Might be true about performance. But what happens when you want to copy it all over to another drive 😉
I trashed two passports because of GLACIAL transfer speeds. Not sure if they were SMR or not.

ncmark wrote on 2024-08-31, 19:24:

Might be true about performance. But what happens when you want to copy it all over to another drive 😉
I trashed two passports because of GLACIAL transfer speeds. Not sure if they were SMR or not.

Glacial write or read speeds?

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-31, 14:07:

But... the real issue is for backups/archiving. I have spent thousands of dollars on external hard drives to back up my NAS and most of them have failed within 6 months of the warranty end. Some suspect that there's binning going on, i.e. the less promising drives are being shoved in external enclosures and, oops, my 3 times per week backups are too intense a load. Removable media is dead. As you said, optical is not cost competitive anymore. External hard drives cost less per TB than normal bluray, BDXL is even worse. Tape is cool, but LTO is only available in an enterprise sphere at enterprise pricing. What's left... microSD?

That's discouraging to hear about external drives. I'd bought and used a bunch of external Seagate drives specifically for backing my NAS.

I wonder if buying standard HDDs and then just using them with an external drive adapter would be a better option?

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-08-31, 20:20:

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-31, 14:07:

But... the real issue is for backups/archiving. I have spent thousands of dollars on external hard drives to back up my NAS and most of them have failed within 6 months of the warranty end. Some suspect that there's binning going on, i.e. the less promising drives are being shoved in external enclosures and, oops, my 3 times per week backups are too intense a load. Removable media is dead. As you said, optical is not cost competitive anymore. External hard drives cost less per TB than normal bluray, BDXL is even worse. Tape is cool, but LTO is only available in an enterprise sphere at enterprise pricing. What's left... microSD?

That's discouraging to hear about external drives. I'd bought and used a bunch of external Seagate drives specifically for backing my NAS.

I wonder if buying standard HDDs and then just using them with an external drive adapter would be a better option?

I don't know. All I know is that I've had very bad results, both with Seagates and WDs. Now, maybe I have the drives in an environment with a bit too much heat, maybe something else, who knows. The binning theory was put forward by others. I would note that in the same heat, one of my oldest drives, an...8ish?... TB Seagate from many years ago, continues to be working fine, whereas the newer drives went bad much, much quicker.

Last hard drive I tried to buy, a WD, started going bad within a few weeks. Exchanged it. New one went bad again. I think I exchanged that one too. Then I started to give up and worry worst buy would think I was trying to defraud them, so that drive just sits here, half broken, half alive, not being used for anything.

Oh, another thing that annoyed me - one of my Seagates had a drive with a firmware update, but guess what, when you run the firmware update tool, it looks at the information from the SATA-USB adapter, not the drive contained within the enclosure, so it didn't pick up on the fact that the underlying drive's firmware was actually old. Would that firmware update have improved its reliability? Who knows.

It's reached a point though where I actually think the right backup option might be... another NAS. Which is nuts. But I... just don't see any good options for backing up ~20TB.

Glacial - we are talking down to 2-3 MB/S
Right click on a folder to do a file count, come back 5 minutes later.

ncmark wrote on 2024-08-31, 20:47:

Glacial - we are talking down to 2-3 MB/S
Right click on a folder to do a file count, come back 5 minutes later.

If this is Windows, is the event viewer full of errors?

Nope
Granted we are talking about huge folders with thousands of files, but the older Toshiba drives still do it MUCH faster

Backup. Backup, Backup……
Save your important docs and files on the cloud in 3 different location
( Google drive, MS OneDrive, iCloud, etc )
Local backups to a USB drives and NAS.

Thats what I do.
I backup to the cloud important stuff.
Everything else is local home network backups and USB drives.
I have a few NAS drives.
I also built an inexpensive NAS out of an HP z440 with a Xeon e5-1660v4 CPU ( 8-cores, 16-threads )
64gb ECC RAM and Two Terrabyte Nvme boot drive
Added (8) 12 terrabyte Sata drives I have them mirroring eachother.
For a total of 100 Terrabytes storage
2.5gb NIC, Cheap video card, and some Sata SSD’s
A total of 12 drives.
I could add more if I wanted.

I paid about $120 for the Basic HP z440 on eBay from Computer Server resale .
With all the parts cost about $300
Hard drives were extra cost that sell refurbished on eBay for about $80 for 12tb.

I have had mine for about a year now running 24/7/365
No Problems and very stable.

I also built some workstations with these computers using the Xeon e5-2697a v4 CPU ( 16-cores, 32-threads )
And loaded them up with hard drives.
These computer are Extremely stable and reliable.
And very Affordable.
They can plow through any task. They are very resilient durable.

These are the Best used computer deal on eBay.
And they are fully supported in Win-10 and Win-11. By HP and Microsoft,.
So these computers are good until Win-11 expires at least.
Drivers load automatically and NO need to buy a license these computers activate themselves.
They also support Linux and UNIX.

I am very happy with these computer for the price I paid for them to build.

I will switch to only Nvme SSD when the price comes down.
But for now these computers will do just fine.

So with 16-core Xeon CPU, 64tb ECC RAM , Nvme SSD’s, LSI 9300 Mini-SAS controller, and 100tb of Storage they cost me about $1000 each to put together.
I have not had any problem and the refurbished hard drives are very reliable.
So I have full backups of my drives everywhere.

Post link:
Re: Bought this (Modern) hardware today

HP Xeon CPU link:
Re: Bought this (Modern) hardware today

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-08-31, 20:20:

That's discouraging to hear about external drives. I'd bought and used a bunch of external Seagate drives specifically for backing my NAS.

I wonder if buying standard HDDs and then just using them with an external drive adapter would be a better option?

This is what I do, all my "shelf" drives are just standard WD or Seagate SATA HHDs. The only special drives I own are the Ironwolf's in my NAS. To be fair, I only paid for one. I had one sent to me for review (free) a while back, I really liked it, so I bought one more to RAID.

I have a few different docking stations, one is SATA, and it's what I used to move files for long-term storage. I do have and use USB attached external HDDs, but those are what I use for "active backups", files I will go to every so often. Don't need them enough to keep them on my internal storage, need them often enough that it's a pain to drop them on an HDD and put it on the shelf. 😜

For me though, the total sum of all the data we have backed up, or would even want to backup, is probably roughly 4-5TB total, so we're not talking about all that much. It's a lot of files, but most are all small in size.

I guess I've just been lucky? I have yet to have any of those drives fail. I've lost drives I'm actively using, and my NAS setup is relatively new yet, but the drives I stick on the shelf are obviously un-powered, so perhaps that's why.