Best HDD for STORJ?

If you are in the US, Amazon has 12TB drives for $175 for Prime Days. https://amzn.to/2SRTU6S

That is a good price, but I would caution that it can be really hard to find out what drives are used in external enclosures and they often use SMR drives. Verify this before buying. You don’t want to end up with SMR for Storj.

I did a bit of research and it seems that the 12TB version are not SMR. I got 4 of them coming and will verify.

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in some cases the disks might not even be the same models, and they are also often 5400RPM

and really the extra price for getting an enterprise grade drive is often like 20-25%
which extends warranty by 3 years and give you over double the rated data limit.

but on the other hand i have seen people on yt snuck external drives or whatever they call it, with great effect and very reliable outcomes… and getting great drives that was well over the external disk value…

which seems kinda odd, but thats what mass production will do… sometimes it’s easier just to make one good product and repackage it…
good luck, with your … loot boxes …

Yeah, I think that’s pretty much spot on. :slight_smile:

You’re taking a gamble, but it has surprised me in the past how well people have done with that method. I’ve never gone that route myself though, I want to know what I’m buying.

Yeah, I was attempting to recover data for a friend and his USB drive was actually USB - the drive itself had a USB connector, not a SATA connector with USB->SATA adapter. If I had bought that drive with the intention of “shucking” it, well, I would be really disappointed.

I had no idea such things even existed. That’s insane.

same here… kinda makes me wonder a bit how that would actually work… i mean without a sata controller then one would have to have some other way to control the drive… which seems like more trouble than it’s worth to make… unless ofc if there was chips inside instead… i suppose…
i mean there would be a lot of crappy chips around these days to make into drives … maybe

maybe it’s one of those drives that actually can run solely on usb power… those may not use conventional sata … i guess…

I would be careful with that WD Elements enclosure too, no idea what’s in there.
The WD Mybooks however seem to all have HGST Ultrastar white label HDDs, which are quite good. Had a nice offer for a 12TB Mybook on Prime Day too but currently I’m not in need for more HDDs :smiley:

with white label, doesn’t one have to use either a different connector or desolder a resistor or something like that… something with that they are on the new power management or something which does that it can turn off the drive completely or something…

pretty easy to just desolder or cut the resistor tho… or use a modified connector / cable… but still additional trouble / cost… unless if ofc the gear one has suppose the new connection type.

It had a USB connector on the controller board itself. While it was weird to me, I figured probably making a USB PCB was a bit cheaper than having a SATA drive and then a separate USB-SATA board - you did not need the SATA connectors, a separate board etc.

I do not remember the manufacturer or the model number of that drive. As I said, I though it was a bit strange, but probably the new normal.

I found an image of such PCB:

Taken from here:

ah yeah that makes sense… good reason for savings… make one thing instead of two…
one of those ideas where one just have to wonder why nobody came up with that before now… lol

usually means it’s a pretty good idea hehe

I had no trouble with my White Label HGST Ultrastar, didn’t modify anything and seems to work perfectly.

some hardware supports it and some doesn’t… its supposedly a new standard for how the systems uses power management on hdd’s

but i’m not even sure it was on the white label’s … but it’s how i remember it… also might not be on all of them… can’t remember exactly why they are white label, maybe because they are mass produced for enterprise… and stickers costs money… doesn’t seem to make sense tho lol

maybe because the storage engineers / maintenance like that they can write on them with a ball pen…
i would see that as a nice feature lol

so yeah might not be all white label drives that has the new power connector either… or backwards compatibility was added, as always there is most likely 15 answers all correct in their own way lol

white label are all “repurposed” drives wd puts in enclosures. I guess it’s similar to how AMD handles (or handled) some CPUs. If a core doesn’t work correctly, sell it as a version with less cores. Guess WD does it similar, some enterprise feature not working correctly? → white label, too much stock? → white label with reduced features. Or something like that. Can’t quote anyone on this though.
Anyhow, those white label 8-12TB HGST drives are about half the price of their normal counterpart. They do have a lot less warranty of course so you have to decide what you value more. Half the price or more than twice the warranty period (unless your warranty won’t be granted because you shucked the white label drive :smiley:) .

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the repurposed / rebinning of them does seem to ring a bell with me, but i duno where i heard it… makes good sense… doesn’t explain the white labels, ofc if they are suppose to be in external hdd cases i suppose they would want the cheapest possible markings then…

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I use external WD Elements hard drives for all of my home nodes on RaspberryPis
Never had problems with.
Ordered two new 14TB thanks to Prime Day.

I bought a WD Elements 10TB, a WDC WD101EMAZ-11G7DA0 drive inside, it got very hot to 54 degrees Celsius on hot days, I took it out of the original case and put it in another with a fan, now 43 degrees Celsius. Outside of temperature is fine for now.

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hdd’s and computers / usb is stable enough that in theory some will never had any issues…

there are just so many things that can go wrong, that the odds of something going wrong is fairly high… ofc as time goes on this will become less of an issue… like modern ssd’s with internal raid setups so that part of them can fail without the entire drive failing.

something that the older harddrive technology had much more difficulty doing because of the inherent issues with the mechanical aspects of the technology…

so in the future, i’m sure the whole concept of running with redundancy will basically just be a feature instead of having to stack hardware to make it possible…

hdd’s is micro magnetic vinyl lp recordings basically, its a miracle that they work at all… :smiley:

my drives are like to cold most of the time… right now they are at like below 20 celcius
to much cooling and to low ambient temp, and like peem says, temps inside external drives can be quite high… ofc depends a lot of ambient also…

high hdd temps have been shown to dramatically reduce avg hdd life span… by like 40%
and micosofts new under the sea datacenter approach which runs at even lower temps that usual data centers have shown to have an 8% increase in hardware durability most likely due to the lower temps and more uniform cooling.

from the tests i’ve seen there is a certain temp within like 30-40 celcius that hdd’s should be at for optimal lifespan, but heat is by far the worst to have… and really i would think rapid temp changes would be even worse than that… difficult stuff to really test in reliable ways tho…

looks like WD only has SMR drives <8TB so certainly looks good.
My drives in an enclosure with a fan get to 54 degress celsius too, for me that is fine. I don’t want to have a plane in my appartment just for a few degrees less :smiley:

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