Do 6TB drives wear out 6x faster than 1TB drives?

[felixthemaster1]

A friend of mine on steam who knows his stuff about storage told be that each of the 6 platters could fail and then the whole drive is useless so it is better to get 6 1TB drives. When one fails the others still work.

[PokémonTrainerFour]

Not really an answer to the question, but 6x1TB isn't even close to sensible.

Get 3x2TB or 2x3TB, that's a nice blend in space and reliability.

[Shroomster]

No, that is not true. 6 drives is worse than one big one.

[Askew]

Technically true despite 1tb drives often having multiple platters, but fuck having 6 1TB drives in my PC.

 

I have 3 2TB drives and wouldn't swap them for a 6TB drive.

[DigitalHermit]

He does know that even a 1TB drive can have multiple platters, right?

 

Best bang/buck imo is 3x2TB...

[Shroomster]

One drive is not however redundant.

[felixthemaster1]

Seems like 2TB drives are the sweet spot, thanks guys.

[PokémonTrainerFour]

mfw best answer :DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

[Dimwitted]

The whole question doesn't make sense. And no, 3x2 or 2x3 is not better. Irrespective of how many platters a drive has, if any go bad it's toast. If platters go bad on a regular basis it's a bad drive series. Reducing the platter count doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design. It's the equivalent to saying that a 4 cyl engine is superior to a V8 because there's less chance of a piston going bad. That's not how things work.

[patrickjp93]

No, that is not true. 6 drives is worse than one big one.

Eh...If you run them in Raid 6 then not necessarily.

[Shroomster]

Eh...If you run them in Raid 6 then not necessarily.

Yes, but it is more points of failure. It is like having 8x120GB ssd instead of a 960GB one. It is faster but not necessarily better. Raid 6 is a bit useless with 1TB drives. Who uses 1TB drives for a big NAS Raid setup?

[patrickjp93]

Yes, but it is more points of failure. It is like having 8x120GB ssd instead of a 960GB one. It is faster but not necessarily better. Raid 6 is a bit useless with 1TB drives. Who uses 1TB drives for a big NAS Raid setup?

My family runs a 12x4 in Raid 6 for hosting a common media center and 4 virtual drives for stuff we keep to ourselves.

[Blade of Grass]

Actually, I believe what he was talking about was the error on read rate, which (on pretty all consumer drives) is about one bad sector per 12TB read/write. A 6TB drive will get to 12TB faster than a 1TB drive, therefor you're more likely to encounter a bad sector on a 6TB drive than a 1TB.

[FizzyFantom]

It's mostly about points of failure. Being mechanical, HDDs have several points of failure and have an increased likelihood of a fault occuring at some of the points. Firstly HDDs are sensitive to physical damage such as impacts from dropping, but lets discount these and assume you are taking very good care of your drives.

Points of failure are the primary concern here. Adding more PoF will increase the likelihood that the drive will fail. All of the following are potentail points of failure in a mechanical drive: HDD platters, read/write heads, the motor, the coil that moves the arm, the chips and electrical connections on the daughter board.

Some of these are more likely to fail than others, namely the mechanics of reading and writing the metal platters, ie. the read/write heads and the platters themselves. The chips and electrical connections are unlikely to fail if the drive is properly used, as well as the coil, so we will dicount these too.

Most 1TB drives actually contain several platters (including one I pulled apart the other day that contained 2), whereas a single 6TB drive will only contain 5, 6 or maybe 7 platters.

In summary, the number of potential points of failure in a single HDD is far less than that of 6 drive that make up the same amount of storage.

[kuddlesworth9419]

The more platters the more points of failure. You are better off finding a HDD that only has one platter. 

[IdeaStormer]

The whole question doesn't make sense. And no, 3x2 or 2x3 is not better. Irrespective of how many platters a drive has, if any go bad it's toast. If platters go bad on a regular basis it's a bad drive series. Reducing the platter count doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design. It's the equivalent to saying that a 4 cyl engine is superior to a V8 because there's less chance of a piston going bad. That's not how things work.

 

I have avoided this thread for some time, I'm glad I'm not the only one with your point of view. The World is not as bad as I had assumed. B)

[felixthemaster1]

Technically true despite 1tb drives often having multiple platters, but fuck having 6 1TB drives in my PC.

 

I have 3 2TB drives and wouldn't swap them for a 6TB drive.

Honestly,I love the idea. I prefer different drives than letters and each drive can have a different folder size saved depending on the media type. I have a tb for windows and games now (other than ssd). a tb for general downloading, 1.5tb for all media. I want to get another tb one for my games only and a 3tb for my media 

[Askew]

Honestly,I love the idea. I prefer different drives than letters and each drive can have a different folder size saved depending on the media type. I have a tb for windows and games now (other than ssd). a tb for general downloading, 1.5tb for all media. I want to get another tb one for my games only and a 3tb for my media 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

[felixthemaster1]

I don't see the point of getting 6 small drives unless you have like a HDD fetish or something..?

Just get 2x3TB or 3x2TB.

I do! hnnngggg all dem organized folders and drives give me a hard on.

 

 

The whole question doesn't make sense. And no, 3x2 or 2x3 is not better. Irrespective of how many platters a drive has, if any go bad it's toast. If platters go bad on a regular basis it's a bad drive series. Reducing the platter count doesn't change the fact that it's a bad design. It's the equivalent to saying that a 4 cyl engine is superior to a V8 because there's less chance of a piston going bad. That's not how things work.

Yea but surely having more platters = more change of failure , if a 6tb drive has 6 platters then any one of those 6 can go bad and boom, all lost. in something with 1 or 2 platters, it is much less likely. only a few points of failure. That's what I have been led to believe anyways.

 

Actually, I believe what he was talking about was the error on read rate, which (on pretty all consumer drives) is about one bad sector per 12TB read/write. A 6TB drive will get to 12TB faster than a 1TB drive, therefor you're more likely to encounter a bad sector on a 6TB drive than a 1TB.

^^^^^^^^^^^ this

 

 

Most 1TB drives actually contain several platters (including one I pulled apart the other day that contained 2), whereas a single 6TB drive will only contain 5, 6 or maybe 7 platters.

In summary, the number of potential points of failure in a single HDD is far less than that of 6 drive that make up the same amount of storage.

You made zero sense. Youre saying a 6tb drive with 6 platters had more failure points than a 1 tb drive with 2 platters? How does that work? And yes, one of the 6 drives will fail but this means I wont loose all my data, just the data on that particular drive. On a 6tb drive, one bad platter and i lose everything

[felixthemaster1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning

Meh, this is way easier and safer, just plug and play.

[SMURG]

It really depends how you're going to be deploying them. If you're building a RAID array, 6 x 1TB is the way to go. If you're running the drives separately or in JBOD, 2 x 3TB or 3 x 2TB makes more sense. 1 x 6TB is never really a good idea imo unless you're really tight on SATA ports. Replacing 6TB of data is a pain.

It's not that 6TB drives wear out 6x faster than 1TB drives, it's that if everything is on 1 x 6TB drive, the data is a lot harder to replace than if it was stored across 6 x 1TB drives and 1 drive fails. This is especially true if the 6 x 1TB are in RAIDZ1 or RAID 5 since they can then tolerate the drive failure without any data loss at all.

[Dimwitted]

But by that reasoning instead of failure of platters you're looking at failure of drives. To get the equivalent of a 1x6tb drive in RAID5 you need 3 x 3tb drives. More secure? Yes indeedy and probably the config that I'd go for. But you're now looking at NINE platters and if that is a problem, the likelihood of it hitting all 3 drives is high. More cost, more complexity and more power. It doesn't come for cheap and it's all theoretical assuming that the 6 tb drive sucks.

[felixthemaster1]

But by that reasoning instead of failure of platters you're looking at failure of drives. To get the equivalent of a 1x6tb drive in RAID5 you need 3 x 3tb drives. More secure? Yes indeedy and probably the config that I'd go for. But you're now looking at NINE platters and if that is a problem, the likelihood of it hitting all 3 drives is high. More cost, more complexity and more power. It doesn't come for cheap and it's all theoretical assuming that the 6 tb drive sucks.

Not really interested in RAIDs tbh. Like I mentioned here, 1 for windows.games (maybe two), 1 for downloads and 1 for media.

[SMURG]

But by that reasoning instead of failure of platters you're looking at failure of drives. To get the equivalent of a 1x6tb drive in RAID5 you need 3 x 3tb drives. More secure? Yes indeedy and probably the config that I'd go for. But you're now looking at NINE platters and if that is a problem, the likelihood of it hitting all 3 drives is high. More cost, more complexity and more power. It doesn't come for cheap and it's all theoretical assuming that the 6 tb drive sucks.

Not necessarily, you could have 7 x 1TB in RAID 5 if you wanted, which would only be seven platters but would be capable of tolerating an entire drive failure without data loss. For me, wherever possible I just buy however many 1TB drives I need to reach the capacity I need, and then put them in RAID(Z) array dependent upon how much redundancy I want. Since a 1TB drive will hit a read error a lot less frequently than a 6TB drive, the only time you'd really want to use the 6TB was when you needed the maximum capacity per SATA port or per dollar, and were only storing data that could be easily replaced. I do intend on purchasing a couple of 6TB drives, but they're for RAIDZ1 on a motherboard with only 2 SATA ports which is less efficient than a RAID 5 because I'm limited in terms of ports.

 

Not really interested in RAIDs tbh. Like I mentioned here, 1 for windows.games (maybe two), 1 for downloads and 1 for media.

So in that scenario you're better off going for either 2 x 3TB or 3 x 2TB imo. I just wouldn't trust a single 6TB - for me it'd have to be backed up (or be the backup), but then it depends how easy it would be to replace the data on it should it fail. Even with fast internet, 6TB is a pain to replace if you have to redownload it all.