Would You Buy Another Spinner

[bayswater]

My backup drives for project and TM are getting old and I'm thinking about replacing both of them pre-disaster (a new strategy for me). Preferably one drive to replace both. SSDs are still pretty pricy for the larger units, but a 8T spinner is pretty cheap.

Is buying a spinner now like getting a betamax? Or are they around for a while yet?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I think spinners will be around for quite a while longer, at least until the prices on SDDs come down. I have 11 spinners (a total of about 20+ TB of space). A couple of 2TB and 4TB are blanks. I run them to keep the bearings lubed and also run Disk Utility (Apple) to check their general health. If one of my drives or backups fail, I'm ready. It's cheap insurance.

Enclosures are the real issue most of the time. If something fails, it's more often the enclosure than the drive (but not always). $@50 gets you a 12TB spinner. That's pretty hard to pass up...

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/HGST/0F29610P/

(Limited supplies - 5 left at OWC at this writing)

[cuttime]

Personally, I would buy spinners in bulk and be prepared to replace them. I work in the TV broadcast industry, and our state of the art long-term storage devices are Spectra Logic tape drives, which I understand Google also uses:


If you told me in 1996 that we would still be using magnetic tape in 2020, I would have laughed at you, because I was fully convinced that we would be using holographic crystal cubes for petabytes of storage. I also would have laughed if you told me that LP vinyl would return. I think the only conclusion you can make about storage is that whatever choice you make, it will become outmoded in just a few years.

[mikehalloran]

It depends. For anything other than backup, I'm using SSDs only. Life is just too short.

The two 4TB SATA III SSDs I have hooked up via TB2 run less than 1/6th the speed of the internal on my iMP. To "save time", I recently bounced a different mix on an older project leaving it on an external rather than moving it to my internal first. That simple task took way too long.

HDDs are a lot slower than that unless four in a RAID 0 array and there's no cost savings over my pair of 4TB drives in that TB2 dock. This doesn't take into account the additional heat and noise. No thanks.

Planning on upgrading my three Time Machine drives to 12GB WD Reds. $treet is just under $350ea. Even though Seagate has improved quite a bit in recent years, my buddy who worked there still recommends the Reds.

The reason for this is to back up my 2x 4TB VI/Samples/Archive array that I will then run RAID 0. Because of the lanes issue and certain inefficiencies, the resulting 8TB array will not run twice as fast but it will be close. With RAID 0, if one drive in the array messes up, you've lost the data on both. I had the unpleasant experience of downloading and re-authorizing everything on those drives last year when I set them up. Now that I'm also using them to offload recent projects from my 2TB internal plus my iTunes… it's time to back them up to Time Machine.

HDDs have a lot of life left in them for certain tasks.

[HCMarkus]

Planning on upgrading my three Time Machine drives to 12GB WD Reds. $treet is just under $350ea. Even though Seagate has improved quite a bit in recent years, my buddy who worked there still recommends the Reds.

In case you hadn't heard, an FYI...

Western Digital has been receiving a storm of bad press—and even lawsuits—concerning their attempt to sneak SMR disk technology into their "Red" line of NAS disks. To get a better handle on the situation, Ars purchased a Western Digital 4TB Red EFAX model SMR drive and put it to the test ourselves.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06 ... t-garbage/
It's my understanding WD is now specifying when Reds are SMR and, based on ARS testing, it appears that only edge cases run into issues in NAS applications.

And, yes, spinners are still the way to go for on-site backup.

I am now using BackBlaze for cloud backup, so far very satisfied.

[bayswater]

Thanks everyone. I think I'll get the largest spinner I can find easily, after looking at some reviews, and let TM back up everything, including sample drives, and the backup of my audio projects, so there are three copies. I have enough fast SSDs to deal with all the everyday stuff, and the core files will all fit on my expanded iCloud account.

Speed is not really a big issue for me -- TM runs in background slowly anyway and I rarely notice it.

The missing element still is some sort of background software to do syncing of some folders that I like to access from more than one Mac. Right now I put those on a drive connected to the wifi router, but this requires attention to copy files. It would be better to have the sync just happen in background. I think Terminal V5 will do this, but it's difficult to figure out what it's doing. Anyway, it would be great if all this just ran in background without any intervention from me. Does anyone have something that does file syncs reliably in background?

I don't know what SMR is, but apparently it involves shingles. Don't like the sound of that. I had Chicken Pox when I was a kid.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Might I suggest you also get a second drive and make a redundant backup. TimeMachine makes that easy.

[bayswater]

Might I suggest you also get a second drive and make a redundant backup. TimeMachine makes that easy.

Yes, thanks, I will do that. If I get one large drive, I'd have enough to do at least two backups, if not three.

[mikehalloran]

Replicating WD Red's ZFS failures artificially

…Unfortunately, it would appear that Western Digital did not test ZFS, which a substantial minority of their customer base depends upon…

Yea, that. If I ever set up a server farm or an 8 disk NAS array or need ZFS, I'll be sure to read it again—if I could take it seriously.

About that: I feel the article is more than a bit disingenuous comparing a 4TB Red to a 12TB IronWolf. According to Western Digital, the 8-14TB drives they sell are all based on PMR, while the 2TB-6TB parts are all SMR drives.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/3 ... -customers

Reds have oversized bearings, are energy efficient @ 5,400 RPM and I've never had a failure. They do cost a little more than the 7200 RPM Seagate IronWolf and both are PMR at the capacities I like. The 6TB Reds I've had for the last few years are PMR because of their age.

Amusing article, though.

[HCMarkus]

I use multiple Seagate 8TB externals for Time Machine... $130-150 each. They are not fast, but have been solid for me for several years now.