Best Hard Drive for 24/7 Use?

[kingknightrider]

Which of these would be the best Hard Drive for use in a Work/Business/Gaming/Video&Audio editing BEASTstation that will be able to take a beating and working non-stop for at least 5 years 24/7 and be faster and better performing than 4x WD Black 2TB WD2003FZEX drives?

WD Black 2TB WD2003FZEX

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822236624?

 

Western Digital Ultrastar 6TB DC HC310

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822234362

 

WD Red Pro WD6003FFBX 6TB

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822234344?

 

WD Black 6TB Performance

https://www.newegg.com/p/234-000G-000W5?

 

Note: Beast-Station Means: Ryzen 7 3800X | 48GB RAM | 2 Raedon Vega 56's (TBRL) | 8TB of data.

Note 2: Plan to have three drives for 18 TB storage.

Note 3: Please note that the drives may have to take some hits when the station gets moved every six months.

Note 4: 250 USD is price limit -tax included.

[vanished]

If you just need 24/7 operation, my mind goes to WD Red or Purple, but considering you are also concerned about performance exceeding the Black line, you might need to look into the enterprise/server grade drives.  With that said, I have a regular consumer Seagate with the following specs:

 

Not that one is a good sample size, but you very well could just run a normal drive 24/7 for years and not have an issue.

 

Beyond that, you'd be getting into SSDs.  They're really ideal for video editing in particular due to the speeds massively outclassing any HDD setup, but of course that would be quite a bit more expensive.

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

8 minutes ago, kingknightrider said:

Western Digital Ultrastar 6TB DC HC310

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16822234362

I advised my fd getting one 8tb for toughly $190 in HK, so you may find cheap one around the corner

[kingknightrider]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

If you just need 24/7 operation, my mind goes to WD Red or Purple, but considering you are also concerned about performance exceeding the Black line, you might need to look into the enterprise/server grade drives.  With that said, I have a regular consumer Seagate with the following specs:

 

Not that one is a good sample size, but you very well could just run a normal drive 24/7 for years and not have an issue.

 

Beyond that, you'd be getting into SSDs.  They're really ideal for video editing in particular due to the speeds massively outclassing any HDD setup, but of course that would be quite a bit more expensive.

Yeah according to my math the biggest SSD is 2TB which would mean I would need 8 SSD to get near the 18 TB and at over $350 to $450 a SSD of that size it seems way more economical for me to go mechanical.

 

Western Digital Ultrastar 6TB DC HC310

Is this enterprise/server grade and does enterprise/server equate to WD Gold -which I hear has been termed by Western Digital as a now End-of-life product line?

Isn't this Drive a Hitachi HGST Ultrastar drive in disguise?

 

1 hour ago, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

I advised my fd getting one 8tb for toughly $190 in HK, so you may find cheap one around the corner

Actually the 8 TB is a bit expensive here -the place I be getting my hard drives from is a bit over priced.

Still... probably best not to put all eggs in one basket either... and maybe take in a combination of both ideas and go to maybe 5 4 TB drives instead.

 

One unique thing about running multiple drives I have learned is by keeping say games on one drive, video and audio editing to another and OS on another I get better performance when multi-tasking. Such as playing Metro Exodus while running a video or audio conversion with Adobe Premiere while having a smooth frame rate in game.

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

59 minutes ago, kingknightrider said:

Still... probably best not to put all eggs in one basket either... and maybe take in a combination of both ideas and go to maybe 5 4 TB drives instead.

just to share how I look into 4tb vs 8tb drives,

2x 4tb wd blue 5400rpm is roughly same here as 1x 8tb ultrastar rpm

1 hour ago, kingknightrider said:

Western Digital Ultrastar 6TB DC HC310

Is this enterprise/server grade and does enterprise/server equate to WD Gold -which I hear has been termed by Western Digital as a now End-of-life product line?

Isn't this Drive a Hitachi HGST Ultrastar drive in disguise?

WD has aquired HGST (some part/ HDD related stuff?) and use this to replace gold while keeping hgst ultrastar

[seagate_surfer]

The item "Power-On Hours" is basically what determines if a device can remain on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. if it says 8760 then it's made for that but it is the "load cycle" that will determine its endurance. Most consumer devices will withstand 300,000 Load/Unload Cycles but the higher the category of HDD, the greater this number, approximately an enterprise-like level HDD will withstand 600,000 Load/Unload Cycles. Then it depends on how much you are going to write to this HDD or if it will be mostly for reading tasks.

[danomicar]

9 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

The item "Power-On Hours" is basically what determines if a device can remain on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. if it says 8760 then it's made for that but it is the "load cycle" that will determine its endurance. Most consumer devices will withstand 300,000 Load/Unload Cycles but the higher the category of HDD, the greater this number, approximately an enterprise-like level HDD will withstand 600,000 Load/Unload Cycles. Then it depends on how much you are going to write to this HDD or if it will be mostly for reading tasks.

Thanks for this clarification. Can you tell me what you determine is 1 load/unload cycle for a mechanical drive? I'm not familiar with this term. 

[seagate_surfer]

15 hours ago, danomicar said:

Thanks for this clarification. Can you tell me what you determine is 1 load/unload cycle for a mechanical drive? I'm not familiar with this term. 

 

Basically it is the number of times an HDD can be filled in its entirety and then emptied so that it can be filled again. Thus, it is not the same to have the ability to fill and empty a 1TB HDD 300,000 times to have an 8TB HDD that can also be filled and emptied 300,000 times. The greater the capacity of the HDD, the greater this number, the greater the category of the HDD, the greater the number. I quote the following from the article "Can I Use a Desktop Hard Drive in My Storage Array? | Seagate Blog": 

Desktop drives are spec’d to process 55 TB per year while most enterprise drives are rated to handle 10 times that amount. Over a 5-year period that’s a lot more effective storage work you can expect from an enterprise drive.

 

[kingknightrider]

On 9/5/2019 at 1:17 AM, dgsddfgdfhgs said:

On 9/6/2019 at 9:53 AM, seagate_surfer said:

 

Basically it is the number of times an HDD can be filled in its entirety and then emptied so that it can be filled again. Thus, it is not the same to have the ability to fill and empty a 1TB HDD 300,000 times to have an 8TB HDD that can also be filled and emptied 300,000 times. The greater the capacity of the HDD, the greater this number, the greater the category of the HDD, the greater the number. I quote the following from the article "Can I Use a Desktop Hard Drive in My Storage Array? | Seagate Blog": 

Desktop drives are spec’d to process 55 TB per year while most enterprise drives are rated to handle 10 times that amount. Over a 5-year period that’s a lot more effective storage work you can expect from an enterprise drive.

 

 

just to share how I look into 4tb vs 8tb drives,

2x 4tb wd blue 5400rpm is roughly same here as 1x 8tb ultrastar rpm

WD has aquired HGST (some part/ HDD related stuff?) and use this to replace gold while keeping hgst ultrastar

Thanks for the clarification.

Looks like I need to definitely look toward enterprise drives...

That being said I would assume the WD Ultrastar drive linked is an enterprise drive or do I keep looking?

[seagate_surfer]

3 hours ago, kingknightrider said:

Thanks for the clarification.

Looks like I need to definitely look toward enterprise drives...

That being said I would assume the WD Ultrastar drive linked is an enterprise drive or do I keep looking?

You are welcome! In the description of the drive it says "10X The workload rating of desktop drives", so I would assume it is, yes:

• https://www.westerndigital.com/products/data-center-drives/ultrastar-sata-series-hdd

Those are ussually the ones focused to be used in NAS, this is another option in case you want to see it:

• IronWolf and IronWolf Pro NAS Hard Drives | Seagate US | Seagate US

[kingknightrider]

1 hour ago, seagate_surfer said:

You are welcome! In the description of the drive it says "10X The workload rating of desktop drives", so I would assume it is, yes:

• https://www.westerndigital.com/products/data-center-drives/ultrastar-sata-series-hdd

Those are ussually the ones focused to be used in NAS, this is another option in case you want to see it:

• IronWolf and IronWolf Pro NAS Hard Drives | Seagate US | Seagate US

Well seeing as this is a workstation and not a NAS system that is being built...

Are NAS drives better than Enterprise for use in the same thing: IE:>> storage, OS, editing audio and video, performance and not to mention gaming?

 

Though it is interesting that the 6 TB Ultrastar is cheaper by about $35 ($165) over the Ironwolf Pro ($200)

And cheaper than the WD Red Pro NAS drives by about $25 ($190) probably due to lacking the sophisticated software/hardware the NAS drives come with to add redundancy right?

[seagate_surfer]

5 hours ago, kingknightrider said:

Well seeing as this is a workstation and not a NAS system that is being built...

Are NAS drives better than Enterprise for use in the same thing: IE:>> storage, OS, editing audio and video, performance and not to mention gaming?

 

Though it is interesting that the 6 TB Ultrastar is cheaper by about $35 ($165) over the Ironwolf Pro ($200)

And cheaper than the WD Red Pro NAS drives by about $25 ($190) probably due to lacking the sophisticated software/hardware the NAS drives come with to add redundancy right?

Well, redundancy is not as important for regular consumers as you and I, but it is essential for companies that rely on data storage as a fail-safe measure in real-time protection against hard disk failures. A common redundancy feature found in servers and NAS to prevent data loss is RAID where recovery downtime of a defective hard disk is not an option. And that is the main objective of redundant storage: reliability and uptime.

A backup, on the other hand, does not provide real-time protection, but provides protection against a larger set of problems including failed drives (device theft, fire, file deletion). Simply put, redundant data storage provides protection against real-time failures against hard disk failures rather than a real backup of your data because it creates multiple copies of files on several hard drives, the idea is that the other hard drives in the array can be activated immediately and save the day without any downtime without interruption (usually).

[kingknightrider]

2 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

Well, redundancy is not as important for regular consumers as you and I, but it is essential for companies that rely on data storage as a fail-safe measure in real-time protection against hard disk failures. A common redundancy feature found in servers and NAS to prevent data loss is RAID where recovery downtime of a defective hard disk is not an option. And that is the main objective of redundant storage: reliability and uptime.

A backup, on the other hand, does not provide real-time protection, but provides protection against a larger set of problems including failed drives (device theft, fire, file deletion). Simply put, redundant data storage provides protection against real-time failures against hard disk failures rather than a real backup of your data because it creates multiple copies of files on several hard drives, the idea is that the other hard drives in the array can be activated immediately and save the day without any downtime without interruption (usually).

Ok then I will go with the Ultrastar.

Thank you for the information.

[seagate_surfer]

14 hours ago, kingknightrider said:

Ok then I will go with the Ultrastar.

Thank you for the information.

You are welcome! Have a nice day!

[kingknightrider]

On 9/10/2019 at 2:56 PM, seagate_surfer said:

You are welcome! Have a nice day!

It seems the Ultrastar line and gold for that matter are prone to clicking and hard drive failures and possible grinding more so than not...

 

You spoke of Iron wolf line if NAS but would this one be better option?

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Exos-Internal-Drive-Enterprise/dp/B07D9C618D/

 

And for that matter isn't this the same drive -though most likely in a renewed/refurbished state:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FRC1GRQ/

?

[seagate_surfer]

On 10/3/2019 at 4:04 PM, kingknightrider said:

It seems the Ultrastar line and gold for that matter are prone to clicking and hard drive failures and possible grinding more so than not...

 

You spoke of Iron wolf line if NAS but would this one be better option?

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Exos-Internal-Drive-Enterprise/dp/B07D9C618D/

 

And for that matter isn't this the same drive -though most likely in a renewed/refurbished state:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FRC1GRQ/

?

I vote for the Exos too!  Regarding the refurbished, I find very difficult that this drive is refurbished, most likely it is just an older version and that's why is cheaper.

[kingknightrider]

14 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

I vote for the Exos too!  Regarding the refurbished, I find very difficult that this drive is refurbished, most likely it is just an older version and that's why is cheaper.

Both are the same model number:

ST4000NM0035

 

But yeah got the Exo version... going to get more as time goes on --since slightly more they be.

[seagate_surfer]

On 10/7/2019 at 9:43 PM, kingknightrider said:

Both are the same model number:

ST4000NM0035

 

But yeah got the Exo version... going to get more as time goes on --since slightly more they be.

Oh I see what you are saying! Yes they both are ST4000NM0035 but what I meant to say is that most likely they are from different lots and since one may have been manufactured earlier than the other (even if they are the same model number), both may have something different, not necessarily a large or significant change but something as simple as the design of the label or packaging, as you well know manufacturers revisit their products from time to time and make changes like these or sometimes bigger changes, It depends on what that review or revisit deems necessary to update the HDD so that it goes more according to what we use today (or the time when it was reviewed).

[rogerw99]

On 9/6/2019 at 8:53 AM, seagate_surfer said:

 

Basically it is the number of times an HDD can be filled in its entirety and then emptied so that it can be filled again. Thus, it is not the same to have the ability to fill and empty a 1TB HDD 300,000 times to have an 8TB HDD that can also be filled and emptied 300,000 times. The greater the capacity of the HDD, the greater this number, the greater the category of the HDD, the greater the number. I quote the following from the article "Can I Use a Desktop Hard Drive in My Storage Array? | Seagate Blog": 

Desktop drives are spec’d to process 55 TB per year while most enterprise drives are rated to handle 10 times that amount. Over a 5-year period that’s a lot more effective storage work you can expect from an enterprise drive.

 

Your description of "load/unload cycle" is completely wrong. If your going to give advice to someone who doesn't know any better, then you owe it to them to get your facts straight & know what your talking about."Don't give bad advice"

Fact: The load/unload cycle is the movement of the read/write head actuator to move into & out of the landing zone position prior to reading/writing data or returning to a parked position.The more frequently you put your HDD to sleep, the more load/unload cycles you tally up. Most HDDs go well beyond that count due to many factors such as energy saving functions that boost the count but reduce the general wear & tear. More often than not your HDD control board fails long before there is an actual physical failure the drive itself.

And by your quote above, an 8TB HDD would be able to write 2.4 Exa Bytes. That's 2,400,000 Tera bytes of data. There's no HDD in existence that could withstand that kind of wear & tear not to mention that it would take about 2,000 to 3,000 years to accomplish at best. As an Industry Affiliate you should be well aware of all of this.