Stupid question...... are larger drives reliable?(4TB, 5TB, 6TB)

[True Colors]

I feel dumb asking this, but please do not flame.

For years, I have used Western Digital 3.5" bare hard drives. Mainly the EZRX series(WD20EZRX, WD30EZRX, etc.). I have always had great success with these.

Primarily, I use these drives to hold video files. The typical file sizes range from 1gig up to 5 gig. I access these hard drives approximately 5 to 10 times per day each.

So, my question is this....... are the new, larger 3.5" drives trustworthy(4TB, 5TB, 6TB)?

I have no reason to believe that they are not trustworthy, other than it seems like this is too much data crammed into too small of a space.

Is there any reason to have this type of concern?

TC

 

[Lexluethar]

No concerns, the life expectancy of larger drives is no less than the older / smaller hard drives.

 

[carnageX]

You just have to worry about more data being lost if it does indeed fail and is more of a "risk" in that sense, unless you have backups/data redundancy.

 

[1etherer]

^ what they both said

 

[PP Mguire]

are larger drives reliable?(4TB, 5TB, 6TB)

Yes.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Reliable... Yes, to an extent, when they first started popping up, not exactly reliable, but firmware changes, and lessons learned by the manufactures have made 4TB disks a lot more reliable than what they once was. I still view 6TB+ to be cold storage though.

 

[Spud1200]

Reliable... Yes, to an extent, when they first started popping up, not exactly reliable, but firmware changes, and lessons learned by the manufactures have made 4TB disks a lot more reliable than what they once was. I still view 6TB+ to be cold storage though.

By Cold storage are we talking about Server type storage or something similar. I got a bit confused over that for a moment their.

 

[setishock]

I'd use a mirrored raid setup to insure one of them survives a catastrophic event. Cheap insurance.

 

[S0ULphIRE]

Yep, having that much data on one drive with no backup and/or redundancy is just asking for a lot of heartache in the future. Either a quick mirror, or get 3 of the drives and do a nice RAID5 redundancy AND performance improvement

 

[Yami]

By Cold storage are we talking about Server type storage or something similar. I got a bit confused over that for a moment their.

Cold storage typically means storage used purely for archival purposes, not active usage. Generally this means backups, which hopefully will never need to be accessed.