So I’ve only really used lower capacity drives that are usually in the 500 GB - 1 TB range. I have gone up to 2 TB, but nothing larger. I’m just wondering, do high capacity HDDs that are in the range of 6 - 8 TB have any known issues? I obviously assume that they wouldn’t, but I figure asking wouldn’t hurt. (internal drives by the way)
Specifically, any hardware related issues.
I don’t know of any particlular risk besides the more data on one disk the more you risk to lose.
You can mitigate this with back ups and raid configuration. Not sure what your particular use case is.
There is the BackBlaze data, though take it with a grain of salt
Any HDD can go wrong, so having at least one backup is always a must.
With one large drive, you can lose lots more data than if you have a bunch of smaller drives and one fails.
In a RAID array, repairing the array after replacing a large disk is going to take ages. I assume that this is one of the reasons why Wendell put a hundred or so 2TB drives in his NAS.
The topic is specific to drives in the high capacity range and if there are any known issues compared to lower capacity drives.
Generally theyre a lot more of a pain in the ass for data recovery. From what i’ve heard from data recovery people, they’re saying that its easier for sectors to fail primarily because theyre so small and packed together and for hard drive heads to get messed up easier due to less tolerance for failure. you have to be extremely accurate to read all dem terabytes. Also takes muuuuuuuch longer to get any data off due to its sheer size. Take this with a grain of salt because im not data recovery expert. From my experience data recovery folks generaslly dont like high capacity spinning rust.
higher capacity drives are fine to use as long as you have proper redundancy and backups setup. RAID isn’t a backup solution. RAID mitigates outright failure of HDD’s, but it doesn’t always correct for drive read errors or corrupted data or bit rot. If you’re using the drives for just silly crap like movies and saved 4chan pics then RAID1 is fine but for creitical shit like databases, system backups, or any other critical data then you’ll need a more robust solution. If the drive itself is pulling a Trump and spewing out partially wrong data for whatever reason then its possible the RAID array may even overwrite the good data with the fake data(looking at you RAID5), though not always.
Dedicated RAID card with onboard backup battery + RAID6 + filesystem that does proper end-to-end error correction and verification(like ZFS/BTRFS) is generally a good combination for critical stuff. Avoid OS based raid solutions or mobo onboard raid, theyre not as reliable.
Drives over 2TB have a few issues:
Have to use GPT instead of MBR (I’m sure there are exceptions, but generally, this is the rule)
Older RAID controllers often won’t work with them
I know there are more but I’m spacing out.
I’ll specify. Thank you for the information.
Hardware issues specifically, software related is also accepted, but primarily hardware.
They tend to be significantly more vulnerable to dying during rebuild since a rebuild can take multiple days and stress drives more than regular operation.
They can also give more vibration since they typically use more platters, meaning more rotating mass.
Aside from that, there aren’t any serious downsides to drive size.
If you get into the shingled drives (WD purple, Seagate Archive, etc…) they have an interesting method of writing to the drive that doesn’t really affect sequential writes, but it will affect randoms significantly.
Probably not what you’re asking for, but as a heads up to anyone looking, 10TB drives are physically thicker than regular 3.5" drives. (Not talking about SATA vs SAS, here.)
Really? Interesting. How much thicker? Is there like a review or comparison of some type?
Height wise none of the drives I can find are over 26.2mm, so while some smaller capacity drives are thinner, the 10TB class devices I have seen are all withing normal 3.5" internal drive standards, not inherently over height, so should work in any standard enclosure thats not built by a OEM for one particular drive.
Just my 2 cents here, but I personally don’t use drives larger than 4TB in RAIDs simply due to the obscene rebuild times if a disk fails, leaving the array vulnerable to data loss if another drive decides it’s time to go to that big recycle bin in the sky (RAID 1, 10, 5 and other single disk failure setups). ZFS/BtrFS/ReFS w/ Storage Spaces can lower the risk, but you are still talking about a huge amount of data at HDD speeds. I use large single disks in rotation for backups, mostly for simplicity (6TB drives at the moment).
As far as hardware goes, I think people forget how amazing HDD technology is. The precision of the mechanical systems in these drives is a marvel of modern engineering. The higher the capacity, the more moving parts you have and the higher the precision required. They’ve even had to fill the drives with helium because standard air density is too high for the platters to spin properly at high speeds. Increased mechanical complexity doesn’t necessarily mean they will fail quicker than lower capacity drives, but there are more things that could go wrong. This doesn’t even take into account the higher cost per GB as the capacity gets higher.
If you really need more than 4TB on a single drive, I wouldn’t worry about the failure rate too much. Have good backups and enjoy the space. Know what you are going to use the drive for and get a drive that is appropriate for the use case (standard desktop drive vs NAS drive vs enterprise vs archive shingled drives). If your backups are really on point, I would take some of those old smaller capacity drives and setup something similar to RAID 0 of large capacity. Good way to recycle drives and good performance. But again, you must have a solid backup scheme setup as a single drive failure will kill the whole array.
Raid 5 is already a bit moot in 4tb consumer drives, especially if you bought a bunch around the same time (so they will approach end of life together, and failure rates will likely be higher by the time you do first proper rebuild). As for the speed of rebuild, with a better setup (like raid 6/7 or the ZFS equivalent… which IMO both make more sense than “hot backups”) the idea is you don’t instantly stop and wait for a rebuild, rather it rebuilds while still issuing the typical files use needed by clients… typical client duty cycle on the drives is very rarely high on average for a server, NAS or SAN anyway, so it doesn’t even slow the rebuild time much.
Also for reference, rebuilding an array isn’t crazy long on modern drive speeds, even on 10TB drives it’ll happen overnight for a business, writing 6TB sequentially on a Toshiba X300 6TB\8TB happens at over 150 MegaBytes per second, or total rebuild of a full (or 75% respectively) drive in under 11hrs fi the attached CPU\controller can keep up with parity creation ect in your chosen format. Also given its not much load on the rest of the array to provide 150MBps, even without user prioritization the speed delivered from a NAS\SAN to users shouldn’t be dropped much during rebuild… nor is a rebuild a “stress” far out of the ordinary for any one other drive in the array.
Regarding failure rates, neither the drive manufactures nor more independent reviews claim higher failure rate per Tb\year throughput on higher capacity but otherwise equivalent drives. You may have more read heads than a single lower capacity drive, but you have less moving parts than an equivalent capacity of lower capacity drives. One of the large reasons for helium isn’t the need for tolerances, its the ability to seal from external factors and reduce power draw, which (along side having less reciprocating mass per terabyte) is one of the reasons that the larger capacity drives can be much more power efficient than their peers (I say peers because enterprise drives tend to be hungrier than their consumer equivalents of the same capacity), enabling similar totally draw per populated drive bays, despite radically higher total capacity.
Cost per terabyte wise, on all the drives listed on PcPartPicker, limited to 7200rpm 3.5" and sorted by price per gigabyte, the top options are 3tb Seagate barracuda, 3tb Toshiba, 6tb Toshiba x300, 6tb Hitachi (my personal pick & 28cents per gigabyte), then 5&4Tb Toshiba x300’s. With an exception for stock clearance for older drive designs (which can be totaly worth it as a new in box last gen drive doesn’t necessarily even have a higher failure chance than the drive that replaces it), price per gigabyte isn’t really a shortcoming of big drives, especially once you consider the costs per bay in your storage array (or hassle of swapping more times in cold backup).
I do however totally agree about getting a drive that suits your use case, having good backups and learning not to worry… I personally wouldn’t raid0 a bunch of older drives (its just not been worth the headaches in the past for me, even when you don’t have any irreplaceable data on the array).
Indeed I suspect for home users, more often than not you’ll find that once you understand your needs you don’t even need raid arrays, since even if the storage pool is big the daily modification rate is pretty small, and up-time of most of the data is not essential so long as it can be eventually recovered, thus you can maintain complete data replacement in acceptable time via infrequent complete backups with something like a nightly delta. Although having said that 2 disk raid1 (even in poor software like within windows) is still certainly a possibility for storage within a machine your directly interfacing with, as it allows near zero downtime in an unexpected drive failure (just remove old disk). Just remember, RAID is not a backup!
I’m glad the price per GB seems to be coming down on the higher capacity drives (hence why I use the 6TB drives myself for backups). I’m sure they will continue to fall as well.
As far as the stress of a rebuild, IMO the rebuild process can put excess stress on drives that may already be on the edge considering the constant reads. This doesn’t even take into account URE rates that could cause a failed rebuild in a RAID 5 if the array is large enough (especially if you aren’t doing data scrubbing on your array on a fairly regular basis). Again, RAID 5 is kinda crazy in this day in age with how cheap capacity has gotten, but still something to consider. This link will goes into the math if anyone is interested.
https://standalone-sysadmin.com/recalculating-odds-of-raid5-ure-failure-b06d9b01ddb3
Call me a heretic and chase me away with torches and pitchforks, but I really like Storage Spaces for Windows. I have used it as a Software Defined Storage solution for a few years now at home and in some production servers. Setting up a RAID 0 (called a Simple Space by Mircosoft) does have decent performance and allows the use of different sized drives, even on different buses (SATA mixed with USB). Not saying it’s necessarily worth it, but there are options to use old drives until they croak.
Power savings is definitely a huge part of the appeal of He drives, but also these ultra high capacity drives wouldn’t be possible in a standard 3.5" footprint without the use of Helium. BTW, they make a 12TB drive now. That’s insanity.
https://itblog.sandisk.com/rise-helium-drives/
But again, for the average consumer that just wants a crap ton of space for their data hoarding needs, there is no need to fear large capacity drives with the understanding that nothing replaces a solid backup solution. My advice for cheap insurance is to get a Backblaze account or something similar with unlimited storage and have one of your backups in the cloud. I like Backblaze because you can provide your own encryption key so even Backblaze can’t access your data without your password. I don’t think that is necessary for the average consumer, but it has definitely been a deciding factor for some businesses that are considering cloud backup solutions. However, it’s nice to know it’s available.
Your points were spot on and it’s always a pleasure to read well-informed options. 
I like that first link you posted. Thanks for the interesting read!
I forgot the details, but there was something about first gen helium drives that made them a particularly bad choice.
Does anyone remember what that was?
“should"
We had to reorder new chassis’ from the manufacturer because the 3.5” slots were made just millimeters too thin. This was only because the 10TB drives hit the absolute limit of the 3.5" standard, and I suppose the chassis manufacturer didn’t consider that this would be something that would happen anytime soon.
Anyway, just an fyi for anyone looking, not meant to be a deterrent in any fashion. It wasn’t something I expected to need to check previously.
Clarification: Talking about SANs, but I can’t be super specific because I help design them, and I signed an NDA.
They would float away if you’re not careful. Had to only use them indoors in locations where you could reach them, just in case.
/s
I’ve been running a seagate 5tb external for about a year and a half now I haven’t had any problems with it, and I’ve dropped it at least twice.
I have a wd green drive 3tb it was slow as hell but that was my only complaint.
I’m rocking a seagate sshd 2tb drive now for storage it’s working fine.
The only drives I wouldn’t recommend are the cheapy aftermarket ones.
May I ask what aftermarket drives are? OEM/ white label versions sold in bulk to system builders?
Or second hand ones?
Or externals from a company other than a HDD manufacturer?
Genuinely have not heard of aftermarket HDD’s