
Best Consumer Hard Drives: August 2020 - rbanffy
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12075/best-consumer-hdds
======
gruez
This is a really poor article. It's basically looking at spec sheets and
current prices to determine the "best" drive. There doesn't seem to be any
empirical testing whatsoever. They also seem to recommend product lines that
are significantly pricier. eg. their "High-Capacity Desktop" recommendation is
"14TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro" for $515. Is that really better than getting a
12TB easystore for $190 and then shucking it? The cost per terabyte of the
easystore is less than half, and I really doubt that the recommended drive
would last twice as long. Also, despite the article being less than 2 days
old, most of the recommended drives are either not available, or available at
significantly higher prices that listed.

~~~
vondur
They do specifically discuss "shucking" the drives from USB enclosures and
recommend against it. I do wonder how well this list compares against the
reports from Backblaze.

~~~
gruez
Replying to the quotes from the article:

>While this is easy enough to do, the user experience might not be optimal -
obtaining warranty services is pretty much ruled out

AFAIK easystores are relatively easy to shuck non-destructively. If you do it
right and don't destroy the enclosure, and your drive breaks, you might still
be able to submit it for warranty. Regardless, I'm skeptical about the actual
value of the warranty is worth the premium (double the price).

>the default TLER settings might need alteration (which is not always possible
with commercial off-the-shelf NAS units)

True, although it's likely not useful unless in business-critical workloads.
You're probably fine without TLER if you're just using it to store
movies/games.

>the drive is going to be used in non-critical scenarios.

What's meant by "critical scenarios" here? Either you care about the data or
not. If you care about it, you will keep backups and/or use parity to ensure
that one drive failure won't wipe out your data. If you're only storing on one
drive, you're one unexpected disk crash from losing it. This applies
regardless of whether you're using the cheapest consumer drive, or the most
expensive "enterprise" drive.

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revivedblaze
Backblaze does it the best way IMHO, they review the drives based on the time
they have them in production running and based on the effective failures to
write operations & consider the $/Tb as well and they do this every quarterly
and publish the result.

Check those out once and see if you can get the data you need

~~~
larrywright
I read somewhere recently (might have been here, I don’t recall for sure),
that one of the problems with the recommendations from Backblaze is that the
drives change constantly and there can be variations over time in
manufacturing. You could buy something today that has the same model number as
what Backblaze bought 6-12 months ago, and it’s not really the same drive.

They’re still my preferred resource for this, but it’s not without its
caveats.

~~~
spiffytech
That is a very valid criticism, but at the same time, could anyone really do
any better? If the manufacturer is going to change the build for the same SKU
within the time it takes to collect meaningful failure rate data, then I don't
know that you can construct a more useful measurement technique than Backblaze
has. The data on specific drive models may be of limited reliability, but you
do at least get enough data to rank brands based on typical long-term
reliability by brand and product line.

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popotamonga
I find it very hard to browse all these comparison sites. For example i need a
very simple question: whats the very best SSD i can buy 1TB for under or near
$500. So much confusion, especially Samsung with all the EVO and PRO and
numbers and whatever models sheesh.

~~~
wtallis
> whats the very best SSD i can buy 1TB for under or near $500

The problem is that you have already made some kind of decision that $500 is a
reasonable threshold for getting 1TB of SSD, and some assumption that you
stand to gain anything at all by paying extra for the same capacity. That's
kinda backwards; you should start by figuring out how much performance and
endurance you need out of your 1TB of storage, just like you've apparently
already figured out that 1TB is the capacity you need.

You might be fine with a $99 1TB SSD, or maybe you need a $320 1TB SSD. But
it's pretty odd to expect a purchasing guide to be a useful tool to figure out
how best to _overpay_ for your storage.

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Animats
Those are prospective MTBF numbers from the manufacturer. More useful would be
observed MTBFs from a big data center operator.

~~~
rbanffy
But then you need the datacenter operator to use the same generic drives you
would. Backblaze is the only one who publishes results for the drives they
have, which are more or less close to what a prosumer would pursue.

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waheoo
*only

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jeffbee
This is a bit like having the "best" bag full of vomit. Who can make the case
for hard drives in consumer applications?

~~~
mlyle
For people who want to store lots of stuff.

Not everyone has a photo library or media library or game collection that fits
onto a reasonably priced SSD.

~~~
jeffbee
It seems like people who need moderate tens of terabytes of storage would be
_more_ interested in the performance and reliability of an SSD, not less. If
you have demanding storage needs aren't you then more likely to be willing to
pay $100/TB for storage?

~~~
jmnicolas
There's no reliable storage, only backups of backups.

So in the end the choice is SSDs if you need fast storage or hard drives if
you need cheap(er) storage.

Even if SSDs were priced the same as hard drive you would need much more SATA
ports on a machine to achieve a big storage capacity.

~~~
jeffbee
> you would need much more SATA ports on a machine

Why? There are 16TB SSDs u.2 SSDs on the market. That is comparable to top-of-
the-line hard drives in terms of bytes per port and much, much better in terms
of bytes per volume.

~~~
wtallis
U.2 is a different kind of port, and one that's in notoriously short supply on
all but the most expensive platforms. Even if you could get U.2 SSDs at the
same price per TB as hard drives, you still need to spend a lot more to get
them connected and keep them cool (enterprise SSDs don't have low-power idle
states).

~~~
jeffbee
This conversation is increasingly weird. Enterprise SSDs definitely do have
low-power modes. The Samsung PM983 I've used at scale draws 4W when idle or
11W active. A 14TB Seagate HDD like the one recommended in the article draws
5W minimum. The SSDs have a 5 milliwatt non-operating mode they can exit in
less than 30ms, which is dramatically better than the latency of a non-
operating hard drive (and turning a hard drive off wears it out, too). The SSD
wins in this regard.

It's also virtually impossible to overheat an SSD. Samsung SSDs have critical
temperatures above 90C. You won't reach this temperature just by operating the
drive. The only way I've been able to make a Samsung SSD trip the critical
temperature alarm was by pointing a paint-stripping air gun into the fan inlet
of a machine while running an fio workload. HDDs by contrast are trivial to
overheat, and are destroyed by doing it.

~~~
wtallis
> The SSDs have a 5 milliwatt non-operating mode they can exit in less than
> 30ms,

Which mode exactly are you referring to? Because the 983 DCTs (retail version
of the PM983) that I have don't support features like NVMe APST, and idle at
3+ W (for the M.2 version, which is lower-power than the U.2 version).

> It's also virtually impossible to overheat an SSD.

Maybe in a properly designed rackmount enclosure with fans that never drop
below 4k RPM. But in a more typical consumer case, enterprise U.2 drives will
absolutely overheat, and I have the logs to prove it. (The Samsung drives you
refer to are definitely better about this than the kind of U.2 drives that use
15mm thick cases and controllers with more than 8 channels—which I believe
includes all U.2 drives with capacity in excess of 8TB.) Consumer cases that
still have 3.5" bays tend to provide plenty of airflow for them, but that's
not the case for 2.5" bays.

~~~
jeffbee
Maybe we should avoid the specifics of Samsung, since they are in the habit of
shipping different firmware to retail and bulk buyers. I've never used the
retail 983, and I have no experience with the u.2 either. All I can say for
sure is you cannot overheat the stick version. If it overheats that's because
your datacenter is on fire.

I can replicate this at home with a Samsung 970 PRO m.2 in an Intel NUC. It
just will not overheat. The only thing I can do to make it shut down is to put
blankets over the NUC in which case the CPU has gone PROCHOT anyway.

Bottom line, it seems to me that power and heat are advantages of SSD, not
HDD. It seems like people buy HDD purely because of GB/$, which makes sense to
me at scale but not at home. The care and management of hard drives, and their
atrocious performance, seems to outweigh the price advantage. It's really hard
to manage HDDs successfully and even if you are doing it perfectly, it still
means you are replacing the HDD every 3-5 years. What a pain.

~~~
mlyle
> It's really hard to manage HDDs successfully and even if you are doing it
> perfectly, it still means you are replacing the HDD every 3-5 years. What a
> pain.

Neither HDDs nor SSDs will last forever.

It's as easy as sticking a pair of drives in a cheap NAS enclosure and
listening for the warning alarm when SMART predicts failure or a drive fails.

I _did_ have to replace the previous NAS after 5 years-- not because of
failure, but because I needed more storage and wanted more performance.
Otherwise it might have lasted quite a bit longer.

~~~
jeffbee
An SSD that's only being read really will last ~forever. It has the same wear-
out process as a CPU or RAM. A hard drive will wear out based on power-on
hours and start/stop cycles, regardless of how much you use it. I'm not saying
you should blindly assume that your SSD will never break, since they can and
do randomly stop working, but it seems clear that reliability is a clear win
for SSD over HDD, especially in consumer applications where the mere passage
of time is the thing that will kill hard drives.

~~~
mlyle
> It has the same wear-out process as a CPU or RAM.

This isn't really true-- flash isn't really like DRAM; leakage currents tend
to increase even if you don't reprogram things (and to properly fight leakage-
related data corruption, you really need to periodically rewrite and do the
erases that further compound dielectric breakdown). And it's especially not
true of board-level assemblies, where capacitor failure and solder joints
become important.

> A hard drive will wear out based on power-on hours and start/stop cycles,
> regardless of how much you use it.

Some failure modes look like this in SSDs, too. Studies have shown that SSD
age is a much better predictor of failure probability than usage. Depending on
how firmware handles things and the cell characteristics, -insufficient use-
of a SSD can cause failure, too.

I mean, I did some work on firmware for early SSDs and error rate / lifetime
analysis and I've had SSDs lose data in a drawer unused, but maybe you know
better. Yes, SSDs are better than HDDs, but not as drastically so as one would
think.

I <3 flash. But I also like having big dumb spinny disks. I'm rather glad I
can have both.

