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  3. Recommendation on an external HDD for backups

Recommendation on an external HDD for backups

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  • J Offline
    J Offline
    Joan M
    wrote on last edited by
    #1

    Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

    www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

    https://www.robotecnik.com freelance robots, PLC and CNC programmer.

    R D J L abmvA 10 Replies Last reply
    0
    • J Joan M

      Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

      www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

      R Offline
      R Offline
      RickZeeland
      wrote on last edited by
      #2

      According to this review you can't make a bad choice: The Best External Hard Drives of 2018 | PCMag.com[^]

      J 1 Reply Last reply
      0
      • J Joan M

        Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

        www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

        D Offline
        D Offline
        dandy72
        wrote on last edited by
        #3

        Seagate's got such a bad reputation is recent years decades I wouldn't take one even if given to me for free. And that's actually happened - I was given a system that had a set of mirrored Seagate drives - one was already dead, and the other failed within the following month. All Seagate drives I've ever purchased are dead. I've retired functional drives from other companies because they just got too small, not because they stopped working. IMO: If you're going to insist on Seagate as a backup drive, then back up in pairs, at least.

        J H 2 Replies Last reply
        0
        • J Joan M

          Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

          www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

          J Offline
          J Offline
          Jorgen Andersson
          wrote on last edited by
          #4

          Personally I haven't had the bad experience of Seagate, the opposite actually. Their average fail rate is about the same as any other manufacturer. According to (some fairly old) statistics from google, who buys a lot of hard drives from all manufacturers. But what all manufacturers have in common is that they very often have systematic errors, so if one drive fails, usually most drives from the same batch or even model fails at the same time. Therefore my recommendation is to buy a Synology diskstation or a Qnap or something similar, and fill it up with disks from different manufacturers. That said, one should still check out current statistics[^], and you should NOT buy Seagate ST4000DMxxx, and the stats for certain Western digital disks doesn't look to shiny either. At the moment it looks like Hitachi is the way to go. (which I personally have had extremely bad experience with :laugh: )

          Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello

          J 1 Reply Last reply
          0
          • J Joan M

            Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

            www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

            L Offline
            L Offline
            Lost User
            wrote on last edited by
            #5

            It may also depend on your NAS too... had one client with a Synology box (admittedly low end) stacked with 2 mirrored WD drives, less than a year in started reporting SMART fails on both drives. Went through the return/replace of drives, but problems kept coming back. I took a look at the forums on Synology's own website, seemed others with sometimes even days old new WD's having problems. Of course Synology's reply "update the software, rebuild the RAID, if that fails change the drives" (just like MS, if the upgrade fails, reinstall). WD - drives are fine but we'll give you another [often refirbished] just to be sure. To save the client spending on more drives (now after warranty) I took the supposed worst of the current 2 drives and threw it in a desktop PC, full reformatted it (many hours), and had it duplicate what they were putting on the NAS (from original sources of course) - been flawless in both work and regular SMART tests while the 2nd (now single drive) still in the NAS is picking up more errors. (Moving that 2nd drive a job for another day.) Summary: 1. check compatibility NAS to drives beyond what manufacturer claims - check forums etc 2. For sure: if it's Synology NAS avoid WD drives, not sure whos fault but it's not a happy mix.

            Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.

            J 1 Reply Last reply
            0
            • J Joan M

              Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

              www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

              abmvA Offline
              abmvA Offline
              abmv
              wrote on last edited by
              #6

              WD External HDDs.Last for ages

              Caveat Emptor. "Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long

              We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. - Greta Thunberg

              J 1 Reply Last reply
              0
              • J Joan M

                Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

                www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

                OriginalGriffO Offline
                OriginalGriffO Offline
                OriginalGriff
                wrote on last edited by
                #7

                I'd have to say my experience with Seagate drives is fine: my NAS has 4 * 4TB Seagate drives (ST4000DM000-1F2168) organised as RAID 5 that have run 24/7 since early 2015 and - so far - no problems at all. My USB (air gapped) image backup drives are also Seagate and are all fine as well - I can't remember when I got them, but they well and truly predate the Seagate NAS. In fact, the only HDD failures I've had in the last 15 years have all been Maxtor drives of various sizes.

                Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

                "I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
                "Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt

                L J 2 Replies Last reply
                0
                • OriginalGriffO OriginalGriff

                  I'd have to say my experience with Seagate drives is fine: my NAS has 4 * 4TB Seagate drives (ST4000DM000-1F2168) organised as RAID 5 that have run 24/7 since early 2015 and - so far - no problems at all. My USB (air gapped) image backup drives are also Seagate and are all fine as well - I can't remember when I got them, but they well and truly predate the Seagate NAS. In fact, the only HDD failures I've had in the last 15 years have all been Maxtor drives of various sizes.

                  Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

                  L Offline
                  L Offline
                  Lost User
                  wrote on last edited by
                  #8

                  OriginalGriff wrote:

                  I'd have to say my experience with Seagate drives is fine ... In fact, the only HDD failures I've had in the last 15 years have all been Maxtor drives of various sizes.

                  Maxtor - Wikipedia[^]

                  Quote:

                  In a deal worth US$1.9 billion, Maxtor was acquired by its rival Seagate in 2006. The Maxtor brand is still in use by Seagate

                  Hmmm, seagate good / maxtor bad ??? :confused: :laugh:

                  Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.

                  1 Reply Last reply
                  0
                  • J Joan M

                    Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

                    www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

                    S Offline
                    S Offline
                    S Douglas
                    wrote on last edited by
                    #9

                    Joan M wrote:

                    I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB.

                    If you don't mind my asking, what do you have for a NAS device? How are backups performed / maintained on it? I ask because I just bought a cheap NAS to house my random junk, and its backup mechanism is very limited.


                    Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.

                    R J J 3 Replies Last reply
                    0
                    • S S Douglas

                      Joan M wrote:

                      I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB.

                      If you don't mind my asking, what do you have for a NAS device? How are backups performed / maintained on it? I ask because I just bought a cheap NAS to house my random junk, and its backup mechanism is very limited.


                      Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.

                      R Offline
                      R Offline
                      Ron Anders
                      wrote on last edited by
                      #10

                      I like Hitachi Touros. They (well mine, bought some time ago) came with little caring cases.

                      1 Reply Last reply
                      0
                      • S S Douglas

                        Joan M wrote:

                        I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB.

                        If you don't mind my asking, what do you have for a NAS device? How are backups performed / maintained on it? I ask because I just bought a cheap NAS to house my random junk, and its backup mechanism is very limited.


                        Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.

                        J Offline
                        J Offline
                        Joan M
                        wrote on last edited by
                        #11

                        A double bay Synology. The backups are being done by they hyperbackup solution to an USB external HDD. They have a versioning system that is great to access different states of the files you are interested in recovering. The biggest problem is that it seems they are not capable to handle multiple drives to make backups. This means you are forced to create n backup tasks (n => one per external disk) and program them to use a specific external disk... this is giving you a failure each day (for the missing disk).

                        https://www.robotecnik.com freelance robots, PLC and CNC programmer.

                        S 1 Reply Last reply
                        0
                        • R RickZeeland

                          According to this review you can't make a bad choice: The Best External Hard Drives of 2018 | PCMag.com[^]

                          J Offline
                          J Offline
                          Joan M
                          wrote on last edited by
                          #12

                          Thank you Rick, I'll take a look at it...

                          www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

                          https://www.robotecnik.com freelance robots, PLC and CNC programmer.

                          1 Reply Last reply
                          0
                          • D dandy72

                            Seagate's got such a bad reputation is recent years decades I wouldn't take one even if given to me for free. And that's actually happened - I was given a system that had a set of mirrored Seagate drives - one was already dead, and the other failed within the following month. All Seagate drives I've ever purchased are dead. I've retired functional drives from other companies because they just got too small, not because they stopped working. IMO: If you're going to insist on Seagate as a backup drive, then back up in pairs, at least.

                            J Offline
                            J Offline
                            Joan M
                            wrote on last edited by
                            #13

                            :~ X| Thank you!

                            https://www.robotecnik.com freelance robots, PLC and CNC programmer.

                            D 1 Reply Last reply
                            0
                            • J Jorgen Andersson

                              Personally I haven't had the bad experience of Seagate, the opposite actually. Their average fail rate is about the same as any other manufacturer. According to (some fairly old) statistics from google, who buys a lot of hard drives from all manufacturers. But what all manufacturers have in common is that they very often have systematic errors, so if one drive fails, usually most drives from the same batch or even model fails at the same time. Therefore my recommendation is to buy a Synology diskstation or a Qnap or something similar, and fill it up with disks from different manufacturers. That said, one should still check out current statistics[^], and you should NOT buy Seagate ST4000DMxxx, and the stats for certain Western digital disks doesn't look to shiny either. At the moment it looks like Hitachi is the way to go. (which I personally have had extremely bad experience with :laugh: )

                              Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello

                              J Offline
                              J Offline
                              Joan M
                              wrote on last edited by
                              #14

                              That one seems an unbiased recommendation... I'll read about those stats. Thank you!

                              www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

                              https://www.robotecnik.com freelance robots, PLC and CNC programmer.

                              1 Reply Last reply
                              0
                              • L Lost User

                                It may also depend on your NAS too... had one client with a Synology box (admittedly low end) stacked with 2 mirrored WD drives, less than a year in started reporting SMART fails on both drives. Went through the return/replace of drives, but problems kept coming back. I took a look at the forums on Synology's own website, seemed others with sometimes even days old new WD's having problems. Of course Synology's reply "update the software, rebuild the RAID, if that fails change the drives" (just like MS, if the upgrade fails, reinstall). WD - drives are fine but we'll give you another [often refirbished] just to be sure. To save the client spending on more drives (now after warranty) I took the supposed worst of the current 2 drives and threw it in a desktop PC, full reformatted it (many hours), and had it duplicate what they were putting on the NAS (from original sources of course) - been flawless in both work and regular SMART tests while the 2nd (now single drive) still in the NAS is picking up more errors. (Moving that 2nd drive a job for another day.) Summary: 1. check compatibility NAS to drives beyond what manufacturer claims - check forums etc 2. For sure: if it's Synology NAS avoid WD drives, not sure whos fault but it's not a happy mix.

                                Signature ready for installation. Please Reboot now.

                                J Offline
                                J Offline
                                Joan M
                                wrote on last edited by
                                #15

                                :~ Synology + WD... And it works perfectly... at least till today I've not seen a failure/problem... I got a couple of the recommended/compatible drives. Now I'm searching for an use external drive to store the backups from what is stored in the NAS...

                                www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

                                https://www.robotecnik.com freelance robots, PLC and CNC programmer.

                                K 1 Reply Last reply
                                0
                                • abmvA abmv

                                  WD External HDDs.Last for ages

                                  Caveat Emptor. "Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long

                                  J Offline
                                  J Offline
                                  Joan M
                                  wrote on last edited by
                                  #16

                                  Now I have a couple of WD internal HDDs and they work very well... let's see what can I find to make the backups... Thank you for your post.

                                  www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

                                  https://www.robotecnik.com freelance robots, PLC and CNC programmer.

                                  1 Reply Last reply
                                  0
                                  • OriginalGriffO OriginalGriff

                                    I'd have to say my experience with Seagate drives is fine: my NAS has 4 * 4TB Seagate drives (ST4000DM000-1F2168) organised as RAID 5 that have run 24/7 since early 2015 and - so far - no problems at all. My USB (air gapped) image backup drives are also Seagate and are all fine as well - I can't remember when I got them, but they well and truly predate the Seagate NAS. In fact, the only HDD failures I've had in the last 15 years have all been Maxtor drives of various sizes.

                                    Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!

                                    J Offline
                                    J Offline
                                    Joan M
                                    wrote on last edited by
                                    #17

                                    I remember years ago to have a failure in a HDD from an HP server... a super expensive SCSI drive at 15K rpm... I got it replaced by an official HP drive... which was exactly a MAXTOR drive with an HP sticker... X| Never again it failed, but well, I paid almost twice its price for a sticker... :mad: Till today I've been very lucky with HDDs, but I thought asking here first... Thank you for the answer!

                                    www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

                                    https://www.robotecnik.com freelance robots, PLC and CNC programmer.

                                    1 Reply Last reply
                                    0
                                    • S S Douglas

                                      Joan M wrote:

                                      I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB.

                                      If you don't mind my asking, what do you have for a NAS device? How are backups performed / maintained on it? I ask because I just bought a cheap NAS to house my random junk, and its backup mechanism is very limited.


                                      Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.

                                      J Offline
                                      J Offline
                                      jsc42
                                      wrote on last edited by
                                      #18

                                      I've been using a D-Link DNS320 (2 bays, max of 3TB discs) (Ethernet) for a few years. It has not had any problems, even though I had been using second hand 1TB discs, but have bought 3TB as I was running out of room. Also, my Acronis backup s/w was up for renewal; so I have followed advice seen over the month to use AOMEI. Thus far, AOMEI looks good - it is different from Acronis. I quite like (but not got used to) the fact that you can open backups as local drives (somewhat more long-winded that the Acronis method of double-clicking the required backup file). I've not been using it long enough to get a feel for how it deals with saving old backups. I am using the free version; thus far, the only Acronis feature that I have used that AOMEI doesn't have is email notifications and one-step cloning (you can clone in two steps and both feature are available if you get the paid version).

                                      1 Reply Last reply
                                      0
                                      • D dandy72

                                        Seagate's got such a bad reputation is recent years decades I wouldn't take one even if given to me for free. And that's actually happened - I was given a system that had a set of mirrored Seagate drives - one was already dead, and the other failed within the following month. All Seagate drives I've ever purchased are dead. I've retired functional drives from other companies because they just got too small, not because they stopped working. IMO: If you're going to insist on Seagate as a backup drive, then back up in pairs, at least.

                                        H Offline
                                        H Offline
                                        Harrison Pratt
                                        wrote on last edited by
                                        #19

                                        I had a very similar experience with 2 Seagate NAS drives. One lasted almost 1 year, the replacement ("free" under warranty) lasted 2 months. Major headache. "A scalded cat is even afraid of cold water" -- I won't be back to SG in a long time.

                                        1 Reply Last reply
                                        0
                                        • J Joan M

                                          Hi all! I own a NAS that has a total capacity of 6TB. More than enough for my business needs. Till today I've been using a 3TB HDD as backup and it worked perfectly... versions... all OK, but of course I'm running out of space. Would you recommend the Seagate STEL6000200 HDD? It's 6TB of capacity and the USB3.0 port seems what I need. Thank you all!

                                          www.robotecnik.com[^] - robots, CNC and PLC programming

                                          B Offline
                                          B Offline
                                          BarrRobot
                                          wrote on last edited by
                                          #20

                                          A very interesting source of data here: Backblaze [^] This is not their first report, similar data is available going back a few years, IIRC. TL;DR You can't go just by manufacturer alone.

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