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So, a couple of months after the warranty expired, one of the two 2TB WD Greens I use for data archiving on my server died today (click of death). The Greens were probably a poor choice. Three years ago WD was pushing them as cost effective data "archival storage" drives, but from reading reviews online lately, they don't seem to hold up. I probably could have gotten more life out of WD Blues.

Not a catastrophe as I have two data drives in my server (in addition to a boot SSD which gets imaged weekly). The data drives are setup as mirrors but NOT using RAID. I use Allway Sync to sync the primary data drive to the mirror once a week (in addition to backing up critical data to an Amazon S3 cloud bucket daily). I do this to protect against ransomware: if the primary gets encrypted by ransomware, I have a certain amount of time to detect that and disconnect the mirror before it gets the encrypted files copied to it.

All of my video media stuff, nowadays, is on a Synology NAS, so this is mainly data files, backups, personal stuff like my personal photo & video library, my MP3 music, etc.

The Primary drive is the one that died so I ordered two WD Blacks (yeah, I'm going to bite the bullet and buy a couple of enterprise class drives this time with 5 year warranties). I was going to order the 4TB versions but Amazon didn't have more than one available, so I ordered a pair of 6TB drives since the price wasn't that much more, and Amazon Prime was promising them day after tomorrow.

So Sunday I'll be cloning the old Mirror to the new drives, then I'll stick the old Mirror in the safe deposit box as an archive backup. I'll be using the failed drive for target practice. I have three other drives I need to decommission so it's definitely time to do some target shooting on the backyard range

i had my friend buy a wd black drive for his laptop its been rma'd 4 times not sure if the drives are better but the warranty is nice.

Gee, remember when ALL drives had 5 year warranties? What happened to that.

Yeah, I was going to go for an HGST drive that Backblaze gives good stats on in it's HDD report, but they weren't available from Prime and I didn't want to wait a week.

FlyingPenguin wrote:Gee, remember when ALL drives had 5 year warranties? What happened to that.

Yeah, I was going to go for an HGST drive that Backblaze gives good stats on in it's HDD report, but they weren't available from Prime and I didn't want to wait a week.

Most of the drives in my unraid are HGST that have 5 years. 13 of them total with some 5+ years old and I can attest that they are rock solid. The other drives I use are Seagate Ironwolf (3 years) and 2x Seagate Exos for my parity drives.

Ha! speaking of drives. This weekend I just finished up an upgrade of my NAS. My file server which is offline all the time except to do backups of the NAS was upgraded a few years ago to 5 4TB (GREEN) drives. While my NAS had 5 2TB (RED) drives in it and it reached 10% a few weeks ago so I decided to upgrade it. I have always used WD but there was a deal on Seagate 8TB that I could not pass on ($105) and it was like a 1 day sale so I pulled the trigger on them.

Replaced them one at a time until all 5 were done then expanded the array and now im sitting on 28.8TB of storage space. That should hold for a LONG time. The 2TB drives were the original ones I bought when I bought the NAS (Thecus N5550).

Only reason I ran out of space ahead of schedule is I aquired 2 TB of music videos. I happen to be building a Video Jukebox and adding the videos to the NAS pushed the limits of it. So now 2 of the old NAS drives will end up in the jukebox in Raid 0 for the speed. I dont care if one takes a dump there will be a copy of its files on the NAS.

I've gone mostly with WD Red Pros (7200 rpm 7 5yr warr). All of my NAS units have them and the only reason I've ever pulled one out was to replace it with a larger WD Red Pro.

Okay, back online.

I have several 8TB drives that are the Seagate "archive" drives. So far (about 2 years), only one soft failure. Though, I'd prefer outright failure so I know when my data is being corrupted.