i dunno man, i have about 20 years worth of bad experiences with seagate. none of their drives have ever been reliable for me. WD drives have always been rock solid and overall just better drives in my experience. I have two WD externals sitting on my desk right now that are almost 15 years old. Still going strong.

I've had at least 6 seagate drives over the past 20 years. none of them survived more than 2 or 3 years. Meanwhile, i have two almost 15 year old WDs sitting on my desk still going strong.

start building a media server. space goes quick. I'm sitting at about 100 TB right now and I'm running out of space.

the people downvoting you are the inexperienced.

You're listing a lot of brands that are mostly known for their ssds / NVME drives. This convo is about mechanical drives. By their very nature, SSDs are bound to be more reliable than HDDs.

However, when it comes to mechanical drives, western digital is waaaaaay more reliable than Seagate. Always has been. Maybe a lot of people don't use mechanical drives anymore, so their frame of reference is skewed -- but seagate makes trash mechanical drives. They have NEVER been reliable when compared to WD.

Anyway Hitachi made/makes shit mechanical drive and Samsung was never really known for HDDs. Crucial only makes solid state drives.

exos are fine if you don't mind them being loud as hell.

underrated comment. i'd much rather clone a 16 tb drive than 50 tb one. Also better speeds considering the use of more drives. That said, if I can save on electricity, noise, enclosure space, and very importantly, money, it could be pretty cool. Just need to wait and see how reliable these things are and if they are going to carry a price point that makes them make sense.

My 14TB are almost full but I can't fathom what you'd use 100TB on??

8K ultra high def 3D hentai?

Right now I have about 3000 movies, mostly 4k, and about 500 TV shows. As well as a pretty massive music library. No room for the hentai.

It’s all anecdotal for the most part. I’ve had two DOA WD drives in a row before, but no dead seagates.

As a side note, I hope you have those two WDs backed up, they’re overdue for a death.

Then I see why you need moar disks. But seriously, are you ever gonna watch 3000 movies and 500 TV series?

That's about 25000 hours of content. If you watch 3 hours per day it will take you 23 years to watch it all.

Are you okay, brother?

Trust me, I've been waiting for those ancient WDs to die. I'm actually using them in a raid 1 config, so if one dies the other remains. I've also got anything really important backed up to cloud storage. I've worked in software (games) for 20+ years. I'm very well accustomed to data loss and recovery.

Anyway, much of my opinion on seagates comes from people I know who work in render farms and IT guys who manage entire studios. So its not really that anecdotal.

…And it’s bound to be stupidly expensive.

Wish I could afford 20 of them, but not without winning the Powerball.

I mean personally, for long term data hoarding, I dislike running anything below raidz2, and imo anything less than 5 disks in that setup is just silly and inefficient in terms of cost/benefit. So I currently have 5x16TB in raidz2. The 60% capacity efficiency kinda blows, but also I didn’t want to spend any more on rust than I did at the time, and the array is still working great, so whatever. For me, that was a reasonable balance between power draw, disk count, cost, and capacity.

Not sure how you're doing your math, but I've probably watched about 85% of it. And a lot of it I've watched multiple times.

But no. I am not ok. lol.

The only drives I have ever had die on me were actually both WD, but it's all anecdotal, and I've had tons of WD drives that were great (my favorites were the raptors and velociratpers). I've owned way too many HDDs over the many years, and I can say that I haven't had issues with any, but again I do my research and only order from what I believe to be good runs of drives. In case you have never done so, take a look at the reports that Backblaze puts out on their drive reliability. I found it pretty eye opening. Before Backblaze start sharing their data, there used to be a site that crowd sourced HDD lifetimes and failure causes that I used to use when buying drives and I always entered my drive data there. I can't recall the name of it now nor do I know if it still exists, but you could definitely spot the "bad" gens on there and WD and Seagate were both pretty even as far as I recall. I remember Hitachi being statistically worse, but it made sense as they bought IBM's derided Deskstar business from them. Ironically, WD ended up buying Hitachi's HDD business years later, but I think it was considered OK by then.

Honestly, I get it. If you have a relatively small stash of media, say a couple TB worth, you can pretty easily say "well I watched this movie, so I'll delete it and make room for the next. When you get into the 10's of TB range, the mindset has switched from it being a dynamic, temporary library to a repository. And it becomes easier just to plug in another 10-20TB drive occasionally, rather than trying to curate thousands of movies and shows.

I can see both sides though. There's certainly something to be said for being deliberate about the media you consume--and therefore only needing enough storage for your immediate viewing plans. I'm not quite into the 100TB range with my library, but I definitely have moments where I feel like having so many options makes any given option seem less appealing.

Yes, if you have money to burn, sure. I'll go with the financially better approach.

they have to make it at all before they make it cheap

It is not anecdotal, Seagate, FOR A DECADE, had quantifiably the worst drives with some models hitting 30% failure rate. They still, to this day, have shit models with over 10% and are almost always, the worst in back blaze reports of all data center drives. The only issue we have on the reports is nobody does random sampling and Seagate has always been the cheapest so they get overrepresented in reports.