Need help picking a multi-bay external enclosure

[heksodokem]

PommieB, could you possibly post the forum link about that guy with experience on Probox?

I was just about to get a couple of 3TB WD Green WD30EURS. I assumed they would be reliable because they are aimed at 24/7 use, unlike the slightly cheaper Caviar Green WD30EZRX. And 3 year vs. 2 year warranty.

In New Zealand it's pretty much either WD or Seagate. Some retailers have one Hitachi 3TB model about 40% more expensive than equivalent WD/Seagate, and Samsungs are nowhere to be found.

[PommieB]

I didn't take notice of the links, but I'll check my history and see if I can find it, I tend to use the greens as well, the guy in the forum may have just picked up a bad batch of green drives, he didn't specify which, I've a number of the EURS drives and I haven't had problems with them, I've never used Hitachi and I lost a Samsung 1tb just recently with surface problems.

I don't worry too much about disk drives, most if not all manufacturers put out faulty drives at some time or other, these larger drives seem to be more prone to failure, I have four EURS drives and none have failed yet.

The guy in the forum seemed to prefer either Hitachi or Samsung, the Hitachi was priced between the two green drives, I was thinking about buying a couple of Hitachi drives, I would have preferred Samsung, but they are hard to get.

[heksodokem]

I've just read here that the EURS skips error correction in favour of command completion time. The review seems pretty adamant that it is "not meant for use in desktop or server environments". What's your take on that?

[PommieB]

I haven't yet found that forum, you need to buy the more expensive RE4 drives for server environments or maybe the black drives, the greens and blues aren't meant for server 24/7 environments, these are more expensive drives, the black drives would be a better option for desktops, the green drives are more for back-up and Media player use.

If your drives are going into a 24/7 or raid environment you need to buy the appropriate drives for that type of use.

If I was running a 24/7 environment I'd buy the RE4, especially if raid is involved. The greens are cheap but I wouldn't use them as a OS drive, I'd use a quality ssd drive or in the case of a laptop a quality ssd drive or a Seagate XT hybrid drive, in a desktop I'd use a ssd drive and two quality rotational drive in raid for storage.

I'm not saying the greens won't work 24/7, they may work ok, just that I would prefer a drive more reliable for 24/7 use.

I spent 45 mins trying to find the forum, couldn't locate it at all, if I come across I'll link.

Well I hope that helps.

[heksodokem]

Many thanks for your advice PommieB. You didn't have to spend so long trying to find that link for me; I feel kind of bad now.

I agree that the highest capacity drives available at a given time seem to be less reliable. More platters, more read/write heads, more complexity. It's rather telling that enterprise series drives currently max out at 2TB rather than going up to 4TB or whatever.

I'm doing things on a tight budget so think I will go with WD greens in my soon to be multi-bay enclosure. They will be running 24/7 so I'll just run a reasonably strict backup plan and not expect them to last beyond two years or so.

Thanks again for your help.

[PommieB]

Depends a lot on what you are using them for, the multi-enclosure if it's the Probox will shut down when not in use after a certain length of time anyway, unless the drives are in constant use all the time as a commercial set-up would be, they won't be actually be running 24/7 anyway, so they'll probably be ok.

You can never tell with Disk Drives, you could buy the cheapest greens and have no problems at all, buy dearer drives and lose them, enterprise drives go down as well. Peoples opinions on disk drives depend on what problems they have with them or what they read on the internet, actual use can be quite different.

The only drive of my own I've had fail was the Samsung F1 which failed last year, having been a builder and a repairer I've come across a lot of failed hard drives of just about every manufacturer, so it's really a lottery on how long a drive going to last anyway. You cover yourself by backing up on multiple disk drives, depending on the value of the data.

No need to feel bad about my search, I had time on my hands due to the bad weather.

[Spartacus]

Thanks for this guys, I'm gonna pick up one of the HF2-SU3S2 Probox in a couple of weeks and throw some F4 ecogreens in there based off this.
Looks like a solid option to have the drives in non-raid over USB3 as a redundancy storage to my current 4x2tb.

......now I just have to manage to gather 600$ to get the box and the 4 drives.

[PommieB]

Pleased you found the thread beneficial, if it doesn't get locked, let us know how you go.

[Mack12]

Yes, it would be great to hear how that works for you, Spartacus. Hopefully everything goes smoothly for you.

I'm glad my situation helped, PommieB. I will be checking in periodically.

On the topic of green drives, any idea how long you could expect them to last if you only run them, say, 12 hours a day? I know there are too many variables to do a real prediction, just wondering, since the drives I have are "Green."
Although, I understand what you mean about disk drives, you never can tell when it is going to go bad until it does.

Also, what are the symptoms of a drive that is failing, and is the data itself likely to be corrupted? If so, I would not want to do a last backup, since I might lose more than I secure.

Thanks again for the help PommieB!

[PommieB]

Good to here from you again, disk drives and reliability are pretty hard to determine, I've found over the years that anything can happen with just about any disk drives and manufacturers, over the years of building and repairing computers, I've seen a lot of bad disk drives, I was a user of WD drives of decent quality, I used to buy them in bulk, I got a bad batch that started failing around the 3 month mark, luckily I wasn't busy at the time and only used six out of the box, but it cost me a lot in time and reputation. I didn't get much sense out of WD, so I dumped the lot and moved to Seagate.

That's not to say WD drives are bad I just got a bad batch, but it put me off WD's for a long time.

Symptoms can be anything from blue screens to slow performance, it depends on what has or is failing.

On the other hand on my own computers I've had only one bad failure, which was a 1tb Samsung F1, which I have referred to previously, the drive began to get surface problems, I moved over 300gb of data only recently with the drive and noticed that certain files were only moving at between 1 and 6MB/s instead of the usual 60 to 70, the drive was a back-up and was practically full, there was only two 4g files that noticeably slowed down. I have two other Samsung F1 drives that I bought at the same time as the failed drive, they appear ok.

I ended up moving the data to another drive ( 850gb ) and started testing the drive, it passed all the obvious tests, when I buy new drives I always test them with HD Tune, when I tested the drive again I got one defective block. Later the drive started to freeze badly and I had to reboot windows. Retested with Hd Tune, still only one defective block. Downloaded the manufacturers surface testing software and there was failing blocks on about 30% of the drives surface, it was out of RMA so I tossed it.

I also have a WD blue drive I keep getting errors when I clone a back-up, testing shows the drives okay, when I clone using a Seagate drive, I get no errors and a perfect working clone, so I'm not sure about the blue drive yet.

From what I've read on the Internet, these larger size drives have a greater chance of failure, whether that's correct remains to be seen. As far as the greens not being reliable or whether they will stand up to 12 hours a day use, hard to say, I have five 2TB greens, one in a media player and four in dual externals, they don't get used that often as they are mainly back-ups, all I can say is, I've had no problems with them over the last 2 or 3 years, there are two 1 tb greens in the Studio and they've been trouble free and are nearly four years old, but they are not in daily use, though I do use it as a external drive on the Media player.

When the guy on the forum mentioned disk drives, it's a single opinion, he probably had a couple of failed green drives and avoids using them anymore, I didn't really take his opinion too seriously, had other people posted complaints about the green drives, then maybe I would get concerned.

My preference would be to mix the drives in a non raid situation, maybe a couple of Samsung greens, wd greens and Hitachi, the Samsung greens are difficult to find in Aussie and are dearer than the WD and Hitachi's, depends on the pocket I guess.

Sorry about the long-winded reply, reliability is a difficult subject.

[Spartacus]

SOON THERE WILL BE STORAGE!
I ran HDTUNE on all the drives already and they tested good, should get the enclosure on Tues.

[PommieB]

I'm close to buying the non-raid 8 drive enclosure, just got to a pay a couple of big bills first, part of owning a property I guess, probably populate it with WD greens which are now at there pre-flood prices again, no usb 3 so I'll run it via a port multi expresscard on the laptop. Buying a 512gb M4, be the first non Intel ssd drive that I've owned, according to the forum there are a few people having problems with them, I'll only be running on sata2 till I update the laptop. Sadly no 400 bargains in Aussie land.

Be interesting to see what the performance is like, been getting 80 MB/s using the expresscard between two dual external enclosures, the Vantex MX and the WD Studio, be interesting to see what the eight stacker will do. I'm still a couple of weeks away yet, from buying.

[PommieB]

I bought the non raid Probox 8 stacker, inserted four 2 TB drives, which took maybe 10 minutes, connected it to the laptop via an esata expresscard, set the probox to esata, all four drives recognized, had to format two drives, up and running in 15 minutes, between 71 and 74 MB/s between a Vantex Dual and the ProBox. Worked like a treat. Haven't got USB3.0, certainly happy with the esata.