Bill P

I used to feel like you, until I had several failures with rarely used drives. I was told by a computer expert that Hard drives should continue running it's the start up and shutdown where things go bad. Guess they're like airplanes. But I have a friend that is retired for WD. He was their analog expert, a EE, and he said he didn't even begin to understand what went on inside those little things.

I think the enterprise drives are a better bet.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

A large majority of drive failure occur on start up, so in general the advice we gave customers (from a number of the world’s largest storage companies) was to leave drives running constantly. There are actually drives that are designed to be shut down (either to save power or in laptops), but unless your drives are of that design, I recommend you never turn them off. During Y2K (for those of us old enough to remember), we were busy telling customers NOT to power down their arrays because we knew the mass of failures that would occur.

There are multiple failure modes on start up, but one common one we discovered on tearing down failed drives was the accululation of debris (flaked off magnetic material) on the outer tracks where the heads would park on shut down, getting “stuck” in the debris (since the heads travel just above the disk surface on a cushion of air in normal operation.

I was reminded of this phenomena some years ago when taking down a NetApp NAS with 16 drives that had been running without a drive failure for almost 9 years. After being down for a week, we restarted it, and 3 of the 16 drives would not come up.

srt101fan

You, Gene and other folks here that I trust, have consistently recommended enterprise drives over consumer drives. The main reason being increased reliability and longer life. Made sense. But then I read that enterprise drives really only pay off if you are running your drives 24/7. And now I hear that all drives, consumer level and enterprise, should be left on 24/7.

I am strictly a photo hobbyist who has accumulated a lot of digital images (most of them should be deleted, but that's another story!) I keep my originals on an external hard drive (a 2 TB WD My Passport Essential) and copy them to another external drive for backup (I am considering cloud storage or a third drive for additional backup). Neither one of these drives are on very much and there is no way I would ever run them 24/7!

So, the question is what kind of drives should I use in my setup? If the enterprise drives are just as prone to failure due to repeated startup/shutdown, am I not just as well off buying cheaper consumer drives?

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Even though I personally prefer to run drives 24x7, in your case, if you must run externals that are only on occasionally, then I would certainly choose enterprise class drives. Even though they may be more reliable running 24x7 than intermittently, in either use, they are considerably more reliable than cheap drives. BUT, while they won’t fail as often, they will certainly fail eventually, so make sure you have a backup copy and an off-site DR copy.

When I have a few minutes, I’ll write up a “best practice” guide for storage and address the various forms of storage failures and what you can do to protect your data.

blackest Loc: Ireland

I think we mostly agree hard drives break.

It doesn't matter if it's a 5 year warranty or shorter, they will fail. The Warranty does not recover your data, maybe it gets you another copy of the drive that just failed on you.

The important thing is to maintain at least 2 copies of your data so a minimum of 2 drives and possibly a third off site somewhere, if your home is at risk of natural disaster or a fire hazard.

srt101fan

Thanks,TriX, much appreciated.

d3200prime

After much deliberation and research, I have decided to go with Gene51's advice. I ordered a WD Gold 2TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM Class SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD2005FBYZ from Amazon. I wish to express my thanks to all hogs for their time and many suggestions.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Right answer - congrats.

d3200prime

I would very much like to read your "best practice" guide. Thanks!

srt101fan

Ditto!

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Thanks guys, I’ll get started on it.

Cheers

DJphoto Loc: SF Bay Area

The next thing (if you haven't already done so) is to now get all of your photos in the cloud. There are many good choices, some will be better than others depending on how much you want to share your images. We have a large family and I do a lot of image sharing, so I use Dropbox. My 2 TB account was just upgraded (at no extra cost!) to a 3 TB. The $200/year is worth it to me. I also have every photo on at least 3 other hard drives.

d3200prime

Thanks for your input!