How reliable are portable HDs these days?
April 25, 2024 7:03 AM Subscribe
I have four large (but not full) hard drives on my desk that are getting old--two 4TB and two 3TB (one of each pair is a backup for the other). One drive holds media files and the other my Lightroom library. Given technology developments, I could fit all of my data on a single 5TB portable drive (I'd get a second for backups). Is this a bad idea, and should I just stick with desktop drives if I don't actually need a portable drive?
Both Seagate and WD have 5TB portable drives for less than $125 (I don't have a strong feeling about either--my 4tb drives are WD, and the 3tb are Seagate).
If I don't need the convenience of actually taking the portable drives anywhere, should I just get a desktop drive?
It's hard to tell the drive specs other than being USB3.0--would you anticipate any usability issues with these drive for light photo editing and streaming media locally? Thanks!
Both Seagate and WD have 5TB portable drives for less than $125 (I don't have a strong feeling about either--my 4tb drives are WD, and the 3tb are Seagate).
If I don't need the convenience of actually taking the portable drives anywhere, should I just get a desktop drive?
It's hard to tell the drive specs other than being USB3.0--would you anticipate any usability issues with these drive for light photo editing and streaming media locally? Thanks!
Watch out for shingled magnetic recording (SMR) drives, they have weird/bad performance characteristics compared to standard conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drives.
For instance when trying to rsync ~500 GB of music to one it would start off nice and fast (100+ MiB/s) but drop to incredibly slow (~5 MiB/s) after a while.
posted by genpfault at 7:11 AM on April 25 [3 favorites]
For instance when trying to rsync ~500 GB of music to one it would start off nice and fast (100+ MiB/s) but drop to incredibly slow (~5 MiB/s) after a while.
posted by genpfault at 7:11 AM on April 25 [3 favorites]
How reliable are portable HDs these days?
Unreliable enough that your present backup policy is necessary; reliable enough that it's probably sufficient. They're much like desktop drives in that regard.
Once a proper backup policy is in use, I don't think the difference between 1% annual drive failure rate and 0.1% annual drive failure rate is worth using as a distinction criterion. Obviously I just retrieved both those numbers rectally but I'd be astonished to learn that the actual failure rates for 2.5" vs 3.5" spinny drives are as disparate as that; I'd expect the reliability differences between distinct models to swamp those between 2.5" and 3.5" drives as classes.
If I could find little spinnies with the capacity I needed, at a price per gigabyte as low as big spinnies of similar capacity, I'd get them on noise and energy efficiency grounds.
Another thing to think about is that the little drives, being more portability oriented, often have accelerometers in them and automatically park the heads when they detect freefall. Depending on how hazardous your desk is (do you cohabit with cats?) that feature could save you a restore or two.
And yes, avoid SMR drives. Any operation involving continuous writes of more than a few tens of gigabytes will make their internal defragmenter thrash and cause long delays, some even long enough (I've seen a single write request take thirteen seconds to get a response) to make the OS time out and declare the drive failed. They're fine for light, read-dominated loads,. but anything as disk-intensive as backups onto them is just a nightmare.
posted by flabdablet at 7:50 AM on April 25
Unreliable enough that your present backup policy is necessary; reliable enough that it's probably sufficient. They're much like desktop drives in that regard.
Once a proper backup policy is in use, I don't think the difference between 1% annual drive failure rate and 0.1% annual drive failure rate is worth using as a distinction criterion. Obviously I just retrieved both those numbers rectally but I'd be astonished to learn that the actual failure rates for 2.5" vs 3.5" spinny drives are as disparate as that; I'd expect the reliability differences between distinct models to swamp those between 2.5" and 3.5" drives as classes.
If I could find little spinnies with the capacity I needed, at a price per gigabyte as low as big spinnies of similar capacity, I'd get them on noise and energy efficiency grounds.
Another thing to think about is that the little drives, being more portability oriented, often have accelerometers in them and automatically park the heads when they detect freefall. Depending on how hazardous your desk is (do you cohabit with cats?) that feature could save you a restore or two.
And yes, avoid SMR drives. Any operation involving continuous writes of more than a few tens of gigabytes will make their internal defragmenter thrash and cause long delays, some even long enough (I've seen a single write request take thirteen seconds to get a response) to make the OS time out and declare the drive failed. They're fine for light, read-dominated loads,. but anything as disk-intensive as backups onto them is just a nightmare.
posted by flabdablet at 7:50 AM on April 25
Just to make sure the OP has heard of this (not saying whether it's appropriate or overkill in their situation) there is something called the 3-2-1 backup rule. Also, some will claim that RAID counts as a backup because RAID can in some cases recover from a single hard drive failure in a RAID array, other says RAID is NOT a backup. Of course "the Cloud" can also be considered a backup but your cable company might have problems with mass uploading, plus there might be security/privacy concerns.
Separate from the above FYI, my personal experience with hard drive failures was once when the power supply in my PC failed in such a way as to fry ALL the hard drives. Luckily I took backups like the OP to USB3 drives, though of course I lost data between the last backup and the failure.
Note: I don't mind if folks tear apart this answer, it's a controversial area.
posted by forthright at 7:59 AM on April 25 [1 favorite]
Separate from the above FYI, my personal experience with hard drive failures was once when the power supply in my PC failed in such a way as to fry ALL the hard drives. Luckily I took backups like the OP to USB3 drives, though of course I lost data between the last backup and the failure.
Note: I don't mind if folks tear apart this answer, it's a controversial area.
posted by forthright at 7:59 AM on April 25 [1 favorite]
Either will work just fine with a caveat: portable drives are slow. They are designed to be low power and small. So they use 2.5" drives optimized for low power, not speed.
The WD desktop version starts at 6TB for $144: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV/
Note that the CMR vs SMR issue noted above is important if you intend to do a lot of writes. But at this price point, you are getting SMR unless you explicitly opt for something like the WD Red Pro which is $200 (6TB) for just the bare drive.
The obligatory word of warning: Data Loss Ahead! External drives are very susceptible to having that usb cable pulled. I lost a 6TB drive this way when an ill timed cable bump resulted in a corrupted ntfs partition. It is good to have a 2nd drive to act as a backup, but Backblaze or a similar offsite backup solution would be a better option to protect against fire, theft, or alien invasion.
Personally, I went the overkill route. I have a Synology DS923+ with a pair of mirrored 12TB drives that is backed up to Backblaze's cloud service. I just mount the volume from the NAS on my laptop and can reach it anywhere in the house. A Synology DS223j and two IronWolf 8TB drives will set you back about $600, so twice what you are looking at. But provide better data protection, 2x the space, and allow you to not need to be physically connected to the drive.
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 8:15 AM on April 25
The WD desktop version starts at 6TB for $144: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076MPMZDV/
Note that the CMR vs SMR issue noted above is important if you intend to do a lot of writes. But at this price point, you are getting SMR unless you explicitly opt for something like the WD Red Pro which is $200 (6TB) for just the bare drive.
The obligatory word of warning: Data Loss Ahead! External drives are very susceptible to having that usb cable pulled. I lost a 6TB drive this way when an ill timed cable bump resulted in a corrupted ntfs partition. It is good to have a 2nd drive to act as a backup, but Backblaze or a similar offsite backup solution would be a better option to protect against fire, theft, or alien invasion.
Personally, I went the overkill route. I have a Synology DS923+ with a pair of mirrored 12TB drives that is backed up to Backblaze's cloud service. I just mount the volume from the NAS on my laptop and can reach it anywhere in the house. A Synology DS223j and two IronWolf 8TB drives will set you back about $600, so twice what you are looking at. But provide better data protection, 2x the space, and allow you to not need to be physically connected to the drive.
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 8:15 AM on April 25
Get SSDs if your storage needs are relatively low, like only a few TB. They are much more reliable than spinning disks. Spinning disks nowadays goes up into the tens of TBs.
posted by kschang at 8:46 AM on April 25 [4 favorites]
posted by kschang at 8:46 AM on April 25 [4 favorites]
Nth-ing SSD over spinning rust. They're so much better able to handle physical shocks and dropping, as well as more robust to power loss when a cable gets yanked out.
There should be options for sale with a 5-year year warranty from the manufacturer -- which isn't insurance or protection against data loss, but is a reminder to consider the age and wear on these hosts to your precious data.
Nth-ing also 3-2-1 pattern for multiple redundancies. If you have space it's good practice to restore to a folder alongside the source and confirm that the backup is good which also has you running through the steps to restore the data from the backup.
posted by k3ninho at 9:04 AM on April 25 [3 favorites]
There should be options for sale with a 5-year year warranty from the manufacturer -- which isn't insurance or protection against data loss, but is a reminder to consider the age and wear on these hosts to your precious data.
Nth-ing also 3-2-1 pattern for multiple redundancies. If you have space it's good practice to restore to a folder alongside the source and confirm that the backup is good which also has you running through the steps to restore the data from the backup.
posted by k3ninho at 9:04 AM on April 25 [3 favorites]
Also recommending SSDs, and don't cheap out on these drives if they're mission-critical, a cheap physical hard drive in a plastic box is not a reliable storage medium, that's just for handy transfer of large amounts of data. For 5TB a quality SSD drive will get expensive, but that is weighed by how valuable the data you're storing on it is. Regardless of how nice a drive you get, you still need a backup process, there's things unrelated to the quality of the drive itself that could result in data loss.
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:18 AM on April 25
posted by AzraelBrown at 9:18 AM on April 25
Response by poster: Thanks, all--I was not aware of the distinction between CMR and SMR drives, which throws a bit of a wrench in my plans! The first writes on these drives would be meaningful (copying over the 4tb of files to the new drive), and it seems like the speed issue could be very frustrating--though I saw some reference to issues with big writes after the drive is more than 50% full (no idea whether that's accurate).
Noting the votes for SSDs, I'm not certain they're cost effective for this use, given the sizes I need. Assuming I want CMR drives, it seems hard to ensure the pre-packaged external drives are CMR. I may end up having to get bare drives.
I'm a bit torn between buying enclosures (which I've done before) and putting into a NAS. If enclosures, do you have anything I should look for in 2024? Seems like they are mostly commodities.
If NAS, has anyone had issues using a NAS for a Lightroom library? People used to stress putting it on a connected drive.
Last question (I promise)--I already have a Synology NAS (DS218) for other files. Are there any issues working with two NAS on the same small home network?
posted by Admiral Haddock at 9:37 AM on April 25
Noting the votes for SSDs, I'm not certain they're cost effective for this use, given the sizes I need. Assuming I want CMR drives, it seems hard to ensure the pre-packaged external drives are CMR. I may end up having to get bare drives.
I'm a bit torn between buying enclosures (which I've done before) and putting into a NAS. If enclosures, do you have anything I should look for in 2024? Seems like they are mostly commodities.
If NAS, has anyone had issues using a NAS for a Lightroom library? People used to stress putting it on a connected drive.
Last question (I promise)--I already have a Synology NAS (DS218) for other files. Are there any issues working with two NAS on the same small home network?
posted by Admiral Haddock at 9:37 AM on April 25
If I don't need the convenience of actually taking the portable drives anywhere, should I just get a desktop drive?
You could but if your computer explodes then bye bye all your data. External backups will always have value, even if you keep them in the premises.
Get 2 USB3 3.5 HDD enclosures, get 2 4TB or larger CMR drives, and use them as backup mirrors of your desktop drives, one external for each internal.
When one of the internals dies, swap it out with the corresponding external and buy a new one for the enclosure.
You can also do this with SSDs I guess but to me those will always be the emperor's new clothes of storage.
Why yes, I do want a storage medium that degrades itself when written to and forgets its contents if powered off for extended periods, how did you guess?
posted by Bangaioh at 9:38 AM on April 25
You could but if your computer explodes then bye bye all your data. External backups will always have value, even if you keep them in the premises.
Get 2 USB3 3.5 HDD enclosures, get 2 4TB or larger CMR drives, and use them as backup mirrors of your desktop drives, one external for each internal.
When one of the internals dies, swap it out with the corresponding external and buy a new one for the enclosure.
You can also do this with SSDs I guess but to me those will always be the emperor's new clothes of storage.
Why yes, I do want a storage medium that degrades itself when written to and forgets its contents if powered off for extended periods, how did you guess?
posted by Bangaioh at 9:38 AM on April 25
If NAS, has anyone had issues using a NAS for a Lightroom library? People used to stress putting it on a connected drive.I have my archive Lightroom library on my NAS. It works fine. Not as fast as the onboard SSD from a browsing perspective, but good enough for casual use. I have a single Lightroom catalog so it is easy to just drag and drop folders of photos from the local system to the NAS for archiving. My workflow is that I import it to the local SSD and then once I'm done with the project, migrate it to the NAS for long term storage.
Last question (I promise)--I already have a Synology NAS (DS218) for other files. Are there any issues working with two NAS on the same small home network?
If you already have a DS218, it is possible to just upgrade the drives in it to expand the capacity. Assuming you did not span them (raid 0), get two new drives ($~400 total for two 6TB. WD Red Pro or Seagate IronHorse to avoid the SMR issue). Then follow the instructions at https://kb.synology.com/en-us/DSM/help/DSM/StorageManager/storage_pool_expand_replace_disk?version=6
Alternatively, yes, you can have as many NAS devices on your network as you have ports to connect them to. So you could pickup a new DS223 or DS923 (or any of the 2 or 4 bay units.)
posted by SegFaultCoreDump at 9:52 AM on April 25 [1 favorite]
I have two Synology NAS on my network with no problem, partly for the added advantage that NAS #2 is doing incremental backups of NAS #1, which is both a file store and backup device (my Mac's Time Machine backs up to it). They work great together.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:18 AM on April 25
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:18 AM on April 25
My vote would be a Synology NAS, especially since you are already familiar with them. They are not the cheapest solution, but I think they pay for themselves in ease of use, especially around how easy it is to configure cloud backup, which for me is crucial.
For Lightroom, I get good performance by storing the catalog/previews on a local SSD, backing it up to Synology (backed up to cloud), and storing photos on the Synology (also backed up to cloud).
Also, consider that if you buy a 4-bay, you will be more future-proofed.
posted by SNACKeR at 1:12 PM on April 25
For Lightroom, I get good performance by storing the catalog/previews on a local SSD, backing it up to Synology (backed up to cloud), and storing photos on the Synology (also backed up to cloud).
Also, consider that if you buy a 4-bay, you will be more future-proofed.
posted by SNACKeR at 1:12 PM on April 25
Good answers concerning HDD, SSD, NVMe, Synology NAS. Tangent: In my experience, all these storage technologies can rot, even sitting offline. Adjacent magnetic domains degrade each other. SSD is vulnerable to solar flares. Archival CDs & DVDs write to organic dyes. For prized archives, I've started using off-site duplicates and M-Disc, rated for 1,000 years. (Grin: I still aim to check it in 500.) Of course for such archival, encodings, drives, and transfer protocols must endure.
posted by gregoreo at 2:35 PM on April 25
posted by gregoreo at 2:35 PM on April 25
Get SSDs if your storage needs are relatively low, like only a few TB. They are much more reliable than spinning disks.
SSD reliability is often overestimated. There's an idea floating around that SSDs just don't fail, and that idea often leads people to get really slack about backing them up. This will eventually bite and when it does, it will bite hard; the most common failure mode for SSDs is for an entire drive to become suddenly and totally inaccessible.
Spinnies, on the other hand, tend to warn that they're on the way out with access times that get worse and worse until the sporadic read errors causing that get severe and consistent enough to overwhelm the inbuilt error correction.
That said, SSDs are certainly much less susceptible to data loss from physical shock.
But as far as overall reliability goes, I think the view I expressed above applies to SSDs as well: the mean time before failure for both SSDs and spinny drives is low enough that making MTBF a choice criterion usually reflects skewed priorities. Both types still need backing up, and those backups, if appropriately layered, scheduled, tested and access-controlled, will almost certainly be enough to guard against consequential data loss.
posted by flabdablet at 7:24 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]
SSD reliability is often overestimated. There's an idea floating around that SSDs just don't fail, and that idea often leads people to get really slack about backing them up. This will eventually bite and when it does, it will bite hard; the most common failure mode for SSDs is for an entire drive to become suddenly and totally inaccessible.
Spinnies, on the other hand, tend to warn that they're on the way out with access times that get worse and worse until the sporadic read errors causing that get severe and consistent enough to overwhelm the inbuilt error correction.
That said, SSDs are certainly much less susceptible to data loss from physical shock.
But as far as overall reliability goes, I think the view I expressed above applies to SSDs as well: the mean time before failure for both SSDs and spinny drives is low enough that making MTBF a choice criterion usually reflects skewed priorities. Both types still need backing up, and those backups, if appropriately layered, scheduled, tested and access-controlled, will almost certainly be enough to guard against consequential data loss.
posted by flabdablet at 7:24 PM on April 25 [3 favorites]
If I don't need the convenience of actually taking the portable drives anywhere, should I just get a desktop drive? You could but if your computer explodes then bye bye all your data.
"Desktop drive" generally means a 3.5" drive in a external enclosure, which means your computer exploding will probably not affect that drive. Ones mounted internally are, unsurprisingly, called "internal drive", and adding one requires checking whether the computer case can hold one more and that the mainboard has a free SATA connector.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:37 AM on April 26
"Desktop drive" generally means a 3.5" drive in a external enclosure, which means your computer exploding will probably not affect that drive. Ones mounted internally are, unsurprisingly, called "internal drive", and adding one requires checking whether the computer case can hold one more and that the mainboard has a free SATA connector.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:37 AM on April 26
forthright: Also, some will claim that RAID counts as a backup because RAID can in some cases recover from a single hard drive failure in a RAID array, other says RAID is NOT a backup.
Backups are sets of data saved separately from your operating environment. RAID sets ARE NOT BACKUPS. They can guard against single drive failures in RAID sets and allow you to continue working with all your data on that set still intact. Except RAID-0, that is; if one drive fails you're left with zero data, exactly what it says on the tin.
Proper backups are ideally stored offsite and regularly rotated; a workable alternative for most people would be cloud storage, and the very minimum is a drive you can grab as you run out the door waiting for the fire brigade.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:53 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]
Backups are sets of data saved separately from your operating environment. RAID sets ARE NOT BACKUPS. They can guard against single drive failures in RAID sets and allow you to continue working with all your data on that set still intact. Except RAID-0, that is; if one drive fails you're left with zero data, exactly what it says on the tin.
Proper backups are ideally stored offsite and regularly rotated; a workable alternative for most people would be cloud storage, and the very minimum is a drive you can grab as you run out the door waiting for the fire brigade.
posted by Stoneshop at 1:53 AM on April 26 [1 favorite]
bangaioh: You can also do this with SSDs I guess but to me those will always be the emperor's new clothes of storage.
Why yes, I do want a storage medium that degrades itself when written to and forgets its contents if powered off for extended periods, how did you guess?
I haven't had functioning but amnesiac data loss from long-term poweroff state with an SSD, partly because my kind of use doesn't leave disks offline for long and partly because I've been buying SSD's since the first generation of SSD that had protections against this in 2010/11. They're a trade-off, almost zero worry about dropping an offline disk and it becoming mechanically failed versus it possibly not waking up again. So I have a habit of paying attention to the SMART reporting (via smartmontools) for the total reads and writes, failed writes and how many blocks are worn out, their allocation replaced by spares.
This reallocation with spares had its best days with Single-Level Cells, where mostly-empty and mostly-full could be used to store bibary data, and over time those buckets for electrins could adapt to the silicon trapping more and more electrons. Recent devices have Multi-Level Cells where there's 8, 16 or 128 levels of charge stored in each bucket and the device manages this over time, too, but with shorter lifetime read and write counts.
flabdablet: SSD reliability is often overestimated. There's an idea floating around that SSDs just don't fail, and that idea often leads people to get really slack about backing them up. This will eventually bite and when it does, it will bite hard; the most common failure mode for SSDs is for an entire drive to become suddenly and totally inaccessible.
SMART reporting and self-testing help, but my cliff is still the manufacturer's warranty replacement term, buy 5-year warranties and have that multi-tier (i.e. 3-2-1) strategy for failed backup devices.
I would almost advocate buying a Crucial MX-500 or Samsung 860 Pro SATA device to put in a cheap USB caddy or, if you have USB3.2 or 3.2gen2 or USB4 or Thunderbolt4 ports, an NVMe drive caddy and almost any M.2 2280 drive with 5-year warranty life -- you may be able to get a cheaper, proven model that can saturate the USB3.2 link rather than a newer model with higher speeds faster than USB can carry.
posted by k3ninho at 2:37 AM on April 26
Why yes, I do want a storage medium that degrades itself when written to and forgets its contents if powered off for extended periods, how did you guess?
I haven't had functioning but amnesiac data loss from long-term poweroff state with an SSD, partly because my kind of use doesn't leave disks offline for long and partly because I've been buying SSD's since the first generation of SSD that had protections against this in 2010/11. They're a trade-off, almost zero worry about dropping an offline disk and it becoming mechanically failed versus it possibly not waking up again. So I have a habit of paying attention to the SMART reporting (via smartmontools) for the total reads and writes, failed writes and how many blocks are worn out, their allocation replaced by spares.
This reallocation with spares had its best days with Single-Level Cells, where mostly-empty and mostly-full could be used to store bibary data, and over time those buckets for electrins could adapt to the silicon trapping more and more electrons. Recent devices have Multi-Level Cells where there's 8, 16 or 128 levels of charge stored in each bucket and the device manages this over time, too, but with shorter lifetime read and write counts.
flabdablet: SSD reliability is often overestimated. There's an idea floating around that SSDs just don't fail, and that idea often leads people to get really slack about backing them up. This will eventually bite and when it does, it will bite hard; the most common failure mode for SSDs is for an entire drive to become suddenly and totally inaccessible.
SMART reporting and self-testing help, but my cliff is still the manufacturer's warranty replacement term, buy 5-year warranties and have that multi-tier (i.e. 3-2-1) strategy for failed backup devices.
I would almost advocate buying a Crucial MX-500 or Samsung 860 Pro SATA device to put in a cheap USB caddy or, if you have USB3.2 or 3.2gen2 or USB4 or Thunderbolt4 ports, an NVMe drive caddy and almost any M.2 2280 drive with 5-year warranty life -- you may be able to get a cheaper, proven model that can saturate the USB3.2 link rather than a newer model with higher speeds faster than USB can carry.
posted by k3ninho at 2:37 AM on April 26
it seems hard to ensure the pre-packaged external drives are CMR.
WD externals of 8TB or larger sizes are all CMR — they're repackaged WD Reds (which is why the community buys them, shucks off the external case to throw in the garbage, and uses the drives). The MyBook, Elements, and Easystore models are all CMR Reds.
Damn near everything smaller is shingled these days, for cost reasons (fewer platters, in particular). Most manufacturers make it somewhat murky or difficult to determine if shingled media is being used; when in doubt, assume it is and avoid the disk. Personally at this point I only buy SSDs for internal use or WD externals, but my use case is totally different because I buy much larger drives and I buy crates of them to shuck the external-ness off them.
Still, though, don't buy shingled disks. If there's a good use for them I've never known what it is.
posted by majick at 7:38 AM on April 26
WD externals of 8TB or larger sizes are all CMR — they're repackaged WD Reds (which is why the community buys them, shucks off the external case to throw in the garbage, and uses the drives). The MyBook, Elements, and Easystore models are all CMR Reds.
Damn near everything smaller is shingled these days, for cost reasons (fewer platters, in particular). Most manufacturers make it somewhat murky or difficult to determine if shingled media is being used; when in doubt, assume it is and avoid the disk. Personally at this point I only buy SSDs for internal use or WD externals, but my use case is totally different because I buy much larger drives and I buy crates of them to shuck the external-ness off them.
Still, though, don't buy shingled disks. If there's a good use for them I've never known what it is.
posted by majick at 7:38 AM on April 26
The sort of shame of it is that zfs is really the right tool for long term near online archival use (as opposed to making parity sets and rar bundles and etc), because regular scrubs of the filesystem will (usually) catch and correct slow rotting block failures in ways that mdraid and btrfs (probably) won't, but zfs is only really available on truenas or proxmox, neither of which is particularly consumer friendly in the way that Synology's Diskstation is.
I just went through my stack of 2.5" portable external drives the other day and one had just sort of had enough of an error at the wrong part of the disk that apple's disk utility just threw up its hands and went "nothing I can do here, hoss". No great loss, I had the information backed up elsewhere, but it's still a failure mode that's hard to account for.
posted by Kyol at 10:52 AM on April 26
I just went through my stack of 2.5" portable external drives the other day and one had just sort of had enough of an error at the wrong part of the disk that apple's disk utility just threw up its hands and went "nothing I can do here, hoss". No great loss, I had the information backed up elsewhere, but it's still a failure mode that's hard to account for.
posted by Kyol at 10:52 AM on April 26
i consolidated all my drives into a stack of like, 3 5tb portables. I worked in IT for many years, and i've seen every kind of drive fail more times than i can count. SSDs are not more reliable, they're just faster. I have drives from the 90s that still work, and I've seen 3 year old SSDs die more times than you can imagine.
If i cared about the data at all, i wouldn't keep less than like 3 copies of it. Usually for me that's "on the computer itself" and a couple drives. One of these drives should go somewhere else than the computer or the first drive. Parents house? Office? Art studio? Doesn't matter, just not somewhere shitty/bumpy/hot/cold like a car trunk and not in the same building. Houses do burn down, and flood. Contractors fuck up the wrong building when they were scheduled for nextdoor, etc.
An alternative option is plugging in a desktop drive and paying for something like backblaze, which also seems fine to me. The point is just having an operational, backup, and offsite copy. I actually think having it spread across less drives is better for keeping everything synced up and current and vigilant. Seen tons of data lost that way too.
posted by emptythought at 8:15 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]
If i cared about the data at all, i wouldn't keep less than like 3 copies of it. Usually for me that's "on the computer itself" and a couple drives. One of these drives should go somewhere else than the computer or the first drive. Parents house? Office? Art studio? Doesn't matter, just not somewhere shitty/bumpy/hot/cold like a car trunk and not in the same building. Houses do burn down, and flood. Contractors fuck up the wrong building when they were scheduled for nextdoor, etc.
An alternative option is plugging in a desktop drive and paying for something like backblaze, which also seems fine to me. The point is just having an operational, backup, and offsite copy. I actually think having it spread across less drives is better for keeping everything synced up and current and vigilant. Seen tons of data lost that way too.
posted by emptythought at 8:15 PM on April 26 [1 favorite]
Kyol: The sort of shame of it is that zfs is really the right tool for long term near online archival use
It's not a thing I want to try, but Ubuntu in WSL or Parallels would allow you to pass the whole disk or partitions to ZFS then a Samba share.
posted by k3ninho at 4:37 AM on April 27
It's not a thing I want to try, but Ubuntu in WSL or Parallels would allow you to pass the whole disk or partitions to ZFS then a Samba share.
posted by k3ninho at 4:37 AM on April 27
Kyol: but zfs is only really available on truenas or proxmox
One of my server systems runs Debian, and its 8T /home partition is zfs. I did have data loss once caused by 2 flaky SATA channels nearly simultaneously, and of course I then tossed that mobo. In general it works fine even though it's lacking a few, minor bits of functionality; the FreeBSD implementation is said to be complete. Also, it was slightly less than straightforward installing it, but that was on 10.early.
posted by Stoneshop at 9:09 AM on April 27
One of my server systems runs Debian, and its 8T /home partition is zfs. I did have data loss once caused by 2 flaky SATA channels nearly simultaneously, and of course I then tossed that mobo. In general it works fine even though it's lacking a few, minor bits of functionality; the FreeBSD implementation is said to be complete. Also, it was slightly less than straightforward installing it, but that was on 10.early.
posted by Stoneshop at 9:09 AM on April 27
I didn't remark on it because it seemed OT but since other comments went on this particular tangent: Btrfs covers all of ZFS' use cases that matter for backups, and it's part of the kernel and ready to use on any Linux distro, no flaming hoops to jump through. It does scrubs and detects corruption just as well as ZFS.
Or to paraphrase my earlier answer:SSDs ZFS to me will always be the emperor's new clothes of storage filesystems.
posted by Bangaioh at 5:27 PM on April 27
Or to paraphrase my earlier answer:
posted by Bangaioh at 5:27 PM on April 27
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posted by Admiral Haddock at 7:06 AM on April 25