Yep staggering manufacturing dates is a good suggestion. I do it but it does make purchasing during sales periods to get good prices harder. Better than losing multiple drives at once, but RAID needs a backup anyway and nobody should skip that step.

That's not how computers work, but sure bro.

Do people actually use such massive hard drives? I still have my 1 TB HDD in my PC (and a 512 GB SSD), lol.

I mostly buy new Toshiba drives now. The WD blue drives are fine. I have a few of them. I have a WD red that is reporting surface errors, it's still going and the number of errors hasn't increased so I'm not stressing replacing it. Also, btrfs gives me peace of mind because I can periodiclly check if my filesystem has corrupted data.

Pretty sure I had a bigger hard drive than that for my Amiga. You could have broken a toe if you’d dropped it.

no thanks Seagate. the trauma of losing my data because of a botched firmware with a ticking time bomb kinda put me off your products for life.

see you in hell.

Data hoarders could be happy, but otherwise it's mostly enterprise use.

Still, I personally hold about 4 TB of files, and I know people holding over 30 TB.

As soon as your storage needs exceed 1-2 games and a bunch of old photos, demand for space raises quickly.

Is Seagate still producing shitty drives that fail a few days after the warranty expired?

It's not really Ext4 doing that, it's a bunch of tricks in the OS layer and the way apps write files to storage that limits it.

You'll see it if you use something like a BT client without pre-allocation, those files can get heavily fragmented depending on the download speed.

Hey, they told you how long they expected it to last

But it is a hard drive requirement.

Any hint about the ironwolfs?

I mean a backup of a RAID pool is likely just another RAID pool (ideally off-site) – maybe a tape library if you've got considerable cash.

Point is that mfg refurbs are basically fine, just be responsible, if your backup pool runs infrequently then that's a good candidate for more white label drives.

I have 50t of data total : archival, old project, backups, backups of my physical medias, etc

but then wd and their fake red nas drives with smr tech?

what else we have?

Elaborate please?

In my case, 10+years ago I had 6 * 3tb Seagate disks in a software raid 5. Two of them failed and it took me days to force it back into the raid and get some of the data off. Now I use WD and raid 6.

I read 3 or 4 years ago that it was just the 3tb reds I used had a high failure rate but I'm still only buying WDs

Can someone recommend me a hard drive that won't fail immediately? Internal, not SSD, from which cheap ones will die even sooner, and I need it for archival reasons, not speed or fancy new tech, otherwise I have two SSDs.

Hard drives aren't great for archival in general, but any modern drive should work. Grab multiple brands and make at least two copies. Look for sales. Externals regularly go below $15/tb these days.

Wait.. fake? I just bought some of those.