[mythtv-users] Quiet, reliable hard drives

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 12:48:23 -0800, you wrote:

>
>  Any recommendations for a quiet & reliable hard drive for mythtv?  SSD would 
>fit the bill, but at 2 TB capacity (what I'm looking at), still a bit pricey.
>
>  I'm currently running 2 machines - a system with enterprise quality HD that 
>stores the data in a far way room (drives going on 5 years of operation and 
>still strong) and a frontend/main linux computer with all SSD.  Ideally, I'd 
>like to consolidate, but those enterprised HDs are quite noisy, and I like the 
>relatively quietness I have now.
>
>  Mythtv pretty much never records more than 1 thing at a time.  The storage is 
>also used for zoneminder & other minor storage use.
>
>  I'm tempted by the 2.5" lap top drives - those generally seem quieter & lower 
>power, but I'm not sure if they'd be up to long term use.  Though the Firecuda 
>comes with a 5 year warranty, suggesting some degree of robustness.
>
>  I currently mirror all of my data, and I'd probably want to do that with the 
>new setup.  I'll probably free up an SSD, so can use that as read/write cache.
>
>  Looking for thoughts/suggestions.
>
>  Thanks.

My experience with drives is that you can never tell exactly how loud
or what annoying noises one will make until you have actually tried
it.  Seagate drives do seem to be more likely to be noisy though,
although I have not used so many of them, due to the high failure rate
of their cheap drives.  I have had good luck with WD Green drives (now
no longer available) and WD Red drives (but not the current generation
of them).  The WD2003FZEX desktop drive (based on the older Green
drives) we recently bought to replace an old failing Seagate drive was
disappointingly noisier than the one it replaced.  The problem seems
to be the quality of the noise - its noise rating in dB was fine.

For reliability, enterprise class drives are best - all the
manufacturers seem to be able to make them very reliable.  But they
are at least twice the price.  HGST drives at all levels seem to be
the most reliable, so the lower level versions of them are likely to
be just as reliable as enterprise drives from other manufacturers. But
their drives are more expensive.  I have two Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000
HDS723030ALA640 (3 TByte) drives still in service on my main MythTV
box, both showing over 6.5 years of 24/7 operation with no problems.
One of them was my system drive up until I finally put in a super fast
NVMe SSD drive for that.  I have been extremely happy with them, even
though they did cost a bit more than other drives available when I
bought them.

If you want to record to an SSD, you might find that they would not
have as long a lifetime as you would like.  SSDs are rated by how many
times each flash block is able to be erased and rewritten, and they do
not last as well as rotating rust.  When I bought my 256 GByte Samsung
950 M.2 SSD, I did calculations of the workload for the drive versus
the rated lifetime writes for it.  So far it looks like my
calculations were accurate.  It is now showing 13,086 power on hours
(= 545 days, 1.49 years), and "data units written" 41,209,336 x 512
byte blocks = 21.0 Tbytes written.  It has a 5 years or 200 TBytes
Written warranty, so I am not going to wear it out too soon - it looks
like it might last 10 years or more.  But if I was also writing all my
recording files to it, at 4-5 Gibytes per hour of recording for my HD
channels, I would massively increase the usage and it would wear out
pretty rapidly.