In need of recommendations for storage

[Kyouma 3]

Hello, i currently have emby running on an Intel nuc with Google cloud as a storage option, but need to change to local storage.

I got 12tb on the cloud and am looking for something I can plug into the nuc via USB and don't exactly know what works and what not.

Would this be enough for my needs?

TerraMaster D4-300 USB 3.1(Gen1)

I'm thinking of getting 2 18tb hdds with the option to expand if needed, but also don't know which would be the best to choose.

Any recommendations would be appreciated. 

Edited May 18, 2023 by Kyouma

[RanmaCanada 345]

It appears it would do the job, but you can do the same thing with old PC hardware and make your own NAS.  You do not have to have it directly plugged into your NUC, as anything on the network would suffice.  Unless you want the really small form factor.  I would look into recycling older hardware first if you have access to it before spending money.

I would look into UNRAID, OMV or even TrueNAS.  Though you could also just make a windows or linux dummy box to hold your storage.

[Kyouma 3]

Thanks for your reply. I actually don't have any old PC Hardware, but I have this older NAS which I completely forgot, though it only has 2 Bay.

I think I will use that for the time being and upgrade, when more space is needed. And yes, it would be better to have a small form factor as I don't have that much space.

[rbjtech 4283]

Just stay away from Seagate HDD's - in many many years of 24x7 HDD usage in a NAS, 95% of my failures have been from Seagate drives ... 

 

[Kyouma 3]

Thanks for the heads up, I'm gonna buy the WD Ultrastar 18 TB. Heard good things about that one. Will be getting them this weekend I think.

[Ronstang 202]

The best storage drives I have found are the Toshiba.  I have two 16TB helium filled drives and not only are they fast they run cool compared to every other drive I have, plus they come with a 5 year warranty so do not buy from any place not offering that warranty.

In the last 25 years almost all the drives I have had that died were either Seagate or Western Digital with Seagate being the worst.  I will not buy anything from either company any more.  All my current drives are Hitachi or Toshiba and some of the Hitachis are 12 years old and I have never lost one of either.  Granted not all these drives are 24/7 but all those in my one emb emby server are 7-8 years old of 24/7 and those are Hitachis and Toshibas and none of those have died yet....but they are backed up at their age just in case.

[rbjtech 4283]

3 hours ago, Ronstang said:

The best storage drives I have found are the Toshiba.  I have two 16TB helium filled drives and not only are they fast they run cool compared to every other drive I have, plus they come with a 5 year warranty so do not buy from any place not offering that warranty.

In the last 25 years almost all the drives I have had that died were either Seagate or Western Digital with Seagate being the worst.  I will not buy anything from either company any more.  All my current drives are Hitachi or Toshiba and some of the Hitachis are 12 years old and I have never lost one of either.  Granted not all these drives are 24/7 but all those in my one emb emby server are 7-8 years old of 24/7 and those are Hitachis and Toshibas and none of those have died yet....but they are backed up at their age just in case.

Agree 100%.

Every Seagate drive that I had has now failed or losing sectors at an alarming rate - ie about to fail.   I only have a couple of WD (one relatively new - less than 2 years old) and that too now has bad sectors.  My only drives that are 100% perfect after years of being on 24x7 are Toshiba.  My oldest 8Gb HDWN180 drive has been spinning for 2056 days total - so approaching 6 years continous usage. All drives are CMR - SMR is just asking for trouble.

Edited August 29, 2023 by rbjtech

[RanmaCanada 345]

I have a mix of WD, Toshiba and Seagate.  I have several 6+ year old Seagate 8TB archive drives (SMR) that are still going strong.  

[Ronstang 202]

I'm glad you Seagate drives are holding up, but from my experience in the past I am not willing to waste any money on products that have not served me well.....and I only buy CMR drives.  From my experience the Toshiba drives simply cannot be beat for the money.

[Spaceboy 2494]

slightly different perspective - if an SMR disk lasts me six years thats fine, because i'll have replaced it due to not being of sufficient size to add value by then. I have one more 8TB disk left in a pool of 55 disks.

for my use case WD shucked disks cannot be beaten for the money

[Ronstang 202]

41 minutes ago, Spaceboy said:

for my use case WD shucked disks cannot be beaten for the money

I tried that route with a Seagate drive about 5 years ago.  I received it and got it up and running and started transferring movies onto it to clear space for on my HTPC so I could record some more.  My intention was to fill it up then unplug it util I could get around to encoding and organizing it etc.....this was before I was using emby and was just using WMC so it was more difficult.

While the drive was still being filled up it started making noise.  Pretty soon it was garbage and I had not only lost all my movies but I had only had this thing for less than 24 hours.  That was my last foray into anything Seagate because it was not the first  drive I had lost prematurely.

I haven't tried WD lately because of my experience with older drives so I can't speak to them in SATA but considering the drives I buy are not only cheaper but I have not lost one in a decade means there is no reason to stray from my current path.

[softworkz 3338]

On 8/29/2023 at 9:16 AM, rbjtech said:

On 8/29/2023 at 5:56 AM, Ronstang said:

The best storage drives I have found are the Toshiba.  I have two 16TB helium filled drives and not only are they fast they run cool compared to every other drive I have, plus they come with a 5 year warranty so do not buy from any place not offering that warranty.

In the last 25 years almost all the drives I have had that died were either Seagate or Western Digital with Seagate being the worst.  I will not buy anything from either company any more.  All my current drives are Hitachi or Toshiba and some of the Hitachis are 12 years old and I have never lost one of either.  Granted not all these drives are 24/7 but all those in my one emb emby server are 7-8 years old of 24/7 and those are Hitachis and Toshibas and none of those have died yet....but they are backed up at their age just in case.

Agree 100%.

Every Seagate drive that I had has now failed or losing sectors at an alarming rate - ie about to fail.   I only have a couple of WD (one relatively new - less than 2 years old) and that too now has bad sectors.  My only drives that are 100% perfect after years of being on 24x7 are Toshiba.  My oldest 8Gb HDWN180 drive has been spinning for 2056 days total - so approaching 6 years continous usage. All drives are CMR - SMR is just asking for trouble.

Did Seagate quality change that much? In the past 5-8 years, I didn't deal with larger amounts of HDs, but for the 20 years before, I always had the best experiences with Seagate drives of which I've rarely seen one failing - many running even for 12-15 years (all 7200, mostly running 24/7). It was even that every non-Seagate HD that I had installed over time has failed while Seagate HDs of the triple age continued to run. When the servers were shut down, there were only Seagate HDs. Of course I had focused on those and bought other brands only when there was no other choice, but the box with dead HDs had more non-Seagate HDs even though it was the majority in acquisition. 

Hm, I wonder how my experience can be so different...

[RanmaCanada 345]

Seagate drives, according to BackBlaze, have the highest failure rate, and even then, the failure rate is ridiculously low except for outliers.

[Ronstang 202]

3 hours ago, softworkz said:

Hm, I wonder how my experience can be so different...

I don't know but I stopped using them after 1TB drives were the sweetspot for price....except one 2TB I bought because it was a great deal....but you guessed it, it died yet all the Hitachi 1 and 2TB drives I have that are 10-15 years old still work but they have not been in service for a while and I use them to store DVD and Blu-Ray rips I have encoded already.

[softworkz 3338]

2 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

I don't know but I stopped using them after 1TB drives were the sweetspot for price

The ones I'm talking about were all < 1TB

[Ronstang 202]

10 minutes ago, softworkz said:

The ones I'm talking about were all < 1TB

The smaller drives were far more reliable back then and are you talking IDE?  I just got tired of loosing data with relatively young drives so when Hitachi bought the IBM hard drive division after the "click of death" syndrome the deskstar line developed and fixed the problem I switched and never looked back because the IBM drives were always the gold star drives and Hitachi was smart enough to capitalize on IMB's stupidity.

20+ years ago I always bought the Maxstor drives because they were always on sale and I had great luck with them.  I only had one drive die, it was a 40GB one and was under warranty and Maxtor sent me a 60GB as a replacement.....now I have files that would eat up an entire one of those drives LOL!!!

[softworkz 3338]

12 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

The smaller drives were far more reliable back then and are you talking IDE? 

Always had SCSI since the early 90ies and until fast SATA came. I remember just 3 Seagates which died before the age of 10: One fell on the floor, one actually died without obvious reason (but > 5 years) and then I had one of the first Cheetahs with 10k rpm, which died somewhere between 5 and 8. All other Seagates were still functional when taken out of service. But the box with died-in-action HDs was full of all the other brands.
Maybe it's because I only bought other brands when no Seagates were available, which might have been at times of global shortage, so that I maybe got lees good models of the other brands. I've never been familiar with other brands' models, means in those cases, I just took what was available.

[Ronstang 202]

SCSI.....there's your reason.  They were  the drives of choice for the big guys like SUN Microsystems for a reason....reliability and performance.  But they were more expensive and the interface was designed for servers and a higher drive count in a machine and by the time the PC became mainstream the IDE had replaced it because back in the early 90s very few had more then one hard drive in a system and a 400MB drive was huge.

I had a relative the used to work for SUN and I had lots of cast off equipment.  I had a 24" CRT monitor....damn thing weighed 75lbs and was HUGE.  I also had a box full of 12 brand new Quantum SSCI drives that I gave away because I never used them because of the interface and by the time they were a little small.

[rbjtech 4283]

Maybe we need to defined what I consider a 'bad drive' - I don't recall 'any' of my drives actually failing to spin up (mainly because they spin 24x7 I guess) - but I consider any drive with increasing 'bad sectors' (according to SMART) to be 'going bad' and thus no longer reliable.   ALL of the Seagate Barrcuda's 2Tb drives had increasing bad sectors, to the point that I retired / destroyed them - in constrast, none of the other drives to this day, have a single bad sector.     Maybe it was the temp range they didn't like - likely too low, as opposed to too high as they were cooled to be max 40 DegC.

 

[Ronstang 202]

@rbjtechYes, I agree that to me a drive that keeps loosing sectors is a bad drive because it puts data integrity at risk and for people like us, even though hobbyists, loosing data is just painful and we are willing to spend money to avoid it.  I used to have drives that had increasing bad sectors but we are talking way back in the GB size drive and IDE days for me.  I have not had that issue in over a decade  and for me a failed drive is one that either won't spin up or if it does isn't recognized by the system.

I have a lot of USB docks and my biggest "failure" issue  in the last decade has been drives loosing their file system when removed or a power failure and the drive showing as RAW or needing initialization.  But in these cases that is not an issue with the drive nor it's fault and once I pull the data off with DMDE (the best and only data recovery software I use) simply reformatting or reinitializing them makes everything fine again.

[softworkz 3338]

11 hours ago, Ronstang said:

SCSI.....there's your reason.  They were  the drives of choice for the big guys like SUN Microsystems for a reason....reliability and performance.  But they were more expensive and the interface was designed for servers and a higher drive count in a machine and by the time the PC became mainstream the IDE had replaced it because back in the early 90s very few had more then one hard drive in a system and a 400MB drive was huge.

SCSI actually wasn't designed for servers originally, which is already in the name: "Small Computer System Interface", but later it was used for smaller servers because IDE wasn't acceptable for servers - and not for workstations either.

The component list of the first PC I got (around 92-94) was composed by someone in my dad's related company, who did their own MB development (embedded). It was an Intel i486, and Asus board (...TP4XEG), an adaptec controller, SCSI drive, miro Crystal graphics. I kept that recipe for the next 15 years: Asus board, Adaptec controller, SCSI drives. I always had more than one drive and rarely retired any, instead moved them around for different purposes in servers or workstations - that's why many of them grew so old. I never had any data loss over all the time, which was a bad advisor as it made me lazy in doing backups. Eventually it happened and I had to pay an obscene amount of money for a data recovery service 

But that was long time ago. At some point I lost interest in hardware and nowadays I'm rather asking friends for advice when needed.

[softworkz 3338]

11 hours ago, rbjtech said:

ALL of the Seagate Barrcuda's 2Tb drives had increasing bad sectors, to the point that I retired / destroyed them - in constrast, none of the other drives to this day, have a single bad sector.     Maybe it was the temp range they didn't like - likely too low, as opposed to too high as they were cooled to be max 40 DegC.

Few years ago someone told me that you need to be careful with Seagate drives and only buy models which have been manufactured in Thailand but not the ones built in China.
Not sure whether that still applies - not even whether they still have both production places.

[speechles 1920]

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11037/seagate-to-shut-down-one-of-its-largest-hdd-assembly-plants

Ever since 2017 Seagate has been headed in a cost cutting direction. This is why they want to make HDD with NVME interfaces to keep things cheap.

I've had several Seagate drives just up and die on me. The most recent was a 12TB that just up and died at one week past the warranty date. I did recover everything off the drive thanks to the application "FastCopy" on Windows. Heat is the issue with these drives. After they throw errors flip em over upside down. So the hot side is on top and cold on bottom. Keep doing that and keep copying until everything copies off without timeout errors.

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-12TB-External-Drive/dp/B08XKKFDVN?th=1

DO NOT BUY FROM THE STORE SHOWN ABOVE. THERE IS A REASON THEY INCLUDE RECOVERY SERVICES FOR THE WARRANTY PERIOD. THIS IS WHY IT IS ON SALE. JUNK.

</end rant>

Just my advice. I have started to purchase WD for the future.

Edit: You will be able to tell when the drive is dying. It will have these odd pauses where when copying it goes to 0 speed. After about 30-45 seconds it happily resumes copying your data onto the drive. But it is these hangs where copying stalls for a bit or playing things on Emby stalls for a bit. You see the playback recovery happen for no apparent reason. Time to go looking at your hard drives.

Stare especially long at any drives CrystalDiskInfo shows with those yellow caution boxes. Is it better to have more "Power On Count" than it is to have "Power On Hours"? Which process of Power On kills the drive faster? Leaving you to wonder does wake from sleep age the drive faster or does constant power on. That is the question. A media drive technically shouldn't sleep, but if you have few users at certain hours, and the drives can, should they? These are hard questions to answer.

 

 

Edited September 3, 2023 by speechles

[Ronstang 202]

6 hours ago, softworkz said:

SCSI actually wasn't designed for servers originally

I'm well aware of that but at the time small computers were NOT personal computers in the sense that we know them.  I should have clarified by saying small servers such as those made by companies like DEC and Sun back in the day.....by PC standards those were servers.  

[softworkz 3338]

3 minutes ago, Ronstang said:

I'm well aware of that but at the time small computers were NOT personal computers in the sense that we know them.  I should have clarified by saying small servers such as those made by companies like DEC and Sun back in the day.....by PC standards those were servers.  

The famous Adaptec AHA 2940 wasn't really a server controller, though... (I had lots). Also used them to connect flatbed scanners.