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Good morning spiceheads,

I am looking at purchasing six 4TB drives for a new NAS which will be used for daily backups, (other backups are separate). To me, the obvious choice is WD Reds but I have been looking into the failure rates and BackBlaze report the HGST to be more reliable.

See > 2016 Hard Drive Review: Testing 61,590 Hard Drives

The closest disk to the HMS5C4040ALE640 in the BackBlaze link (an old 2012 model) I can find is the https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4tb-hgst-0f22146-megascale-dc-4000b-enterprise-nas-sata-iii-6gb-s-64… The specs of this HGST disk report MTBF of 800K where as the WD Reds report to be 1m MTBF ( http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-800002.pdf ). Conflicting information! Do I believe the marketing or trust facts, (even though the HGST disk isn’t the exact same model).

My question is, which would you go for?

4 Spice ups
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The RAID config is more important/relevant than MTBF

WD RED is basically a desktop drive with TLER enabled but I have piles of them in 20-30TB RAID 10s for bulk storage and they as good as you will get for the money

Put the same drives in a parity RAID and you are asking for trouble…

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I’m a firm believer of RAID 1, 0 or 10. I tend to avoid parity!

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The backblaze report is a pretty unique use case, they load a lot of cheap drives into pods and run them at heavy load

We use Seagate NL SAS, WD RED and RED Pro SATA for our bulk storage and the majority of issues are with drives new out the box. Once we run them in and put into production we dont see many issues until after 3-4 years

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Hey @tobywells , thanks for using Seagate!

Alex- make sure you check out our enterprise hard drives for your needs, we offer a number of solutions for NAS devices, including the NAS HDD , which is designed to manage aggressive workloads in enterprise environments., as well as:

  • Cloud-based and NAS storage
  • Backup and disaster recovery
  • Multi-media server and storage
  • File and print server sharing
  • Archiving and cloud replication
  • On-premise private cloud
  • Tiered storage
  • Remote access
  • Virtualization
  • Auxiliary storage

Please don’t hesitate to reach out for more info or if you have any questions!

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