Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Drive - Cheap 2.5" 4TB drives

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Deslok

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Jul 15, 2015
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I've only got 4 and none have failed with roughly 180 days in service but I bet we could pull some data together for a few hundred drives between us and get a good estimate but here's a form hopefully we can collect the data in one place, I'll publish the sheet in... a week or so and we can get some hard numbers then
 
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Paul Roland

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Jul 10, 2015
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That would not be a problem for me, I can put many drives to mitigate that, using raid10 anyway.
I was unable to exceed 50 MB/s in write. Still decent, my only concern is reliability
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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I have 6 here in my array and 6 in another buddies array and no issue to report, they are ticking along like soldiers!
 

BlueFox

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Oct 26, 2015
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27 here, but only 24 in use. Performance could be better attached to my Areca 1882i, but hard to complain about 100TB in 2U.
 
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PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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24 purchased, 1 dead, 1 still in box as spare. 2x 8+2 raidz2 arrays + 2 others in misc jobs.

Just the one death - and its not "hard dead". Works, but misbehaves in the ZFS arrays.

I had no expectations of performance. The arrays are media backups only, written to with changes once per day. All the active data are on SSD.
 

Deslok

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I have 6 here in my array and 6 in another buddies array and no issue to report, they are ticking along like soldiers!
28 here, 1 non responsive.
27 here, but only 24 in use. Performance could be better attached to my Areca 1882i, but hard to complain about 100TB in 2U.
How old are your arrays so i can add them to the form we're trying to collect some information on their overall reliability

Seagate ARF Estimator
 

Deslok

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Jul 15, 2015
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24 purchased, 1 dead, 1 still in box as spare. 2x 8+2 raidz2 arrays + 2 others in misc jobs.

Just the one death - and its not "hard dead". Works, but misbehaves in the ZFS arrays.

I had no expectations of performance. The arrays are media backups only, written to with changes once per day. All the active data are on SSD.
Does the misbehaving one have a different firmware?
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Does the misbehaving one have a different firmware?
No. Same firmware. Drive was just throwing random SATA transport errors, etc., and FreeNAS would eventually drop it out of the pool. I would put it back on-line and the pool would resilver fine and run OK for a week or so, then the same drive would fault. It was a Z3 pool so I wasn't ever worried about the data - wanted to troubleshoot it a bit because I wanted to better understand how these drives fail. After 2 cycles of this I got bored and just replaced it. The pool has been stable ever since.

Its entirely possible that the slot or cable was marginal. When I replaced it in the pool I used another slot in the backplane (I had a spare drive pre-staged there). I re-tested the drive offline using a USB connector from the cracked cases -it showed several hundred sectors in trouble. I did a surface initialize using HD Sentinal Pro and it shows perfect now, but I don't trust it so its on a shelf for emergency/desperation use only.
 

PigLover

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Interestingly i just had one fail today. So that's 30 drives, one infant mortality, one hard failed in about 9 months.
 

Deslok

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8 drives here, 173 days no issues. Used for media storage. Probably going to sell to go 8TB or 10TB drives as I am running low on space again.
Interestingly i just had one fail today. So that's 30 drives, one infant mortality, one hard failed in about 9 months.
24 drives 8 months or something? 0 fails. I'd expect 1 a year.
These have all been added, the reliability are not horribly only 2 out of 89 entered drives have failed at any point.(1 infant 1 after normal use)
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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Add 12 more to the mix from me, zero failures so far. (approx 7-8 months of use)

2 failed out of 101 :-D, not too bad at all
 

colbradley

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Jan 10, 2017
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Just registered to ask: are these drives reliable in a HTPC?
I was about to buy 2x4TB red but they are VERY expensive for a poor student like me. I've noticed a few of you remark on the performance. But i'm only gonna be using them to stream my own private 2k/4k bluray, but performance wise are they up to the task?

Right now I have 8TB using WDGREENS and they work very well, been on 24/7 for 5 years. But they need to be replaced due to age and runtime. Also i'm not gonna RAID, just use them as a single platform, ex 4TBHD1, 4TBHD2

Thanks
 

BlueFox

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Oct 26, 2015
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Streaming media takes next to nothing (blu-ray tops out at a whole ~7mb/s). A 20 year old hard drive could do it.
 
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fractal

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Jun 7, 2016
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Just registered to ask: are these drives reliable in a HTPC?
The only drive I would put in a HTPC is a SSD boot drive. That is the only thing cool, quiet and reliable enough for my home theater.

A more interesting question is whether they are fast enough and reliable enough for a NAS containing your media content. The answer from this thread appears to be "yes". Though, to be honest, given the choice between a pair if 8TB WD red drives in a mirror or 3-4 of these guys, I would probably go with the reds.