crphoto8 Loc: Anaheim, California

I'm moving from an old HP PC to a Dell that has a 250GB SSD and a 2TB HD. I just moved a second 2TB drive with over a TB of photos
from the HP to the Dell. I'm considering adding another backup drive, so I did a search on UHH which led me to the Backblaze HD failure rates page.

A HGST drive seems to be a good choice due to pretty low failure rates over large number of hours. Which leads to -

What size - 4 or 6 TB, internal or external?
Right now I'm leaning toward an external, 6TB drive.

Any comments are welcome.

Thanks for your help.

Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

Make sure your computer and operating system can handle a HDD larger than 2TB
Large disks used to come with a 'driver' that let older OS handle the larger disk drives
But of late they assume you are using Win7 (Vista if you were conned into buying that) or later that can handle GPT disk formats.
If you have WinXP or earlier - - ensure your system can handle it.

mas24 Loc: Southern CA

A 6TB HD. That's a lifetime and more of memories. I could never fill that up. But the HGST has good Reviews. Samsung is good for SSD. But I don't think they make one up to 6TB.

Merlin1300 Loc: New England, But Now & Forever SoTX

My working computer has 9 TB accessible in a RAID-5 array (any single drive can fail with no data loss)
This data drive is separate from my 512GB RAID-1 SSD system drive.
My Network Attached Storage unit has 12TB accessible in a RAID-5 Array (Backed up to an off-line 12TB JBOD array)
-
I used to think 80 MB was more than I'd ever need. That was in 1980 - - before video.
And you can NEVER have enough data redundancy and backup !!

orrie smith Loc: Kansas

I limit mine to several 2TB external drives, that way if the drive fails, you do not have everything on one drive, if that makes sense. Have you already got your new dell, the 250gb drive for your main drive may be a little small, I had one on my HP and it filled up rather quickly as most programs need to be on the c:/drive. I changed to a 500gb and it seems to be large enough.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Blackblaze's study is flawed, but the HGST Ultrastar is a stellar drive with low failure rates, and can work in a RAID array. Both sizes will work - it's up to your budget. Use a good quality enclosure with a fan - it's a little controversial if active cooling makes a difference, but I know that heat is one of the enemies of hard drives (vibration is another), so if you can keep your drive(s) cooler by a few degrees, I am pretty sure it won't hurt.

The other drive alternatives that I use are WD Black if not being used in a RAID, or their Re drives if they are.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I used to get WD Black drives. Now I get the HGST Deskstar. I have a couple of 3TB and 4TB drives. I don't like going very large because of the potential for failure.

I use a 3 or 4TB drive for data and an SSD for the OS and programs. I also use HGST external drives for backups.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I installed another fan in an older Dell, and I switch it on when the internal drive temp gets to 100° F. I'm also making an enclosure for two drives for backups, and it will have a fan. Maybe heat is bad, and maybe it isn't. You can find articles on both sides.

"Overall, there is not a correlation between operating temperature and failure rates. The one exception is the Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB drives, which fail slightly more when they run warmer."
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-temperature-does-it-matter/

http://www.buildcomputers.net/hdd-temperature.html
https://blog.codinghorror.com/hard-drive-temperatures-be-afraid/
http://www.zdnet.com/article/heat-doesnt-kill-hard-drives-heres-what-does/

Use CrystalDiskInfo (free) to monitor hard drive temp, hours, starts, and condition.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

If I were buying HDs, I'd buy HGST, but probably not a 6TB. As others have said, I'd prefer several smaller drives, even if the cost is higher. I find that a good partial cure for the ever-increasing need for capacity is to be more selective in what you store. I used to store everything I shot - now I may cull down 50 shots to just several "keepers". The question I always have with huge HDs is how are you planning on backing up the data? If you have fast internet access, then the cloud is a possibility, but even then, 6TB will take a very long time to seed and awhile to restore if needed. That drives you toward a second HD in a mirrored (RAID 1) configuration, or 3 or more drives in a RAID group. I do agree that a fan cooled external enclosure is a good idea. Whether or not the mechanical drive is affected by temperature, cooler is always better for the drive controller board.

crphoto8 Loc: Anaheim, California

Thanks for the good info. I do have a couple of external drives still connected to the old PC and they'll move to the new Dell.
Right now I'm thinking of adding a second 4TB external drive and maybe another internal 4TB. The 2TB internal drives of the Dell are
filling up quickly.

Thanks to everybody that helped.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

I can't really advise about the newer, 4 or 6TB drives.

For photo storage I use five Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, each fitted with four hard drives. I also have one internal 2TB HD for data (photos), with a partition that serves as a Photoshop scratch disk.

I'm using a mix of HGST (Hitachi Global Storage Technology), Western Digital (WD) and Seagate drives. Most of the drives I'm using are "enterprise class", which have larger buffers, better dampening, higher quality bearings and overall greater durability and reliability. I know that HGST and Seagate have made similar drives in both enterprise and lower priced "general consumer" classes. Often they can only be distinguished from each other by one or two letters different in the model designation.

One of my NAS is loaded with WD "Green" drives, which are supposed to use less power. However, they accomplish that by running at reduced speed, so I've found them noticeably slower than other WD or the Segate and HGST enterprise drives. WD is a bit unclear about the rotational speed of their Green drives.... but I think it probably maxes out around 5400 rpm and those drives often slow below that or shut themselves down completely after not being accessed for a while. All this seems is controlled by the drive itself, and doesn't seem to be accessible or changeable by the user. WD also makes "Black" label and "Red" label drives with different performance characteristics (no relation to Johnny Walker Black and Red Label Scotches, unfortunately).

Whatever you get, I'd encourage you to look for enterprise class drives. Those are probably what you're seeing, listed as having the lowest failure rates.

It's up to you how you set it up. 2TB drives are the largest my old NAS can use... so that's what I am sticking with (other than a portable external backup that I use with my laptop, which is 3TB).

My desktop currently has a 1TB "C" or boot drive, and a separate 1TB "D" or data drive, that's one of those enterprise drives. I have the D drive partitioned to allocate part of it for Photoshop to use as a scratch disk, and the rest I use for files. This is what I call "hot" file storage... my most recent images that I'm working with a lot. Gradually I migrate those over to "cold" storage on the NAS, after I've built the Lightroom catalog of them all and when I'm accessing those images a lot less frequently (big data transfers, so I try to do start them just before going to bed for the night).

My NAS are set up as RAID X arrays. Those back themselves up automatically. Any single drive can fail and be hot swapped out without any loss of data. I also use another, separate "mirrored" backup scheme.

My next computer will have an SSD like yours, as my primary boot drive. It'll have all my programs on it, too.

Depending upon the status of SSD when I get around to building that computer, I might use one for the D drive, too... But as of right now am still a bit leery about using SSD for this purpose. HGST's headquarters is about a mile from where I live in Silicon Valley and a friend of mine is a design and production engineer there. He knows I'm a photographer and has so far strongly discouraged me from using SSD for any sort of critical, long-term storage of images. He says SSD just isn't reliable enough yet. Maybe it will be some day. And it would be fine if frequently backed up to standard hard drives. And the speed of SSD would certainly be helpful for a lot things!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

HDs have had a great run and have increased in capacity well beyond what we could have imagined in the early 80s when 20 MB was a big drive; and I think they have some years left as their cost/TB and available maximum size make them the choice for large data centers. On the other hand, NAND flash, including SSDs, USB sticks, SD and CF cards, etc. are getting larger and cheaper all the time to the extent that now many/most high-end laptops are shipping with SSD drives. The huge speed advantage is undeniable, and my opinion is that the early start-up problems are now >5 years old and are old news. It's difficult to find large scale reliability studies of SSDs vs HDs since they're still not cost effective for very large data centers, but the recent studies I have seen and my personal experience both as a user (I have 8 Intels that have been in service for 5 years now) and as a data storage professional, indicate they're at least as reliable as HDs if not substantially better. Still expensive if you need multi-TB photo storage, but for everything else (OS, programs, scratch space, etc.), the huge advantage in performance, which is reflected in greatly enhanced system performance (many operations are I/O intensive), plus the inherent reliability of non-mechanical storage make them the choice going forward.