26 TB Hard Drive

[FourCorners 2]

I have one 26 tb hard drive almost full I have lots a movies & shows but what I need to do is I have 7 more 26 tb drives I want to join together as 1 hard drive and just thinking how long does a hard drive last.

 

[yocker 1721]

I would suggest building a dedicated server and use something like Unraid or Truenas.

If you insist on using Windows then look up "Windows Storage spaces" as that is what is used in Windows to manage larger storage/raids.

[MBSki 1127]

Use StableBit Drive Pool on Windows. Fantastic app. Much better than Windows Storage Spaces. Also get StableBit Scanner which will scan your drives every month looking for issues. If an issue is spotted, just send it back to the vendor for a warranty replacement. Drive life varies, but you can get 5 years out of quality drives. If you're getting 7 new drives now, stick with the same vendor now and as you add more later just to make it easier to manage. I use Seagate which also comes with an app that can fix common hard drive issues.

[Neminem 1775]

6 hours ago, MBSki said:

If you're getting 7 new drives now, stick with the same vendor

Do you mean same distributer or same drive manufacture?

What about the bad batch problem?

When sourcing you drives from 1 vendor and buying them all at once.

You might end up with the same batch, of bad drives.

[MBSki 1127]

6 hours ago, Neminem said:

Do you mean same distributer or same drive manufacture?

What about the bad batch problem?

When sourcing you drives from 1 vendor and buying them all at once.

You might end up with the same batch, of bad drives.

Same manufacturer. 

Yea, I guess that's possible. Might be good to split up the order to avoid that issue.

[Q-Droid 1044]

How long HDDs last? That depends.

 Don't try this at home, but...

I have two with 115k hours on them. One reported errors in SMART but that was in the first few years and well before I removed them from the volume at ~90k hours, give or take. No corruption or data loss but they're too old, too slow and too small (2TB) for regular use now. For the last 316 days I've been running an I/O workload simulation 24/7 of around 1.5TB/day on each and still no corruption or loss detected yet. I was planning to keep the workload going until at least one of them fails but if I lose interest or need the slots then they'll get pulled.

 

[yocker 1721]

10 hours ago, Neminem said:

Do you mean same distributer or same drive manufacture?

What about the bad batch problem?

When sourcing you drives from 1 vendor and buying them all at once.

You might end up with the same batch, of bad drives.

Personally don't think it matters.
Unless a batch has a serious flaw i don't see hard drives die within a meaningful time frame that could cost any data when running with parity/raid.

Last time i heard of such a flaw was with the Matrox DeskStars (Also known as DeathStars) in the 201x's. Had two of them my self and even then there was 3 months between them dying.

Ofc. nothing wrong in being careful.  

[js28194 63]

I'm conflicted on this approach as the OP never really states on the "How"... I come from days of Dell PowerVaults and RAID 5 controllers and DRAC cards so, yeah, having one drive letter makes sense, but you need the support scaffolding around it to ensure life works.

I got poor back in the day so external 8tb usb drives and I'm fine with media scattered as I have script that runs every 3 days to generate a text file across the drive letters so if I loose the media on one, I'm fine.  But those drives were relatively inexpensive also back in the day.

I have two usb PCIe usb cards that have 8 usb 3.0 ports each which I have slowly weening myself off of.  I ended up buy one of these https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07MD2LNYX?th=1

so technically, I could 8 of these with 8 drives each... not sure if Windows can support that many drive letters   I would have to get exotic at that point.  Anything that I really really want is not cheap.

Edited 1 hour ago by js28194

[Q-Droid 1044]

With that many SATA drives in that many enclosures using that many USB ports the interfaces are going to be your bottlenecks. Both USB and PCIe would be overcommitted. This is assuming Windows can handle the number of drives. It shouldn't be a noticeable problem for a media server, it being a low I/O throughput application. If you go through with this then building out, transferring files and general maintenance if you try to reorg and rebalance storage periodically are when you're likely to notice things being slower than expected. But these wouldn't be day-to-day events.

 

Edited 1 minute ago by Q-Droid