Best hard drive for media playback

[CBers 7450]

HGST all the way. I have 8 of those and one Enterprise, among the drives in my server.

I bought 2 x 6Tb HGST drives last month and within 4 hours they started to fail.

 

Within 24 hours, they were virtually dead.

 

I returned them for a full refund and bought Western Digitals instead and not had a problem since.

 

I've always used WD drives and will be sticking with them for the time being.

 

Just my experience with 2 HGST drives, so thought I'd share.

[naeonline 27]

I've gone with WD Red Pro and Black drives as they have 5 yr warranty instead of 1 or 3.  Also, I'm a lifetime Plex Pass user (Lifetime Emby user too) and use their discount codes for 20% off at WD's store so it's a steal when comparing prices to newegg or amazon.  I don't do any RAID, just drive pooling with DrivePool.  Currently loaded up with 4 6TB Blacks and 3 8TB Red Pros and a new 8TB Red Pro on the way as I've filled up recently and need to expand.  I loaded up my Dad's server with 15 5TB WD Red Pros.  Out of all of these we haven't lost a single drive running almost 24x7 for more than 2 years.

[PenkethBoy 2068]

Have 14x HGST NAS, 18x WD Blues, 6x WD Red and 6x Seagate (archive drives) - live at the moment

 

Only one to fail recently was a WD Blue which was replaced via warranty

 

Did have a couple of Seagate drives be dead on arrival similar to @@CBers - down to how they we packaged (just in bubble wrap!) rather than a fault with the drives

 

Virtually any SATA III drive will be fast enough to stream videos via Emby - it will only become an issue if you try with high numbers of streams all from the same HDD - SDD much less likely

[Guest asrequested]

I bought 2 x 6Tb HGST drives last month and within 4 hours they started to fail.

 

Within 24 hours, they were virtually dead.

 

I returned them for a full refund and bought Western Digitals instead and not had a problem since.

 

I've always used WD drives and will be sticking with them for the time being.

 

Just my experience with 2 HGST drives, so thought I'd share.

That sucks, but no brand is without failure.

 

And for basic use, anything other than desktop drives will be good to use.

[CBers 7450]

Did have a couple of Seagate drives be dead on arrival similar to @@CBers - down to how they we packaged (just in bubble wrap!) rather than a fault with the drives

 

The HGST drives that failed were packaged correctly, but the replacement WD drives were just in bubble wrap and have worked perfectly ever since.

 

[CBers 7450]

That sucks, but no brand is without failure.

 

Very true, but as they were the first time I'd bought HGST drives, it will make me hesitant to buy them again in the future.

[Guest asrequested]

Very true, but as they were the first time I'd bought HGST drives, it will make me hesitant to buy them again in the future.

I totally understand that. I'm the same way with ASUS motherboards. Bad first impressions, right?

 

I've only had 3 drives fail in over 20 years. I guess I'm lucky

 

I'm definitely only buying enterprise drives or SSDs, in the future.

[legallink 187]

I totally understand that. I'm the same way with ASUS motherboards. Bad first impressions, right?

 

I've only had 3 drives fail in over 20 years. I guess I'm lucky

 

I'm definitely only buying enterprise drives or SSDs, in the future.

 

I would check out backblaze's hard drive statistics before you make any calls on writing off one brand or the other.  I'm not sure how you got such a bad batch of HGST's but they are widely regarded as one of the most stable/reliable brands out there.  But  it all depends on the lineup and the production cycle.  I've been using HGST's and their helium line for a few years now, and love it.  Fast, responsive, runs relatively cool and has significant throughput as well as a great warranty, but they aren't cheap.

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/

 

Of late, the larger Seagate drives have been holding their own, but historically have not been great.

 

WD have been hit and miss I think, but I"ve had a bunch of their NAS Red's and they have worked solidly for me for a few years now....maybe 4 or 5?

[Guest asrequested]

I would check out backblaze's hard drive statistics before you make any calls on writing off one brand or the other. I'm not sure how you got such a bad batch of HGST's but they are widely regarded as one of the most stable/reliable brands out there. But it all depends on the lineup and the production cycle. I've been using HGST's and their helium line for a few years now, and love it. Fast, responsive, runs relatively cool and has significant throughput as well as a great warranty, but they aren't cheap.

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2017/

 

Of late, the larger Seagate drives have been holding their own, but historically have not been great.

 

WD have been hit and miss I think, but I"ve had a bunch of their NAS Red's and they have worked solidly for me for a few years now....maybe 4 or 5?

I guess you missed my post where I put up Backblaze's stats?

[Tur0k 148]

Here, Back in the old days I was a western digital only guy when I was a young geek. Then I got burned by two drives and went seagate. I have an older readynas and the drives in it are ancient half seagate Enterprise drives and the other half are newer WD red NAS drives. The WDs went into it after my three drive seagate config has a single drive failure. My Emby server has a bank of mixed Seagate NAS and WD RED NAS drives for storage and a bank of SSDs for system and application support.

 

These days, I am pretty vendor agnostic. I do generally buy NAS or enterprise level HDDs.

 

I like 7200 RPM and up so long as the duty behavior is bursty and the environment can handle heat effectively. 5400 RPM drives are useful to me in environments where I can not mitigate heat well, or where the behavior is primarily steady writes ( I have found these work really well in security video monitoring servers). Normally, I look up performance metrics and user ratings and select drive specs that match the use case.

 

When I have a bunch of drives to work with, I like configuring a RAID array that is designed for fault tolerance and read and or write performance improvements. This way I don’t get burned by any specific vendor.

 

The build I am working on now build is for my new VMHost that will also support my hardware array of fresh drives. I am planning on separate banks of HDD and SSD drives. HDDs for data and SSD for OS/applications. Right now I am looking at starting with 4 x 8TB 7200 RPM 256MB cache configured in a RAID 10 array (16TB available storage space out of 32 TB Total drive space). This should give me the benefit of some 4x read and 2x write improvement.

 

I will likely do the same thing with my SSD array except on 500GB 3D NAND drives.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Edited March 6, 2018 by Tur0k

[all4dom 101]

Just a quick queation.......are wd red 5400 nas drives any good? My only fear with the hgst 7200 drives is the heat it generates.

[Guest asrequested]

If not in heavy use, I imagine they'll be fine. NAS drives are designed to be continuously spinning.

[dcrdev 255]

Just a quick queation.......are wd red 5400 nas drives any good? My only fear with the hgst 7200 drives is the heat it generates.

 

I've got these - 4 of them in a ZFS array; they are reliable as hell, quiet and generate little heat. Heat is something I was concerned about because of the small chassis that I built my server in.

 

That being said I wouldn't recommend them for a single drive set up - they shine when in a raid-like set up; performance is pretty poor when used individually.

 

If it's a single drive your after, I would recommend an Enterprise grade 7200rpm drive such as the HGST ones, or the WD Red Pros.

[all4dom 101]

I purchased the hgst drives. Only thing I was worried about was the heat but I guess I'll see how it fares. I had a coupon that expired last night so I had to pull the trigger before it expired. I didn't get the shield because I can run the directv now app on it so I'm going to wait til I can setup the live tv.

[all4dom 101]

Once I get my hard drives, what is the fastest way of copying the contents from 1 drive to anothe? I have a 2 drives for media & backups. I'm only looking to do the copying for 1 drive.

[CBers 7450]

Once I get my hard drives, what is the fastest way of copying the contents from 1 drive to anothe? I have a 2 drives for media & backups. I'm only looking to do the copying for 1 drive.

Do you use any kind of drive pooling?

 

DriveBender, DrivePool or Storage Spaces.

[all4dom 101]

No I never did. I used ms sync toy but not since I built my new win 10 server. I guess I'll take a look at win 10 offers but I doubt it's much.

[Guest asrequested]

Drive pooling is a good idea.

[ebr 16169]

Drive pooling is a good idea.

 

Yup.  I cannot imagine managing a media server of any size without it.

[all4dom 101]

Ok guys here's my setup. I have content stored on drive d. Drive e was the backup. I have content stored on drive f and drive g was a backup. When these drives were in my old server, I used to run sync toy to do my backups. Last year I built my server and I would just copy and paste what I added to yhier backups. Recently I filled drive f and had to add some of the content to drive d and a spare drive. While doing this I no longer have a complete backup of drive f. All four drives are 2tb and I'm going to replace drive f & g with 6tb drives. Since I no longer have a nice backup, I was going to replace the backup drive first, copy the content over and then copy that to the other new drive. This is my delima. Maybe someone knows an easier way?

[Guest asrequested]

So if you're going to have 4 2TB and 2 6TB, I would use drive pooling. I would make two pools (if you want to make a backup). Each pool would be 1 6TB and 2 2TB. Or you could make one pool with the 2 6TB and the the backup pool with the 4 2TB. Yeah, I like that, better. Then just add drives to backup pool as needed. If not using a backup, throw them all in one pool, and enable backup in the pool. Go ahead and jump in the pool

[all4dom 101]

I'm eliminating (2) 2tb drives. It will be awhile before I fill them so if I do get a sale at new egg I'll replace the other (2) 2tb drives also....but that s not for some time.

[all4dom 101]

Oh.....If I jump on that pool I think I would sustain some damage to the head or a minor cut...lol.

[Guest asrequested]

Lol...trust me. It's very easy to use. Stablebit has a one month free trial, that you can experiment with. Try it with two of the drives, that are empty.

[ebr 16169]

Oh.....If I jump on that pool I think I would sustain some damage to the head or a minor cut...lol.

 

On the contrary, I think you'll save yourself a lot of headaches down the road.  Adding more drives will be painless and not require you to move things around or re-configure etc.