2yr old seagate 2TB hdd looks like its on it way out am having to reboot it daily, this is the third one recently.
Surely there must be a reasonably priced cloud alternative , in which to store around 8TB of my movie/tv show collection, been looking but keep seeing all sorts other offered options like “syncing”, "file sharing " etc , I just want to upload to storage and access the content from my PMS to stream to family and a few friends, have plex pass.
Are you using portable drives or desktop drives 3.5". I use WD and get 4 years generally
Seagate had a bad series of hard drives a few years ago. They died like flies.
While I know this is not what you want to hear, and nobody likes to have hard drives fail, this is normal. Over time it should be expected that your hard drive(s) will die. Sometimes you have warning, and sometimes it is so abrupt, there is NO warning.
Cloud storage CAN be a good place for backups, but there have actually been a few providers that while they provide good service and availability of data, they do NOT provide backups! So it is still very possible to have everything in the cloud, and loose it from a hard drive failure!
The ONLY real solution is to have BACKUPS, that is plural not just one backup. I have helped many people to recover some files, not all, because both their main storage AND their ONLY backup were both corrupted!
I could write a full book on this, but I will try to give a very short example to hopefully meet the goal to NOT loose data.
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BACKUP - do not count on ANY type of media storage to last forever. Expect that ANY and ALL media may fail at ANY time, (usually at the worst time), WITHOUT prior warning.
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DO NOT KEEP BACKUPS LIVE - expect that a hardware failure, or malicious software may damage ANY backup that is currently available to your computer, at the same time your main storage is compromised.
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ROTATE BACKUPS - Maintain 3 or more backups for real peace of mind. Number them, in some manner so you know which is the newest and oldest, and as backups are made re-use the oldest one first that is in your backup rotation, to make it the newest backup copy.
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PERIODICALLY CHECK BACKUPS - A full scan should be made of all backups to insure the data integrity, depending on backup frequency, this can be done when a new backup set is created, or at different intervals.
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ONLY ONE BACKUP ACTIVE AT A TIME - Make sure you only have one backup active and available to your computer at a time to keep the other backups safe in case of a failure… (see no.2 above)
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KEEP BACKUPS AT DIFFERENT LOCATIONS - Store at least one backup set at a friends or relatives house, or cloud storage. This may be a copy of one of your regular rotation backup sets.
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REDUNDANCY - Not only data on hard drive, etc. can be backed up, but you may want to consider having a full redundant computer build as a hardware backup too! If for example, you had 4 computers, with storage, one could be your main computer and storage. The other 3 could all be the rotation backup sets, making it very easy to keep them off-line and isolated, as they are the separate computer systems with their own copies of data used for backups. This also provides a VERY quick way to be back up and running no matter what type of failure you have with your main system. After you have a backup redundant system online and running, you can then work to repair and restore your main system, with little impact to your core users and needs.
Is this overkill? Perhaps for some, but also just a starting point for others. It helps to prioritize. How important is your data to you? How easy can it be replaced? Does it really matter if the data is lost? Ask these questions, and others that you will best be able to ask yourself about your data. Then you will be able to map out your needs and priorities better and determine what you really need to do for a backup plan.
External hard drives, while convenient and cheap, typically are lacking for cooling. As a result, using them for long term, or always on applications may not be a good idea, and may lead to failures also, Some people solve this very successfully with external cooling fans placed at the vents to force air through them.
Internal hard drives, I find these the most convenient and space saving for my uses. Sadly, MANY computer cases also have inadequate cooling for hard drives, especially for a bank of MANY hard drives. Again air flow is the key to cool drives. There are cases and drive bay modules available that are made just to move nice air flow over the drives. This does not need to be a large volume of air, just consistent air flow usually. So it can usually be done with low speed quite fans instead of loud high speed fans. There are also many options out there for automatic temperature controlled fan speed so if needed the air cooling will be increased if needed without user action.
Hope that can help, someone here. Just remember if wanting to either add or MOVE to cloud storage, that NOT ALL PROVIDERS ARE THE SAME! Some make and provide backups, some do not! Some have protected drive arrays, some DO NOT! Just because they may have an option to pay for an optical backup set if you need it to be sent in the mail to you, does not mean that they have any routine backup methods in place, or that they even have a backup should they have hard drive failures. Do lots of research if CLOUD storage is going to be your only backup, or even more important your ONLY STORAGE.
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I use external USB drives almost exclusively. (Usually WD but I will use others if I get a good deal on a well reviewed drive) Most of my drives are either 4tb or 6tb and I have them pooled for a total of about 60tb.
External cases do not allow for good cooling a lot of the time and that is one reason that external drives seem to have a higher failure rate than internal. My server and all my drives and my networking and a UPS all reside on a rolling shelf system in my back room and I have solved the heat problem by having a room fan blowing across my entire system all the time. Because my system is in a back room I have no real concern about noise or even keeping everything “pretty.”
I have a failure rate of one drive every 5-6 years and it often seems a lot lower than that.
I strongly recommend against using or depending on the “cloud” as a backup or to provide regular real time service. I understand why it often seems a good choice but you are not really in control and you are dependent on some company to keep your data safe.
I do agree that you should keep an offsite backup and that is really pretty easy to do and remember that you do NOT need that offsite backup to include the media that you can easily recreate like rips of DVDs. Just be sure to keep the originals in a safe off site location.
I figure that if things happen that requires a complete rebuild of my system I probably have much greater issues than watching movies/TV so I do not keep off site backups of anything but my media.
Having multiple backup drives means you have to have deep pockets. It gets very costly for the average person. Each one of my drives are 8tbs and they aren’t backed up.
Now what I used to do was just redownload everything, luckily my Internet speed is fast, however, now the plug-in folder has gone, if a drive fails, I don’t know what part of my library is missing, there used to be a plug-in that would track what’s on your server, so perfect for failed drives. Luckily I’ve only ever had a couple of drives fail years back but plex really do need a feature to show you when a drive is offline and what’s now unavailable on the server.
Does anyone know of a feature like this?
You can still use WebTools and the like.
Look in Settings - Plug Ins
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What kind of Hard drive did you get? Because for this type of application you need to look at a NAS drive like the WD Red or the Seagate Iron Wolf, they are built to run 24/7. A normal desktop hard drive is not really designed to do that.
The issue with cloud storage is your at the mercy of your ISP and the cloud storage provider. To me you just need to buy better drives that are more designed for this purpose. Plus the cost would be enormous.
Yeah I just installed it, thanks, when will we lose plugins though? I Feel like if it’s being removed then it’s kinda pointless me having just installed it.
Actually I have found that you do not need those expensive, actually WAY overpriced, drives. I use just regular external USB drives and my failure rate is as low as that reported for the expensive drives. The only requirement is that the drives come from a reliable manufacturer.
The first thing I do when I get a new drive is turn off all the “Power saving” and “Green” functions and asure that the drive will never spin down as long as it is powered up.
In the last eight years I have only had one drive, out of 13, fail during normal operation. I had one other fail but it was one I dropped while it was powered on and I would expect failure in that case and failure to fail would just be a matter of luck. I also have eight other drives that are used for off site backup and none of those have failed.
I think that failure rate is quite good.
It should be noted that these are all external USB drives and that DrivePool balances load and so may contribute to the reliability.
Comes down to this, yes a standard desktop hard drive will work, but there is always a chance it will not last as long in this type of operation. Desktop hard drives are not designed for NAS/Server work loads. WD Reds are designed for 24/7 operation and multiple users hitting the drive all at once. I myself have one had 1 hard drive ever fail on me, but again If I was using it for server level duties I would not expect any consumer grade desktop hard drive to live long in that type of work load. Im not say your way of doing things is wrong. Im just saying I wouldnt do it that way.
That is what the manufactures want you to believe BUT the difference is exaggerated to justify the higher price. You are not wrong to get the higher priced drives it is just more money for a very small, if any, improvement.
Yes I have seen the statistics from various sourses but every set of such I have seen have a vested interest in selling the move to the higher priced drives, even the so called independent ones.
I believe that by choosing the correct testing structure just about anything can be proved by using statistics. “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.”
Definitely agree with needing to use NAS rated drives if your machine is on 24/7. I had a good mix of different drives for a while and noticed the desktop HDDs all died on me way faster than the NAS drives. I’m now running all NAS drives with many approaching 50,000 hrs.
I have always been a bit nervous with the lower priced drives, but have still usually bought them as it has also allowed me to buy spare drives more easily with the money I did not spend on the more expensive drives. I do have a few higher end drives, but not many. Most of my drives are the normal cheap WD greens, with some Hitachi and Samsung thrown in. I have WD green drives with over 66,000 hours of use, red drives with over 47,000 hours of use. All of them are still going strong with no errors. I also have good air flow so the drives do not get hot.
This company is using desktop drives to build gigantic storage farms and is publishing their reliability statistics regularly. Worth a read: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2018/
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ended up buying an off the shelf WD 4TB , think I will stay away from seagate , they seem to be the ones giving me trouble. No way could I justify paying 5x the price for a nat drive am afraid. I have no backups , if I could afford to have multiple drives as back ups I would just go out and buy the high end drives instead , tx for replies.
I believe external drives dont last as long because of they aren’t as well cooled in this casings. I also prefer WD over seagate and I think a lot of people would echo that they have a slightly better track record. I have 4 X 2TB’s in an old school netgear readynas machine that was all purchased 8 years ago and it’s still going (knock on wood). Again WD is definitely far from perfect but I think they have better drives overall.
I dont agree with the previous statements- BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP, simply because it isn’t cost effective and this is media we’re dealing with. There are two schools of thought with this, mine is this is media and not worth the extra expense doubling up on external drives or running them in a raid 1 or 5 environment. If you use a NAS machine you can run it in an environment has some parity/allows for disk failure. Synology has something called SHR or you can use an OS like unraid that will protect you from single disk failure. I think this is perfect for media drives as I dont expect to lose more than one disk at a time and doubling up on everything isnt really cost effective or efficient.
Long story short, TL/DR version- I think a good NAS device in the proper environment will be much more stable than using external disks and more cost effective than most hosted cloud solutions.
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Historically yes, recently? … not in any way shape or form. But I guess that’s how far you go back to class historical. In HDD terms thats no more than 2 years imho.
I do get what you’re saying though. Seagate released some stupidly low priced 4TB drives… They’re there in @OttoKerner link. They were the best selling drive in the world at the time by a long way (almost certainly due to price). They were also really bad drives.
Worse still they were cheaper still when shucked. I havent done it since.
Sadly Seagate have struggled to live it down among casual users.
Seagate really have got their stuff together though recently as that link also shows.
I have actually had good luck with Seagate external drives. By that I do not mean I have had no failures but Rather I mean that the drives that did fail did so within the warranty period and Seagate replaced them without any issue at all.
Since I used them in my DrivePool setup that has good redundancy I lost no data at all. Other Segate drives are years old and have had zero problems.
Whenever I need a new drive I look at the current reviews and go with the cheapest drive in the size I need that is currently getting good reviews.
In my experience all drive manufacturers are pretty much equal and each has good runs and bad runs and drives mostly fail either within the first few months or the last for years.
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Yeah I agree totally.
I have had several of those questionable 4TB drives and to be honest many of them were shucked. Stablebit scanner has been reporting SMART issues with the vast majority of them for years.
As i have upgraded the sizes on my production system those drives sit in another box and despite the warnings have mostly kept ticking along.
I think at my peak I had 14 of them and only 2 have ever died . I also have owned 2 WD drives and both of those died. So I now work on the basis of the most reliable drives are judged from personal experience and not anything I read on the internet.
