12TB Easystore USB HDDs @ BestBuy $180

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Samir

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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
They do if you know where to look. ;) I actually find deals on sas all the time. PM me with what you need and I'll keep my eyes open for it. :)

That's a pretty cool thread. I thought the 12TB looked quite familiar as the 14TB in the side-by-side pic is exactly like the 14TB I got. I could see WD consolidating manufacturing in the same way that Intel produces chips on the same line and just 'bins' them according to the quality of the chip. I could see the same thing for drives, and if so, these externals are some of the lower bins for sure imo.
 

Samir

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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.
Great info on the WD 2.5" drives, although I still think it would be nearly silly to put a usb interface on these if they were also producing them in an sata variant as those didn't sell either. I guess when someone cracks one open we'll see if a nice sata drive is in there or just another usb boarded drive.

Yep, the 3-2-1 backup rule is still a golden one to follow. Multiple styles of backups, multiple copies, and multiple locations is the surest way to stand the test of time, especially when you add in some sort of parity scrub like what's available in zfs to detect and fix bit rot. Over time, this becomes the silent corrupter in my experience.
 

Samir

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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.
Remember thought that a mirrored pair shouldn't be the only copy, so while it would be bad for a pair to fail, it shouldn't be catastrophic.

Interesting to hear your experiences on failures. This is why I was thinking that a raid0+1 while expensive drive-wise would be the most impervious since you'd have to lose a full 2 drives in a mirrored pair to lose the array. Of course, there's a lot better solutions out there, but I still like raid since working with it in the 1990s.

The CDW outlet definitely has some deals on sas drives if you happened to be looking at the right time. The provantage open box also has some once in a while.

I used to think about cycling out storage, but now I just copy to the new one and keep the old as a backup. I've got generations of our data 'archived' via enterprise drives rotated out of production as new ones were bought. It's like some cheap insurance--which like cheap insurance may not actually have you covered. :D
 

Samir

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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 :(
Yep, that's a pretty solid strategy. And like you said, once you add up all the copies of the data, it does start to get pricey. Then you start to think that some product from AWS that's got 99.9999999% uptime might be better for the price, and then realize that it would be just yet another backup medium. :D
 

Samir

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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.
So for real off-site backup, it's pretty easy if you have parents or whatnot as you can easily setup an ipsec tunnel between the two sites that can be useful for a lot of things like monitoring them as they age (this was literally a godsend as I was able to watch the last moments of my mom's life earlier this year when I wasn't near them), remoting into their systems to keep them clean, etc. Then you simply have a replication nas setup at their place and just be sure to replicate regularly. And not only your stuff, but they can use it too and you can keep a copy of their stuff too in case of disaster. As everything moves to electronic mediums, these records start becoming more and more valuable.
 

Samir

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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.
It's external drive deals like this that do take the sting out of off-site backups though. I have 2x 10tb drives from the last deal that I rotate regularly at a bank safety deposit box. They're not the only backup copies (actually just consolidated backups of backups), but they are a nice assurance. And it's cheap too unless you have truly large storage arrays--it was $350 for everything including the drives and the safety deposit box. :)
 
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Samir

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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.
I'm in the same boat with streaming today. I still have most of my back in the day super large mp3 collection on 2x 500gb ext drives that I haven't powered on in years now. :0 I do probably need to move that data into the fold if I want to keep it. Now that I think about it, I've got a lot of data like that to archive. :(

Yep! These things do keep us out of bigger trouble, and always end up getting us in bigger trouble with the SO, lol!! I've loved computing, cars, and photography for years now, and if the 100+ devices on the network as well as 2 garages full of cars isn't enough, there's the 8 cameras--all of which the wife would like to see go. :(

You're dead-on about a secondary nas being older gear; and in fact, it can be nearly ridiculous since you'll never even get 480Mbps to the drive over most Internet connections. (I'm watching a copy job right now running at 3Mbps on a link that's got 50Mbps on the upload side and 500Mbps on the download side--there's just so much overhead.) You can literally just buy one of these external drives and plug it into the usb port on some consumer router that can handle the size and you've got a dead cheap offsite backup.

If you don't want to pay for synlogy dsm, there is the xpenology that you can run on your own hardware. If your dad is connecting storage directly to his laptop, isn't that DAS (direct attached storage)?
 

Bert

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Is there a still 10% off coupon for best buy?

I just bought 14 2 TB drives from 8.5$ per TB, wish I didn't :( It seems like power savings will cover the difference.

Though, I am a little bit worried about the the disk throughput speeds as they are not much faster than before, it would take very long time to dump all the data from these disks.
 
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Evan

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Yep for sure the iops have not increased much at all compared to capacity, does take a good while to read a whole drive these days
 
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Spartacus

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Is there a still 10% off coupon for best buy?

I just bought 14 2 TB drives from 8.5$ per TB, wish I didn't :( It seems like power savings will cover the difference.

Though, I am a little bit worried about the the disk throughput speeds as they are not much faster than before, it would take very long time to dump all the data from these disks.
Depends on how you have it setup, what OS, etc, it took just over a week to transfer the 60 TB I have to an unraid array (averaged about 90MB/s IIRC).
 
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Bert

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That's the thing, the size of the disks are going up but the bandwidth is fixed so I am still getting the same 100MB/sec -150MB/sec sequential rw speed from 1TB disks and I heard the speed is not mucher for 18TB disk, now you have a pool a magnitude bigger but pipe is same and not sure why the pipe is not getting bigger as it used to do in the past.
 

msg7086

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I have a few 500GB 1TB 2TB small drives for backup purpose. I split my library to fit the size, and then fill the drives and call it a day. It'll function as an additional backup along with my cloud storage. In case of a disk failure, I can restore from local first, then sync with cloud to fill the gaps.
 
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Patrick

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Whew! The three closest Best Buy stores are sold out. I would need to go 9 miles to another one, and the car only has 39 miles of electricity left. Not going to chance it today and save some money.
 

GaveUp

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Whew! The three closest Best Buy stores are sold out. I would need to go 9 miles to another one, and the car only has 39 miles of electricity left. Not going to chance it today and save some money.
I wish I had the restraint... in for 12... my wallet hates me.
 
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Samir

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Whew! The three closest Best Buy stores are sold out. I would need to go 9 miles to another one, and the car only has 39 miles of electricity left. Not going to chance it today and save some money.
You can make it there and then just poke along on the smaller roads on the way back vs the highway. And if you're in the bay area there's chargers everywhere. ;)

Of course it is very likely we will see this deal again, so you can wait for it as well. :D
 

Samir

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...now you have a pool a magnitude bigger but pipe is same and not sure why the pipe is not getting bigger as it used to do in the past.
I think it's a matter of there being some sort of ceiling that's been hit when trying to read such tightly packed data on the platters. Before, the read speeds would increase as the density increased, but if there's a physics limit to how fast the data can be read/written, then just the size will increase and that's it.

It would be nice if drives would have gone up in speed as their size increased. A 6x increase in sustained read/write speeds would put these 12TB drives somewhere near 1200MB/s for peak read speeds (based on a peak of 200MB/s for the 2TB HGSTs I've got). :eek:
 

Evan

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There has been some increase in peak pure sequential throughout and also some iops by split arms etc but running into physical limits for sure.

@Patrick bit of range anxiety?, not going to live dangerously haha
 
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ReturnedSword

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I'm in the same boat with streaming today. I still have most of my back in the day super large mp3 collection on 2x 500gb ext drives that I haven't powered on in years now. :0 I do probably need to move that data into the fold if I want to keep it. Now that I think about it, I've got a lot of data like that to archive. :(

You're dead-on about a secondary nas being older gear; and in fact, it can be nearly ridiculous since you'll never even get 480Mbps to the drive over most Internet connections. (I'm watching a copy job right now running at 3Mbps on a link that's got 50Mbps on the upload side and 500Mbps on the download side--there's just so much overhead.) You can literally just buy one of these external drives and plug it into the usb port on some consumer router that can handle the size and you've got a dead cheap offsite backup.

If you don't want to pay for synlogy dsm, there is the xpenology that you can run on your own hardware. If your dad is connecting storage directly to his laptop, isn't that DAS (direct attached storage)?
Yes, I still have my MP3 collection as well my fansub anime collection from way back when I was more active in that scene. Nowadays I somewhat keep up with fansubbing, but it's mostly my nephews and nieces that watch it now after I curate each series.

My backup NAS is running old gear that I already had, but I'm considering building a new backup NAS using an Atom C3000 platform. The benefit here is that it won't use as much power. The processing power is kind of pokey but it probably won't matter as long as it can reliably push a gigabit connection, which it should have no problem doing. It's come down to mostly chassis selection and willpower to do it though.

My dad was technical for back in the mainframe days. He knows his way around modern hardware but isn't techy in today's sense. He still turns off stuff he doesn't use, and doesn't like the idea of a computer running 24/7 using power. A QNAP box though, won him over since it's an "appliance," hah. Certain QNAP models support concurrent DAS mode over Thunderbolt. I set him up with a TVS-872XT with the CPU upgraded to a i7 8700T and 32 GB DDR4.