[PLUG] Hard drive/SSD recommendations

[Ben Koenig]

For WD "Blue" drives that kind of failure rate is not too surprising. If you keep getting the same brand you'll probably hit a good one eventually.

Since this is for backup storage you probably want to go with WD "Red" drives. They are more expensive, but are intended specifically for 100% uptime in NAS system so you'll probably get better results.

If you want to try Seagate they use the "IronWolf" branding for their NAS drives. Generally speaking, it's best to avoid the lower-tier drives from both companies for the reasons you have discovered.

-Ben

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Thursday, January 27th, 2022 at 4:53 PM, Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:

> It must be due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but I've had 2 hard drive failures
>
> in the past month. First, the Hitachi 2T in the external enclosure that held
>
> my daily backups failed, just now one of the WD Blue 1T drives in the new
>
> backup RAID 1 has failed; root told me the other is still good.
>
> A few days ago 'df -h /dev/md0/' showed it about 34% full for the pair of 1T
>
> drives. I can put larger drives in there (e.g., 2T) but would appreciate
>
> advice from hardware-aware folks about brand, model, and SSD vs mechanical
>
> disks for backups.
>
> TIA,
>
> Rich