12TB Easystore USB HDDs @ BestBuy $180

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Samir

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Nice. Prices are coming down nicely.
Yep, and ssd prices also continue to fall so I think the pressure will stay on for traditional hard drives to stay bigger than ssds and relatively cheap in order to still be relevant.
 
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Samir

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Thanks for the tip @Samir
It's interesting for me as a portable storage, independent of whether it's shuckable or not.
You're welcome! It's about as much as you can get packed into that size so I thought it was pretty neat--especially at the price. :)
 

Evan

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5tb is the largest 2.5” disk as far as I am aware, they do may good disks to take critical data for offsite backup if your needs are not too high.

Anyway it been years since WD have used the removable bridge and went direct USB on the drive board on 2.5” drive so I assume that’s no good for shucking unlike seagate that do. But if anybody wants to check ;)
 
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josh

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What do you guys think - 4x12TB in mirror pairs or 5x8TB / 6x6TB in double parity?
 

itronin

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What do you guys think - 4x12TB in mirror pairs or 5x8TB / 6x6TB in double parity?
I'm not buying any - yet... maybe Christmas sale.

But I'll happily play along.
4x8 or 6x6 is probably the safest Raid6/Z2 for media sure.

any kind of performance probably the mirrored pair but such a small number of large drives. If you are going to have a double failure the % is higher than I'd like to gamble losing the array.

Even for media some kind of backup is key. I'd hate to think about the time investment to re-rip my dvd's and blu-rays.

I'm more interested in 16x12... say two 8x12 Z2 vdevs. that would probably be my happy place... Be really happy if they were 12TB SAS3 at that price too.
 
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Samir

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The 12TB. They're still solving the mystery of the unknown model number.
Those look identical to the 14TB 7200rpm WDC drives I got a while back which were helium. The giveaway on the helium is the silver sticker in the reddit picture. I'm not sure if helium and smr are used together though.
 
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josh

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I'm not buying any - yet... maybe Christmas sale.

But I'll happily play along.
4x8 or 6x6 is probably the safest Raid6/Z2 for media sure.

any kind of performance probably the mirrored pair but such a small number of large drives. If you are going to have a double failure the % is higher than I'd like to gamble losing the array.

Even for media some kind of backup is key. I'd hate to think about the time investment to re-rip my dvd's and blu-rays.

I'm more interested in 16x12... say two 8x12 Z2 vdevs. that would probably be my happy place... Be really happy if they were 12TB SAS3 at that price too.
:rolleyes:
I picked mirror for the 12TBs not for performance but for faster rebuilds. Also thinking about future pool expansion as well since I'm not intending on buying a whole bunch of 12TBs at one go and expanding in double drives seems like the smarter way. What do you think of 4x12TBs in Z2?
Have SAS drives ever gone on sale?

Reading the thread about them figuring out which drive it is is kinda hilarious. Weighing the drives :D
Is the WD120EMFZ (12TB Easystore) a firmware-locked 14TB drive? Evidence and theory inside. : DataHoarder
 
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ReturnedSword

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Anyway it been years since WD have used the removable bridge and went direct USB on the drive board on 2.5” drive so I assume that’s no good for shucking unlike seagate that do. But if anybody wants to check ;)
Yes well said @Evan. @Samir All 2.5" format WD external drives I'm aware of as of a few years back going forward have a USB only interface, so the USB port is actually integrated into the controller board on the drive itself. This is mainly why the WD 2.5" externals are "smaller" than the competition, e.g. Seagate. My dad does a lot of photography to stay active while retired, and he would buy the WD 2.5" Passport drives (the equivalent of these Easystore Portables) by the fistful. Inevitably they'd die and it was basically impossible for me to recover the data. I nudged him towards using the off-the-shelf NAS I bought him and he's been fine since then.

A lot of us who have tons of hard drives are data hoarders and want to mess around with storage arrays. I admit I have this compulsion, hah. I have most of my old media and audio collection ripped into a lossless or near-lossless digital format. Magnetic tape (VHS, Hi8, etc) and optical discs fail eventually due to degradation. For those who are wondering of the risk of failure of the disk array, the solution is not to place full trust into any single storage medium to begin with. I remember the days when WD was touting that it was nigh impossible for hard drives to fail (during the 60-120 GB days). I placed my trust in their word then and was predictably disappointed. The first clue was WD, then all the other manufacturers lowering the then standard warranty from 5 years to 3, and in some cases, 2 years ;) I lost all my data from the late 1980s until the early 2000s, including my portrait and nature photography work. So it's important to at the very least have a second copy of the data somewhere. These days I have a second NAS replicating the data from the primary NAS, and an encrypted copy stored in the cloud.
 

itronin

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:rolleyes:
I picked mirror for the 12TBs not for performance but for faster rebuilds. Also thinking about future pool expansion as well since I'm not intending on buying a whole bunch of 12TBs at one go and expanding in double drives seems like the smarter way. What do you think of 4x12TBs in Z2?
Have SAS drives ever gone on sale?

Reading the thread about them figuring out which drive it is is kinda hilarious. Weighing the drives :D
Is the WD120EMFZ (12TB Easystore) a firmware-locked 14TB drive? Evidence and theory inside. : DataHoarder
I just worry about 2 drives same batch failing same time. I'd say exercise the @#$@#$ out of them. Use @BLinux 's drive burn in script thingie if you don't have your own.

yeah mirror makes sense for your requirements. I was considering 4x12 in Z2 after I replied but you didn't originally ask about it. For media etc. I'd do that and save my pennies to buy another set if I wanted a bit more throughput. 4xNxZ2 makes more sense to me to protect against failures in your use case.. Obs any 2 can fail and you get to go buy another two whether on sale or not and hope your rebuild finishes. 3 drives failing = very bad luck but if it was gonna happen I'd say it was gonna happen in the first 3 months FWIW. - just my opinion. I have personally experienced a 3 drive HW R6 failure - on my Birthday while I was playing blackjack in Vegas. Lost there. got home lost again. Nothing super critical. I also experienced a quad drive failure over a 2 hour period. They put in 2 replacement drives and then 2 more went during the rebuild. That was also 10 days after our RS kit was moved across the parking lot in DFW to their new data center. hmmm wonder what happened in the parking lot. but that is a whole 'nother story.

Never have I see SAS drives go on sale though sometimes they show up in CDW outlet but that is a crapshoot.
all my 8TB SAS3 drives were eBay purchases. I am almost finished getting that box (AIO) ready to go and then I get to move 40TB from my Synology DS2411/DX2411 to the new box. Then I need to buy some more drives and might do SATA 12's if they are onsale around Christmas - into the new backup box and then I can retire the SYNO and see if someone wants to buy it and the 3TB drives. I think about a third have 65K hours on them too. :p

LOL then I can think about cycling out the 8TB;s for the 12's... HAHAHAHA it never @#$@# ends. HAHAHAHA.
 

Evan

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Should be a able to get he8 drives end of lease already. SAS, and for the right price I would say run with it.
I thought I had a lot of data but seems so many here have so much more !

4 x 12tb in raid10 or 6 (double parity of any type) is over 20tb usable, same as 4 x 8tb in raid5 (single parity of any type) and 4 disks in a raid set is not a lot. How do you back it all up ? Or like me you don’t backup everything only the important stuff.
 
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ReturnedSword

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How do you back it all up ? Or like me you don’t backup everything only the important stuff.
Living on the edge right here! :D

Personally I have the same data mirrored on two of my workstations, then there's the NAS which gets replicated to the backup NAS, then from there it's further replicated to the cloud in GSuite (or BackBlaze, pick the poison). There's also quite a few data hoarders who use old gear (e.g. Xeon v1/v2 with old smaller capacity disks) for their backup NAS, and only remotely turn it on to run the backup, then it's off again. In any case, this hobby ends up being quite expensive to maintain eventually :(
 
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Evan

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Living on the edge right here! :D
When I say don’t backup, still have a 2nd copy on disk like you, I meant real off site backup.
Was tempted to drop a small box maybe even just a Synology or something at my parents place.
End of the day while it may take time to get the lost bulk data back it’s like impacting if I didn’t have it and it’s always questionable if I need all of it anyway. I steam most media these days so stopped keeping terrabyes of movies and TV, just done stuff I can’t stream or may re-watch.
 

itronin

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Living on the edge right here! :D
There's also quite a few data hoarders who use old gear (e.g. Xeon v1/v2 with old smaller capacity disks) for their backup NAS, and only remotely turn it on to run the backup, then it's off again. In any case, this hobby ends up being quite expensive to maintain eventually :(
that is exactly my plan for my backup AIO. its all onsite maybe someday I'll look at pushing it up. small steps. If a fire or flood or tornado destroys my house down I think I'm going to worry about other things first. that said my kit is insured. All hobbies end up being expensive when you take them to an extreme. I can afford two and kinda have three so I'm kinda sorta screwed.
 

ReturnedSword

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When I say don’t backup, still have a 2nd copy on disk like you, I meant real off site backup.
Was tempted to drop a small box maybe even just a Synology or something at my parents place.
End of the day while it may take time to get the lost bulk data back it’s like impacting if I didn’t have it and it’s always questionable if I need all of it anyway. I steam most media these days so stopped keeping terrabyes of movies and TV, just done stuff I can’t stream or may re-watch.
I completely understand you there @Evan. I also mostly stream music/video nowadays, but as we are well aware stuff regularly gets discontinued/removed from the streaming services due to licensing issues. Hoarding high quality rips of media is just a compulsion I've had since the late 90s; always need some type of hobby to keep one's self out of trouble, that's what I told my neighbor the other day to tell his SO who is PO'd about his compulsion to buy beater cars to fix up, hah.

My backup NAS is at my parents house. It works out well enough as the replication jobs run in the background. The nice thing about a backup NAS is it can be older gear, though older folks like parents might be upset about noise or power usage. My backup NAS isn't particularly fast but it sips power so I'm fine there.

I've always really liked Synology DSM and recently QNAP QTS, but on the cost vs benefit front it's a hard proposition to me. I only got an off-the-shelf NAS for my dad since he's an older guy who isn't very techy and wanted to direct connect to the NAS via Thunderbolt from his laptop.
 
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Samir

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What do you guys think - 4x12TB in mirror pairs or 5x8TB / 6x6TB in double parity?
I'd go with mirrored pairs any day, especially if not striped so each drive is basically part of a jbod mirrored pair.