(Really) Expert guidance on HDDs reliability/endurance, custom APM profiles + RAID setups

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kajimshanti

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I know this question has probably been asked hundreds of times, but I see that all threads regarding this topic are always flooded with a great majority of biased opinions and anecdotal informations which ultimately leads nowhere. Thus I'd like if for once only real experts of the sector would reply here (thank you).

So, ultimately this is because I'd like to invest in some storage devices for a desktop and home server, and I'd want to maximize not just TB/$$ but rather TB*lifespan/$$ . (Question1)
I can see myself paying 50 eur per TB, and I'd like my drives to last at least 5 years, making it a 10 eur per TB per year annualized cost. That would be a fair deal to me. I'm interested in both 7200 rpms and 5400s, and both 3.5"s and 2.5"s (there is a new case design I like which only has 2 3.5" bays, but if prices on 2.5"s are too higher I will stick with my normal case).

I know estimating the lifespan is a hard task though. From what I've been reading buying a HDD is said to be like a Russian roulette just because before buying you can never know when that drive will fail you. I also understood one cannot generalize HDD brands quality since there are only 2 major producers nowadays controlling nearly all of the market and it seems like they both enjoy selling stuff which isn't really designed to last for long, possibly just over the warranty period.

However warranty period is not necessarily a very good proxy for reliability. Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC early 2010s Hitachi s which had 2 or 3 years warranty are now recognized to be generally more durable than the more expensive 5 years warranty WD Blacks. Unfortunately as you know then Hitachi was bought by WD so now it is difficult to tell how reliable the new HGSTs really are. I would buy a 2011-2013 Hitachi if I could find some in new or light-used conditions, but thats obviously very unlikely.

I'm also very interested in understanding which are the main causes of HDD failure aside from environmental causes (oddly enough I've never experienced a hdd failure so far, even though I had a thunderstorm completely fry my old iMac once). I read some debates about aggressive APMs being one of the major causes of premature HDD death. That would explain why some old Hitachi were so durable and Seagate Barracudas / WD Greens so prone to early failure under heavy usage. If that's really the main reason then adjusting APM parameters would ideally improve those drives' lifespan significantly, am I right? (Question2)
Still, would it be possible to do that if drives are in RAID?Are there consumer-class drives which have been reported to be safely APM customizable under (software)RAID? (Question3)

I hope some of these difficult questions can find an answer here. Thank you very much
 
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The LE drive is not as good as a Samsung 850 evo but if you got for a decent amount cheaper then an EVO then it is still a good buy: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/corsair-force-series-le-ssd,4558-5.html

Your OS on an SSD is going to have way more writes then a game or media. Your OS overwrites cache, temp internet files and many other things many many times a day, vs having a game for weeks or months. Modern SSDs would need to write something like 100TB+ per year of data to reach their real lifespan in 10 years. Thus worrying about overwriting a game every 2-4 months is nothing for an SSD.

If you are rendering/editing media or doing transfers to other RAID array's then you will see a noticeable gain from RAID0. Otherwise the...
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Mr5oh

Mr5oh

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BackBlaze, they primarily only test the enterprise drives, but it's pretty much the most complete testing you'll find.

I still only buy WD Black drives. (With the exception of SSD, then it's primariy Samsung, have a couple Corsair (x2) and Mushkin (x2) as well). Every Black WD drive I have is still running today, knock on wood, in fact, when I retire them usually and upgrade to larger drives, they usually go to relatives in their PCs.
 
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oczdude8

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I think the reason why you cannot find the perfect and 100% correct answer is because there is none. Most hard drives these days are extremely similar and I would attribute most failures to random defects in components, manufacturing, shipment, and to environmental differences, such as surges, poor power supplies, physical damage etc.

I am a firm believer that you simply have to be unlucky to have issues with your hard drives (modern ones of course).

Best advice I can give is to look at your alternatives, choose the model series suitable for your use (i.e. there are surveillance drives, nas drives, performance drives etc), and find a reputable store to purchase them and hope the drives you buy were not dropped before you get them. :p
 
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boosted1g

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To give you the best advice we need to know what you are doing with the drives.

A bunch of drives in JBOD or Raid 0/1 vs drives running a hardware raid 5/6 is two very different set of operating conditions. Running anything but enterprise drives in raid 5/6 is not going to stand up to heavy load for 5 years.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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The only thing that really matters with hard drives is the data on those drives.

Hardware dies. Live with it. Replace and move on.
You cannot replace a 10 year old pic of your grandson.

Consumer grade drives are all pretty similar in terms of general lifespan. Some particular moedl lines are aimed at one specific use over another.
Games, backups, surveillance, etc, etc, etc.

You mention RAID, with no specifics.
What do you suppose a RAID array of any type will do for you?

In the consumer space, RAID of any type is rarely needed.
The physical drives rarely die, and if they do, a rational, tested backup situation is the safeguard for your data.
 
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kajimshanti

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@Mr5oh
I was also starting to consider WD blacks for their 5 years warranty, besides their price per TB is basically double of the cheapest drives so the annualized cost isn't much better if i assume all drives fail short after their warranty period. What is the max number of years you usually have your blacks running, and on what kind of load?

@boosted1g
You are right. Im am not going to put these drives under exceptional load, I mostly do 2D art, play some games once in a whike. I was thinking to set up a raid0 for games and other unimportant stuff and a raid1 for backups of important data. However I came to notice Seagate's Firecuda hybrid drives last night, they have 5 yr warranty and are faster and cheaper than WD blacks. If I get one of those I'd not need to set up the raid0 no more. Has anyone had an experience with these hybrid drives? How is the driver support in Linux?

Also, what we can expect from the new HGSTs? Did they implement the sometimes-infamous parking head feature in their new drives' APM?
 
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boosted1g

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Your proposed drive configuration is highly inefficient.

First and foremost you should use an SSD for OS and programs, nothing outperforms an SSD (except new types of SSD drives) and the new models beat out longevity of HDD.

SSHD are pretty much a poor buy. SSHDs are faster because they have some flash memory on it and the firmware puts the most commonly accessed files in that. As a boot drive it shows a moderate performance increase but nothing close to SSDs. As a storage drive/games drive it is almost mute because you are either accessing different files or different games constantly and thus it will not save an entire game in your 8gb flash and thus it will still spend time spinning the disk to find the files.

RAID 0 will give you some performance improvement but at the cost of increased wear on your drives and much higher probability of data loss. Yes you will double the max speed by having 2 drives in raid 0, but the mbps is not what makes a drive slow it is non-sequential file access having to spin the drive to 100 different places to load a program.

RAID 1 is not a backup solution, I really wish we could sort out where this myth got started and squash it because soo many users have this misconception. RAID 1 is a mirror, it is an exact copy; thus if say your RAID 0 array gets corrupted all you will have is a perfect duplicate of the corrupted data. RAID 1 is a very fast "back-up-and-running" solution against a drive failure; but does absolutely nothing to protect against data corruption, accidental deletion, infections, or any other reason you would want to restore data back to a previous state.


Depending on amount of games the best option would be:
1-2 SSDs for OS/Programs and games (games on second SSD)
HDD for media/files if you have more then you can fit on the SSD(s)
HDD(s) for backup, no RAID configuration. Take disc images of your SSDs with macrium reflect or other imaging software, and you can also use a program like syncback for file backups.

This way you have real backups that you can revert back to (I like to keep 3-4 disc images of each drive), You will be putting less strain on the HDD by not using RAID, and the SSDs will provide the best performance.


Naturally this setup is assuming average storage needs so if you have TBs of media or a whole ton of games then can tweak it.
 
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kajimshanti

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@boosted1g
Thank you for rising up those RAID points. Didn't consider them before. Actually (I thought I had already written it but in fact missed it..) I do have 1 SSD already. It is a Corsair Force LE 480GB, it was quite a cheap buy for 120€ so I hope I won't find issues later... btw the reason I thought about RAID0 is that I didn't want to shorten my SSD's life by continuously writing and erasing games and other unimportant short-life big-size data... SSDs are still very expensive so I guess going RAID0 should still be more cost-effective ?
About Seagate SSHDs I guessed they are not anything spectacular performancewise, but they come with 5 yr warranty which is not bad for the price (117 € for 2TB) ?
Other than those I'm still considering WD Blacks and HGST.
WD Reds didn't do well in the Backblaze study. Now what I couldn't get informations about is if the new HGST are at least as good as their older Hitachi equivalents. I think I understand they have implemented the head parking feature now, but I still don't know if that would be a cause of increased wear and if it can be conveniently optimized through hdparam in linux.
 
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boosted1g

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The LE drive is not as good as a Samsung 850 evo but if you got for a decent amount cheaper then an EVO then it is still a good buy: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/corsair-force-series-le-ssd,4558-5.html

Your OS on an SSD is going to have way more writes then a game or media. Your OS overwrites cache, temp internet files and many other things many many times a day, vs having a game for weeks or months. Modern SSDs would need to write something like 100TB+ per year of data to reach their real lifespan in 10 years. Thus worrying about overwriting a game every 2-4 months is nothing for an SSD.

If you are rendering/editing media or doing transfers to other RAID array's then you will see a noticeable gain from RAID0. Otherwise the gains will be minimal as it wont help your game perform any better, and whether your drive can read at 110mBps or 200mBps is irrelevent to watch a 3mBps movie. What you will do is increase the stress on the drive and increase your probability of data loss and drive failure.

Bottom line the warranty is no guarantee of not having a drive failure, it only guarantees you wont pay to replace the drive in so many years.
The level of thought/research you are putting into this is overkill for home use where you are not talking about serious money lost rebuilding disk arrays or from data loss like a medium/large business would have. I personally (for both myself and my SMB clients) I get medium grade drives and have a proper backup solution to protect against data failure. To my clients the $80-150 to replace a drive is irrelevant, as long as the data is well backed up. The medium line drives have a high probability of lasting 5+ years. In 8 years I have seen maybe 5-8% of drives I purchased fail, most failures I get are from cheap drives in OEM computers).
 
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