Thank you for the advice. Will keep it mind when setting it up with the new drives!

Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives. Historically, I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable, and the BackBlaze hard drive stats seem to confirm that, though they tend to have small numbers of Hitachi drives. This is because they optimize for price not reliability. I've had good luck with other brands, but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate. Last year I replaced the last of our Stagate 15K drives with SSDs because, largely, I was tired of doing warranty returns every month or two.

> Oh, my other advice is: Avoid Seagate drives ... I've found Hitachi to be the most reliable ... but I've pretty much had universally bad luck with Seagate.

Don't take this personally but this advice is fairly useless.

For every person like you, who has "found Hitachi to be the most reliable" and "had universally bad luck with Seagate", there's someone else who has the exact opposite advice.

Our opinions are shaped by our own experiences, of course, and (most of the tine) it's hard to change our minds or convince us otherwise.

The (unfortunate) truth is that there's no one brand of HDDs that really is "the best" -- especially for all use cases! If there were, well, we'd all be using them by now and all of the other manufacturers would have already went out of business.

I would generally agree with you, but it comes from a decently sized sample set (not huge, a few thousand), but also because it seems to be backed up consistently by Backblaze's stats. :-)

Also, the bummer about the Backblaze stats is that they can't tell you about new batches of drives.

I used to always buy Hitachi as well, but when I decided a few weeks ago to replace all my old 4TB HDDs with 8TB HDDs I found out that they're quite expensive (did they use to be that expensive?).

Well, in any case now I bought 8 Toshiba N300 8TB (4 HDDs for a server and another 4 for a NAS, both used by a RaidZ1) and so far they worked (and they're not loud and don't vibrate like hell when the disk is spinning, unlike the WD Gold).

It's the first time that I buy Toshiba HDDs - I'm quite sure that if they would have been Seagate then at least 1 would have already failed.

Hitachi have always been a little more expensive than the others, from my memory. The Deskstar consumer line could be around 10-20% more than competition and the Ultrastar enterprise 25-50% more than Deskstar. Going from memory.

I've had good luck with the few Toshiba drives I've had. That's what my storage system is running right now because it was the only thing I could find in 1TB laptop form factor when I bought them 6-7 years ago.

Not to second-guess your purchase, but was there a reason you didn't diversify across the brands to prevent a situation where they might all fail at once?

To be 100% honest: I didn't even think about this kind of strategy (never did even in the past).

Thinking about it now, it might make sense.

On the other hand, nowadays there isn't a lot of choice (only 3 manufacturers? WD, Toshiba and Seagate? If yes, then it's quite sad...) and honestly for me it hasn't been easy to choose even just a single model (reading all user reviews, comparing prices, searching specs for e.g. operating temperature, mtbf, finding infos about SMR, etc...) => I felt exhausted after deciding for Toshiba/N300 and I didn't have any other good 2nd candidate... .

Let's see in another ~4 years, maybe I'll adopt this strategy. At least I ordered 2 groups of 4 HDDs from 2 different shops, so I should have at least a minimal amount of "mix" in it. And the ones used in the NAS host the backup of the ones used by the server, so I just hope that I don't have a 2+2 HDD failure in the two raidZ1 :P

Thanks for the enlightenment :)

I'm reminded of those HP drives that would brick themselves after a certain number of operating hours. People had every drive in their RAID array fail at once.

Ooook, ok, I got it - not a great idea to buy HDDs of the same brand => I'll try to remember this :)

But: in such a case, having a normal raid5/raidZ1 or even a raid6/raidZ2, etc..., you might still get scrd by just having 2/3/4 such HP-drives in such a raid (that might be composed of 8/9/10 drives), right?

> you might still get scrd by just having 2/3/4 such HP-drives in such a raid (that might be composed of 8/9/10 drives), right?

That's true. Ah well, you know what people say: RAID is for high-availability, not a replacement for proper backups.

That's true :D

> have small numbers of Hitachi drives

25,000+ drives according to 2020 Q1 report in case anyone is wondering

But if you ZFS, avoid the crappy WD red SMR drives! Cf. https://www.servethehome.com/wd-red-dm-smr-update-3-vendors-...