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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

What are the best 3TB hard drives (internal)?

Jaime Vallés

Jaime Vallés

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Hey folks,I'm looking for some quality internal HDDs to store all my raw RED footage. These are not going into any kind of RAID setup or enclosure; they're simply going to be the archival drives. I need the best balance of quality, size and price. Let me know if I'm better off with lower capacities (1TB or 2TB) or higher capacities (3TB or 4TB). I already have an external USB3 HDD dock to use with them.

Please post your recommendations. Thanks! :bath:
 
Our baselight system ships with deskstars and in 4 years not a single drive has crapped out. I would go that way or barracuda's ES drives.
 
I would use green drives as they run cooler. Before using green drives I had issues with the docks as the drives would slow down when they got hot. Since switching to green drives never has any issues except when downloading outside at 100 degrees summer day.
I am using mostly Western Digital Green but have used green drives from other brands as well.
 
I use Barracuda's and they're not horrible but I wouldn't trust them for a one disk setup. I have a hundred terrabytes or so of 1.5TB and 3TB units and have had 4 failures in the last 4 years. Not a big deal (and good bang for your buck) for a low cost/large capacity RAID setup (I run RAID6 for long term archival) but unacceptable if you'd lose your data if one failed.
 
Well, the primary use of these drives will be to store the raw footage, not really for editing. These will mostly sit on a shelf as backup. And I'll be making duplicates of all the footage onto separate hard drives, so if one fails, there's another copy right next to it.
 
Jaime Vallés said:
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm looking at these here:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...st4000dm000_barracuda_4tb_7200_64mb_6gbs.html

Seagate 4TB Barracuda 7200RPM drives for only $184.95 from B&H. Insane amount of storage for super cheap. Would you all recommend these for storing RED raw files?
Click to expand...

I'd have no problems using those for backup/storage. Might grab some myself! All hard drives fail, it's redundancy that will keep you safe, regardless which drives you get.
 
I don't know for the 4TB version but the 3TB Barracuda has very fast write/read speeds compared to similar HDDs and holds them even when almost full.
 
Sergei Franklin said:
I would use green drives as they run cooler. Before using green drives I had issues with the docks as the drives would slow down when they got hot. Since switching to green drives never has any issues except when downloading outside at 100 degrees summer day.
Click to expand...
I think the Green drives are OK for backup, but they're not good at all for playback, editing, mixing, or color-correction, because the drives tend to "sleep" every so often. The heavier-duty Enterprise-class drives are the ones to get when you need super-reliable performance and fast throughput.

I have been told that the 3GB drives are being phased out very quickly in favor of the 4TB drives. Not sure when the next size jump is going to happen, but Moore's Law continues.
 
Chad Cooper said:
I've only used barracudas and g-raids for the past few years. never had a problem with the barracudas ::knocking on wood:: and they've taken a beating.
Click to expand...

same here , no problems with my barracudas sofar.
 
I'm backing up some data (2.6TB of exports, renders, etc. --not the original footage) from a feature, and would like to keep it on a single disk to minimize clutter. I was looking for opinions on "archival" hard drives --which don't exist... Hard drives fail. Period. It's just a matter of when... thus my search for people's opinions, which landed me here.

I am surprised by the number of recommendations for Hitachi in this thread. Over 15 years, the vast majority of my hard drive failures have been from Hitachi drives. I guess the fact of the matter is that everyone's experience is different. Some people like Seagate. Some people like Hitachi. Some people like WD.

Some years ago I was a dedicated Seagate guy, but switched to Western Digital after a couple of Seagate drive failures as the world was moving into the era of TB drives (vs. just GB's). WD seemed to be ahead of Seagate during this transition, and as I've never had any issue with WD since then (KNOCK. ON. WOOD.), I've been a dedicated WD user ever since. That said, the number of 1 egg reviews on NewEgg regarding the new RED line has me quite worried (especially since we have a couple RAID setups that use these drives).

We currently have a dual G-Speed eS Pro RAID 5 set up for one of our editing machines that uses 8 Hitachi drives. The setup is currently experiencing issues (after 5 years of solid use, mind you), but I'm not sure if it's the RAID build or the drives (all the drives read "OK" from the RAID GUI, but I'm not sure I trust the information). I'm actually moving data around this week so we can rebuild this array. I only mention this to point out that I do actually have 8 Hitachi drives that have performed extremely well for over 5 years of constant use.

We've got another RAID for back-ups that uses 2TB Western Digital enterprise drives (the pricey ones), and another that utilizes 3TB Western Digital RED drives (this is a "general use" and "media server" array --not for editing or critical back ups).

We've got tons of WD Green Drives that get used for non-RAID stuff, and my only complaint with them is that they often take a couple of seconds (which can seem like an eternity when you're in a groove) to "wake up." I like that they run cooler and use less energy (part of the trade off for this is that they "switch off" and run slower, 5400RPM, though). For archiving (term used loosely), speed isn't as critical, so these seem like the way to go.

I would never recommend Green drives for any sort of RAID or editing use, but they have done well for us in general, and I think I'm going to stick with them for our "archival" purposes.

FWIW, I've heard people say they are going to purchase an enterprise or RED drive for archiving because they are more robust, but the "robust-ness" of those drives is the fact that they are meant to run 24/7, so if you're just plugging them in every 6 months or so to transfer some data and do a disk check, the added cost of enterprise/RED (or even Black or Blue) doesn't seem worth it.

REMEMBER: when using hard drives for "archiving," you should check the data every once in a while. As mentioned before: hard drives fail. Period. There's nothing like popping a drive in the dock after a year of letting it sit and finding tons of corrupted data. This is the perfect time to mention that one should always have back-ups of back-ups for anything that really matters. We try to keep important data on a RAID 5/6 array, as well as backed up in at least TWO separate other locations. I actually have original footage for our feature films backed up to multiple drives in multiple physical locations (one of them being a giant, old bank safe in my parent's basement! --be sure to tell old people not to shake or drop hard drives). Yes, this is all a massive pain in the keester, but it's chump change compared to losing irreplaceable data/footage.

It will be interesting to see how SSD's factor into this equation as prices drop. SSD's aren't great for continual writing, but less moving parts is great for longevity, and if you're just backing up data (not continuously writing to the drive), SSD's should prove to be a good "archiving" (again, term used loosely) option as they become more affordable at higher capacities.

Forgot to mention: The world is in a 3TB to 4TB transition for top-end capacity right now. 4TB isn't too much more expensive, and they are much more stable than when they first started hitting the market. That said, I'm still a little nervous to use them for backing things up, and will likely buy a 3TB drive this week. Maybe by next month that will change, but that's the thought for now.
 
6TB drives are right around the corner with the current tech but right now they are working on bringing that weird ass laser - yes that's right, L-A-S-E-R, stuff to bear on increasing storage density.
 
I'd recommend staying away from the 3TB 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda's 7200.14 series unless you have time to cherry pick through them as I have been doing. Having tested about 15 over the last year, there have been many different firmwares and failed drives in this period- about half defective or showing significant different performance, and the tech support doesn't like supporting RAID even though their drives are supposed to be OK for Desktop RAID.

It is very Hit or miss with these drives, as either they scream or don't perform well right off the bat. Seagate recommends using SeaTools for DOS to test every drive once you get them, and I can say without a doubt, a drive can pass the short, long and acoustic tests in flying colors, yet not perform within read/write specification- hence why they do not have a throughput test for Windows/Mac. Pretty sad, and no recall on any of them...
 
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Hi Jaime

I know your question is about hard drives, but have you looked at LTO backup? Once you've purchased the drive unit, the tapes are very reasonable per terabyte they are also more stable over a period of time.

We changed over to LTO after having had several New Hard Drives arrive failed. I think a couple of boxes might have been dropped during delivery, but it got me thinking that if you dropped a drive it could be pretty much unreadable.

If you are going to stay with Drives, may I suggest backing up to 3x drives and using at least 2 different brands for each archive set. This is just in case there's a faulty component in a batch of drives.

During my research I discovered that 2.5" drives are better for Archiving then 3.5" drives, it's got something to do with how the head is stored when powered down. I imagine that's why they are used in laptops etc.

Lastly we would rotate our drives every couple of years by swapping one of the office sets with the off site sets. The off site set would then be spun up one drive at a time and we'd take some data off the drive to test we could read it ok. I think the last time we did this 2x of the drives failed so we made new copies. That was 2 out of 28. We had everything in triplicate so we were quite relaxed. If we only had two backups and 1x of these failed leaving just 1x this would be pretty stressful.

Our backup now is one Sata on site for quick access and 2x LTO tapes at 2x different locations.

Its good to work out a System/Workflow and then stick to it.

Sorry for the convoluted answer........

Good Luck

Adrian
 
Jarek Zabczynski said:
So hard drives are going optical?
Click to expand...

Sort of. Google HAMR and it will give you the general idea. The different materials used in these future drives requires a laser to warm up the medium for use in write operations because the material required for these high-density drives requires heat to change it's magnetic properties.
 
Adrian Weinbrecht said:
Hi Jaime

I know your question is about hard drives, but have you looked at LTO backup? Once you've purchased the drive unit, the tapes are very reasonable per terabyte they are also more stable over a period of time.

We changed over to LTO after having had several New Hard Drives arrive failed. I think a couple of boxes might have been dropped during delivery, but it got me thinking that if you dropped a drive it could be pretty much unreadable.

If you are going to stay with Drives, may I suggest backing up to 3x drives and using at least 2 different brands for each archive set. This is just in case there's a faulty component in a batch of drives.

During my research I discovered that 2.5" drives are better for Archiving then 3.5" drives, it's got something to do with how the head is stored when powered down. I imagine that's why they are used in laptops etc.

Lastly we would rotate our drives every couple of years by swapping one of the office sets with the off site sets. The off site set would then be spun up one drive at a time and we'd take some data off the drive to test we could read it ok. I think the last time we did this 2x of the drives failed so we made new copies. That was 2 out of 28. We had everything in triplicate so we were quite relaxed. If we only had two backups and 1x of these failed leaving just 1x this would be pretty stressful.

Our backup now is one Sata on site for quick access and 2x LTO tapes at 2x different locations.

Its good to work out a System/Workflow and then stick to it.

Sorry for the convoluted answer........

Good Luck

Adrian
Click to expand...

What software are you using to backup to LTO?
 
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