CompactFlash, by heating them in a box and keeping them there while reading. They were stone dead when at room temp, not even present to BIOS. The SSD needed only 40C, the CF 70C.

So if you find yourself needing to get data out of a dead storage device, try to heat it, and if that fails, try to cool it.
Mandriva since 2006, Mageia 2011 at home & work. Thinkpad T40, T43, T400, T510, Dell M4400, M6300, Acer Aspire 7. Workstation using LVM, LUKS, VirtualBox, BOINC
morgano
 
Posts: 1301
Joined: Jun 15th, '11, 17:51
Location: Kivik, Sweden

Re: Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

Postby jiml8 » Apr 16th, '21, 01:33

A couple of days ago, I was looking at the hard drive marketplace. I immediately went looking for HGST drives to check on reliability and performance of current models.

Well, I couldn't find any. Seems HGST, the brand, is gone. So I dug deeper. Seems Western Digital bought HGST in 2012 but as part of the purchase agreement had to allow them to operate as an independent entity for several years afterward. It was during this time I purchased all my HGST drives.

Now, HGST as a brand has been unwound and merged completely into WD.

That's really too bad; I don't particularly like WD as a company and I have never been overwhelmed by their drives, whereas HGST was formerly Hitachi and still more formerly IBM and, except for one turkey line of Deskstars, were always outstanding drives.

I hope these HGSTs of mine never fail, because I don't know what I will replace them with. I always go toward enterprise drives because reliability is the very most important thing for me in a hard drive. Right now the most likely replacements look like Seagate Iron Wolf Pro drives.

Seagate historically has a mixed record with respect to reliability; some series have been excellent while others were pretty bad. The reviews I have seen on these Iron Wolf Pro drives are all good, but I don't trust any of them because they don't show actual field reliability numbers. I would be interested in anything anyone here has to say about them, or any other NAS-type enterprise grade SATA drives.

I'm not buying now, but given the age of all my devices, I think I need to be ready to go at any time and I want to be pointed in one direction or another when failures start to happen.
jiml8
 
Posts: 1253
Joined: Jul 7th, '13, 18:09

Re: Apropos nothing (but possibly useful information)

Postby benmc » Apr 16th, '21, 02:44

here in NZ, HGST 0.5T drives are commonly the HDD found in PVRs. (excellent source BTW for laptop upgrade HDD drives)

would not have thought the drives were cheap enough to be used in such devices, but maybe the manufactures went for the better quality vs failure cost ratio.

regards
benmc
 
Posts: 1173
Joined: Sep 2nd, '11, 12:45
Location: Pirongia, New Zealand


Return to The Wizards Lair

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest