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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

This is a really poor article. It's basically looking at spec sheets and current prices to determine the "best" drive. There doesn't seem to be any empirical testing whatsoever. They also seem to recommend product lines that are significantly pricier. eg. their "High-Capacity Desktop" recommendation is "14TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro" for $515. Is that really better than getting a 12TB easystore for $190 and then shucking it? The cost per terabyte of the easystore is less than half, and I really doubt that the recommended drive would last twice as long. Also, despite the article being less than 2 days old, most of the recommended drives are either not available, or available at significantly higher prices that listed.

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> Also, despite the article being less than 2 days old, most of the recommended drives are either not available, or available at significantly higher prices that listed.

In my experience with checking prices for the SSD Buyer's Guide, it is impossible to get to the end of the list before something earlier in the list has already changed in price or availability. Amazon is the worst in this respect; I'm pretty sure the act of checking prices causes price changes, and less-popular models are constantly going in and out of stock.

They do specifically discuss "shucking" the drives from USB enclosures and recommend against it. I do wonder how well this list compares against the reports from Backblaze.

Replying to the quotes from the article:

>While this is easy enough to do, the user experience might not be optimal - obtaining warranty services is pretty much ruled out

AFAIK easystores are relatively easy to shuck non-destructively. If you do it right and don't destroy the enclosure, and your drive breaks, you might still be able to submit it for warranty. Regardless, I'm skeptical about the actual value of the warranty is worth the premium (double the price).

>the default TLER settings might need alteration (which is not always possible with commercial off-the-shelf NAS units)

True, although it's likely not useful unless in business-critical workloads. You're probably fine without TLER if you're just using it to store movies/games.

>the drive is going to be used in non-critical scenarios.

What's meant by "critical scenarios" here? Either you care about the data or not. If you care about it, you will keep backups and/or use parity to ensure that one drive failure won't wipe out your data. If you're only storing on one drive, you're one unexpected disk crash from losing it. This applies regardless of whether you're using the cheapest consumer drive, or the most expensive "enterprise" drive.

Whats the deal with the 12TB Easystore?

They regularly go on sale for $180-$190[1]. Inside are whitelabel WD drives. Sometimes they're even helium and/or enterprise/NAS drives.

[1] https://slickdeals.net/newsearch.php?src=SearchBarV2&q=easys...

I agree it's not a great article. I wonder though - is there sufficient data out there to make a good article with the same title?

> I wonder though - is there sufficient data out there to make a good article with the same title?

Isn't that almost exactly the purpose of Backblaze's HD stats?

https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html

Backblaze only covers the drives they have in production, which is a fairly small variation. Any smaller drives you see in their stats will be older (with more data), which means you might not see any data if you're buying a more recent smaller drive, and they may not have data on the highest end as they want to hit a good price to size/performance value for what they buy.

It's more "here's a review of what we have" and less a "here's a survey of what exists to buy", although you might be able to make some educated guesses about the latter from the former (but I would consider those low accuracy).

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