Looking for high capacity drives (8TB) at the best price

general discussion
1

Hi All,
I know this is a long shot but my data storage needs have grown much faster than I expected.
I am looking for high capacity SATA drives, 8TB. I need 20 and the cheapest I can find is actually Amazon at about £198 Sterling. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-Archive-SATA-Hard-Drive/dp/B00UEMKJPA/ref=sr_1_18?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1508609711&sr=1-18&keywords=8tb

I may opt for 6TB if the price is very good.

Does anyone know of a good supplier?

Thanks,
Glenn

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Hi Glenn

This is probably not what you want to hear but hope it helps anyway - I would never ever buy Seagate again because my experience is that they are just not reliable. I’ve had two hardware RAIDs die catastrophically when running Seagates only a few years old, and when I mentioned this to someone who has 50TB of RAIDs in their server room they said that they have had exactly the same experience - it got so bad that a few years they literally binned all their remaining Seagate drives (dozens of drives) and replaced them all with WD Red.

Regards
John

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At least Backblaze seems to have a different opinion. Seagate drives have by far the most “drive days”.

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I recommend reddit.com/r/datahoarder to read and ask about storage drives and chassis. Be aware the drive you linked is an archive drive and not meant to perform 24/7 write/modify operations.

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Hi. What are the drives going in ? Why are you buying 20 at a time ? I may have another possibility;)

Cheers James.

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They are to go into my SuperMIcro 24 bay chassis. It’s currently full of 3TB drives.
What’s the idea James?

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Backblaze’s “drive days” is only high because they have more of those drives than any other. “Failure Rate” is the part that counts, and only in sets with a large number of samples. In other words, Backblaze just doesn’t have enough data in my opinion to be useful. I wish Pornhub would do a drive reliability report, now THEY move some data. :slight_smile:

I work in IT and 80% of the dead consumer drives that come across my desk are Seagates. Enterprise drives seem to be random, but of course the sample size for those is smaller in my work.

Anecdotally, every time that a HDD has totally screwed me it has been a Seagate.

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Hi All. Funny how we all have different opinions. I have used Seagate hard drives for donkeys years and have never had a problem. The majority spin at 7200 rpm and are similar to other drives in that none of them like being moved while running, and I mean not moved at all. Also drives bought off the internet are commonly grey stock so I would always buy from a good well known distributer. The price you see at Amazon is very good but I would check who the actual seller is. I have priced them with Ingram Micro and they are £171 plus VAT. Good luck.

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Hi ashbeale,

Thanks for the input.
As for differing manufacturers, I work with a data recovery company who have a completely separate pricing structure for Western Digital drives. Apparently, irrespective of reliability, they are the hardest drives to recover data from…

Just saying…

Still haven’t decided which direction to go with the drives but I’m currently at 83% capacity. Not ideal for ZFS.
I’d rather not spend £4,000 on drives. I could go a different route and use iSCSI but that means a third server in the office. More heat and noise issues to deal with.

I’ve just emailed Google to see what they will charge me. I’ll report back.

Google are charging £250 + VAT / month for 30TB. Probably ok for some but not enough storage for my needs.

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Don’t buy Seagate 8TB archive hdds. They produce bad sectors very quickly. I don’t know what platters or heads they used but the drives are really bad. Had 4 in a Synology nas for archiving. 2 had sectors problems within a year. Searching in forums showed I’m not the only one with this problem.

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Thanks for the heads up :wink: