July 4th weekend deals- post them here

[Docjon]

Some stuff going on sale at Monoprice.com

They've got a Seagate 4TB BarraCuda drive on sale for $99.99. Seems like a decent deal to me, as it's supposedly one of the faster HD's out there. I generally buy Western Digital Blacks, but I thought I'd pass this along anyway. Would love to get a new HD myself. My HD's are aging - my newest one is going on 6 years old.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=21813

[Paladin]

Seagate drives suck. Not worth it except for extra storage that you won't care about when it fails on you.

Aging HD is not a huge deal man , I have HD "s at work that have been running over 20 years.

Just keep your data backed up. i i

No seriously they can fail at any time. Two weeks or two decades. You just never know... i i

Any HD can fail of course but my experience is Seagate seems to be the worse at it.

[Prophet]

Yeah, Seagate pretty much is always the worst performer on the Backblaze failure reports.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... s-q1-2017/

[Lexx]

Yeap, every drive I had that failed in the last 3 years was Seagate and another cheap brand, damn, can't place the name. Pity as these are made in Pgh and they are fast and cheap. I'll spend the extra and buy WD anymore. 2GBs even is too many shows, etc to replace.

[Larva]

I bought 4 Seagate drives for some RAID arrays several years ago. I got suckered in by the size & price. Half of them failed well before the warranty was up. Going by these other posts it looks like their reputation has not improved since I banned that brand from my shopping list.

When we all actually agree that a particular brand sucks ass, that's really saying something!

[Prophet]

Toshiba is the value option these days. That's what I have in my file server.

[Docjon]

Well, here's one for the Western Digital Black fans. 1TB for under $60, tax included, pickup at Wal-Mart or Amazon Prime may be necessary.

https://slickdeals.net/f/10311820-wd-bl ... i_35045964

Also for the WD fans, I'll post that my NEWEST drive is a 750 gb Black, and it's going on 6 years on in November, having run 24/7 for all that time, except when I was in the hospital. My older drive - I'm not sure how old it is. It's 500gb, and I think it's on the order of 10 years old.

It's kind of an awkward time to buy storage. SSD's should be far more prevalent by now and HD's should be reduced to a niche product, and selling out of old stock, but memory prices are keeping HD's competitive a little longer. Think I'll hold off, even though my drives are really old. Barring natural disasters interfering with memory production, I think by Thanksgiving 2018 few people will be looking for HD's. Hey, maybe I'll get a crazy cheap deal on some cheap TV & movie storage.

[Paladin]

The main issue with SSD's from a personal/support angle is when they fail they FAIL.
With normal HD's usually if the HD gets corrupted or fails booting I can still retrieve the data. SSD's fail catastrophically. No getting access to the data.

They also don't last as long as HD.s having a 5 to 7 year life span and a lot don't make it that far. As I said I have HD's that have been running for years and years.

SSD's are getting better and better though but the tech is just not there yet for long term reliability.

You guys need to remember, when you argue with me, that my opinions come from the IT perspective. I take care of about 60 PC's and that is not including laptops. So my experience with brands and failing is on a different level. Since I have so many systems I see the failures and issues more that the average user. Honestly I rarely have HD's completely fail on me to the point of not being able to get data back off of it. I have already seen several SSD's have issues, especially on the MAC/laptop side which luckily my boss takes care of. I don't "do" MAC. i i

But we do buy Dell's with a RAID 1 setup which is a simple mirror so if they have issues I can slap in a new HD and am good to go with no data loss. We recently have been buying a few with SSD RAID's. They are half the storage size but it is still awesome!

So for me since HD's are still much cheaper and larger I will mainly use those. SSD's are still problematic. As a matter of fact the one system in my house, my HTPC, that I used an SSD for the OS (not counting laptops here) started giving me issue booting for some reason. It didn't fail access wise but got some weird booting problem I could not resolve. I had to build the system again and just used a HD this time. I do not trust the SSD to rebuild on it again.

So don't get me wrong, I frekin LOVE SSD tech. I have been saying for years before they even existed how cool it would be to get a memory based storage system. I am talking in the 90's here.

Faster is better from a user perspective! I am sure the tech will get there, it may take awhile to come down in price, up in size and the same reliability as HD's.

I just think it will take a bit longer than a year though. I am thinking 3 to 5 years before we see SSD's the same size for the money as HD's. It is hard to predict tech.

As for reliability, I am unsure. The tech is always changing and it is getting better but it is the cost to size issue I am keeping an eye on.

Some of the new processes and memory types they are playing with may really help on the reliability side.

[Prophet]

You are right on price/compacity but wrong on life span. These days, outside the server environment, the typical SSD will far outlive the HDD. Especially in the typical home machine where you don't do constant writes.

My 256GB 840 Pro OS drive dual booting Win10 and Arch has 8138 hours of uptime. 1865 power cycles. 12.9TB of writes. It hyas not even touched the overprovision yet with zero detected corrupt sectors.

My 840 Evo 1TB storage drive; 6034 hours uptime, 1023 power cycles, 6.7TB of writes. No bad sectors, no overprovision access.

These are not untypical either. These days SSD tech is far superior to anything HDD related outside price to capacity.

Another indicator of expected life, warranties. Most decent consumer SSDs come with 3-5 year warranty. Typical HDD outside the enterprise class, 2 years. Even things like the WD Black.

The days of spinning rust are coming to an end. They are slower and less reliable in most situations. Not opinion, just the real facts of the situation.

[Paladin]

I have a long post to respond but am not posting it now.
You hate HD's and have a hard on for SD's we get it. Believe what you want.

I will only say that your example of reliability with your SSD is not even a full year running 24/7. My lab of 20 PC's have been running over 5 years so that is a data point that is over 5 times longer. So I think HD's have been proven to be reliable. You saying they are not is just incorrect.

SSD's have simply not been out long enough to have a history of reliability yet. I think the tech is getting better and better as new memory types are being developed and I am all pro SSD.

I just take offense at you saying that HD's are rusty and not reliable, that is just BS.

[Prophet]

But that is exactly why they are being phased out. The numbers do not lie. 99% of people are not constantly writing to the drive. No writes, no wear. Spinners always spin and wear. Outside mass storage, the HDD is dying. And it will be dead in the mass storage area as well before long. Now that SSD compacity has surpassed the HDD. Just a matter of getting prices down.

[Paladin]

"Quando omni flunkus moritati"

 I'm a man, but I can change, If I have to, I guess

[Prophet]

You will. In all likelyhood, the HDD will totally die in the next decade or so. Prices will hit a point where even if more expensive the power savings will make data centers/enterprise migrate over. 1000 SSDs use a lot less power than 1000 15k SAS HDDs. Plus the speed gains. We already have huge SSD based storage servers for massive cache on SAN setups. Or for high demand situations like virtualized servers.

The only place I see HDD's still being used is maybe cold storage. But, that is honestly still dominated by tape currently. Sony makes an 185TB tape currently. Largest HDD on the market, 10TB from Seagate. Largest SSD, 60TB also from Seagate.

The HDD is at it's limits in it's current form factor. Even if they could find a way to double the density, it will never be enough at this point. The HDD is in it's death throughs as we speak.

[Paladin]

You still miss my point but that is okay. At this point I don't expect you will.

Have a great 4th all!