Have a bunch of MG08 16TB ones and this line, in my experience, do fail more often than WD or Seagate (in my humble experience five faulty Toshibas for one faulty Seagate), usually as they are between two and three years old.
They usually fail in a way they start to have issues reading sectors, I haven’t had a total failure yet. Sometimes they do reallocate, but most of the time the SMART values are all okay, just SMART log and dmesg is full of read errors suddenly.
To get a firmware for them is pain as well and I have seen significant performance differences between older and newer firmware versions.
Another minus is you can’t RMA them directly with Toshiba and have to go via distributor, which in most cases is just a pain, but at least here they do come with 5 year warranty.
I only have like 30 Exos. All still alive. 
To be honest I don’t care much about brands. I just buy the cheapest with 5 year warranty. In my location this was mostly Toshiba.
I believe that natively any enterprise drive is silent enough.
The verry low noise that they produce it’s amplified by the enclosure. If you have metal on metal contacts, and some cheap plastic on top of the metal skeleton (synology I’m looking at you) than the noise becomes verry audible.
I strugle with Syno from many years. These days I come up with the ideea to take the drives out of the case and put cables from backplane to drives.
Even if the drives are sitting on rubber feet, the vibrations are transmitted through the backplane (the back connector plate), and that you can’t put on rubber feet, because the connection to HDD will come loose.
So cables are the only option. Now I’m designing in my head some sort of support for the drives outside the NAS.
If someone would start selling Silent Synology Cases as replacement for OEM ones, I would be the first to buy them.
Why I say drives are natively silent? Just take any drive out of the case and put it on some silicon or rubber support. You won’t here nothing at all. You also could suspend them in the air with zip ties.
I’ve done all that ;).
I wonder if Toshiba fails at the persistent cache, or there are hardware fails mostly, like heads?
I remember having a laptop with a Toshiba drive some years ago, and the thing suddenly formated by itself or became unresponsive, untill I took it out and formatted, can’t recall the exact scenario. Than it worked like notting happened. Other laptop drives never failed on me.
For the EMEA region there is a direct RMA page now. The shipment address was in germany.
I am doing something like that. I use these 5 1/4 drive bays where the drive is suspended in rubber bands. And you are right - that takes most of the noise.
I do not like Toshiba’s. They are loud and much slower than WD, even the Green series. But works well for Storj. They also pretty stable (works more than 4 years with known issue with speed and sound). However, would not buy them again.
You may try to add some fluoroplastic washers, or even better - silicone ones, and they will become much quieter. Also, Dental floss can help, well, if you really wants “do it yourself”.
Hello,
I am using 2 usb3 ssd with my Rpi 4. I would like to make a similar storage like you did. Could you please give me some references?
Thanks.
Dental floss? 
How? Suspend the drives on it?
Instead of washers. This is suitable for screw fastenings to the chassis. Just before fully tightening the screw, wind the thread several times in front of the hard drive and near the screw head. The amount is selected experimentally. Another way is silicone sealant. A few drops on the corners of the HDD, in places where it touches the chassis and let it dry before installation. Can be used instead of screws for gluing to the tray or runners (depending on the model) for fixation. Just keep in mind - many sealants use vinegar, so be careful, it can cause corrosion.
By the way, the dried “sausage” of silicone sealant can be used for cutting into silicone washers.
I too use them. They are more than fast enough for me, and the 18TB and beyond additionally uses a 512MB buffer compared to most of the competitions 256MB. If this is as huge as a difference as I tell myself it is, I cannot comment much on - but it is nice.
They are pretty quiet too 
Silicon sealant like the one used for bathroom, etc. is not like the silicon rubber. It can be ripped appart easily. I don’t see it a good option as washers, maybe just as support, in the corners, as you mentioned.
I’m also thinking at rubber bands, good ones, not the ones used for money. You could slip some rubber bands over the HDD or the NAS case, to reduce vibrations. I didn’t tried it, but I imagine it could work. In the end vibrations are like waves in a lake. If you stop the waves, you stop the noise.
I have three older, used, Toshiba MG07 14TB drives. They’ve been fine but only in use for less than a year by me. Most of my drives are older HGST drives, mixed with a single WD enterprise drive and one “Water Panther” (which is a refurb seagate).
I’ve had several drives (and one SSD) die from old age. these current drives have all be running for quite a while though.
I just received the Fractal Design Node 304. Awsome case for 6 drives, with rubber washers etc. It will take forever to fill all spots with 24TB drives, but we’ll see.
I will use MG10 or MG11 20-24TB, depending on price. First I have to decide on miniITX mobo.
I would not pay any attention to brands or models. Get the cheapest drives you can find, regardless of brand. Disks are now commodities. As long as you are not buying new disks, you’ll avoid left side of a bathtub curve; those that survived – will work forever. You can also buy “factory re-certified” disks; those also have passed the initial failure spike.
2$ 100Tb HDDs from Temu🤪
I would buy from known brands like Seagate and so on. But not from unknown brands or those who look way to cheap
Correct. There are only three HDD manufacturers in the world today: Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba. If you see an HDD by any other brand, then it’s a fake or some kind of recertified or rebranded unit, don’t buy anything like that, it’s asking for trouble.
This is a bit off-topic: but the larger sellers of reman/refub/recon HDDs (like SPD or GHD) often give some warranty: even if you use them through Ebay/Amazon (but often longer if you buy direct).
HDD prices have certainly gone up: but I think you can still get good deals on used ones.
The price per TB definitely goes down with each generation. I don’t see any going up. For the same amount last year (~500€) you could buy 18-20TB, and now 24TB. And with 30+TB entering the scene, the 24TB ones will soon get down to 300€.
For the current Storj traffic, I don’t see the point in going above 24TB per node.
Why Toshiba? Because it works without UPS safety net.
Why not recertified? Because there are none 20+TB drives recertified yet. They are too new.
Why 20+TB? Because the energy consumption is an issue, and 1 big drive is better than 2 small ones regarding this issue.
What the heck? The Seagate Exos 26TB already as refurbished? I didn’t even know they existed…
It seems there is a 28TB model too.
What usage scenario could these drives be facing or what storage provider would have gone out-of-business to sell these drives almost new?
Thanks for the links. Are there any other server drives reselers as these ones that can deliver in Europe? I only found a DE one.
