[mythtv-users] Reviving a myth system after hardware failure on /var

[Stephen Worthington]

On Fri, 7 Nov 2014 08:16:33 +0000, you wrote:

>On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 1:25 AM, Stephen Worthington <
>stephen_agent at jsw.gen.nz> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 6 Nov 2014 22:30:41 +0000, you wrote:
>>
>> >I have a bunch of drives in the machine and tend to upgrade them one by
>> >one, when they fill up or fail, with whatever the largest affordable drive
>> >is at the time of upgrade (nowadays 4 TB). So there will always be smaller
>> >and larger drives in there.
>>
>> Actually, 6 TB drives are available at very reasonable prices.  I have
>> a WD60EFRX (Western Digital 6 TB Red) in my system now.  The
>> equivalent Green drive is also available and a bit cheaper, but
>> actually draws more power than the Red model.  I would love to have
>> the Hitachi 6 TB helium filled drives, but they are much too expensive
>> and I do not really need that level of performance except maybe on my
>> system drive (currently a 3 TB Hitachi HDS723030ALA640).
>>
>
>If I look on Amazon.co.uk today, the cheapest WD60EFRX is 208.47 GBP (but
>not in stock), costing 34.75 GBP/TB. What I buy these days is the
>STBV4000200 at 94.99 GBP (also not in stock, so comparing apples to
>apples...), which works out at 23.75 GBP/TB. That's quite a bit cheaper
>than the WD Red! Given the rate at which HD recordings eat the terabytes, I
>always take the cheaper drives. I may not be doing the "redundant arrays"
>part yet, but I'm sure going for "inexpensive" ;-)
>
>NB these Seagate external drives have been the "cheapest GBP/TB" drives for
>the past couple of years, in my research, ever since the 2 TB model. I
>can't figure out their strategy but if I buy one of these, open it up and
>take the bare drive inside, it works out cheaper than buying the drive on
>its own. So I also have plenty of USB3 3.5" SATA enclosures with matching
>power supplies ;-) They now make them up to 5 TB but 4 TB is currently the
>sweet spot.

Unfortunately, Seagate seem to be the least reliable drives available
at the moment.  The 4 TB models have yet to be around long enough for
us to know how reliable they are, but over the last few years, the
reports tend to show the cheap Seagate drives as significantly more
likely to fail than the other brands.  So I tend to avoid Seagate.  I
have only one Seagate drive currently in 24x7 service (ST4000VN000).

The reason I am buying 6 TB drives now is simple - I have run out of
SATA connectors to add more drives on my MythTV box.  One SATA port
has a 4 drive eSATA port multiplier enclosure on it now, with my three
Videos drives and one recording drive in it.  I have 24 TB of
recording drives and 9.1 TB of Videos drives.  Recording space is
reporting as 80% used.

Here in New Zealand, the WD Green 4 TB drives are slightly cheaper per
GB than the 3 TB ones (0.0566 vs 0.0584 NZ$/GB) and the 6 TB ones are
at 0.0685.  The WD60EFRX is currently on one week special at one
supplier and is slightly cheaper than that, but is normally 0.0719
NZ$/GB.