Valid points about the pricing above and I've had Hard Disk Drives last for years too but if you truly want a long lasting and fast accessing drive that you don't have to worry about (not including price), there's nothing more effective than the Flash tech that's in a Solid State Disk.
I love HDDs to this day but when backup time is here, they are the ones I do first.

 

Approx. 10k rpm. Can't remember exactly. Something like 10400 or something.
No, I just got a few WDs with 2x 2TB, and put it in RAID1. At least I think it's RAID1. So if one goes i"m still good. Can't remember if those ones are 5400 or 7200. They are just for the bulk of smaller libraries, not all needing speed as such. Either way, I still don't find 7200 fast enough for some of the newer libs, which is why it's so great to even just have a 1TB SSD for certain libs.
I also have a WD 1TB @7200rpm, and a few @5400rpm.

I'd have to check, but I think some of the libs I put on SSD are:
Sonokinetic Ostinato Strings, which worked so much nicer than on HD.
Audiobro stuff.
Best Service The Orchestra Complete.
Spitfire Audio LLP Solo Strings, and probably some other SF libs.
Ha. I've just noticed they're all Orch libs!

It's not that they didn't work on spinning drives, but life is so much better with at least 'an' SSD in it!
And most devs do recommend this now.

 

I wouldn't touch a reconditioned hard drive with a barge pole.

I appreciate you would be using them in RAID formation so if one went wrong you would merely buy another without losing your data, however 90 days warrantee? that for me says it all. if you want to see how confident a seller is about their product, look at the term of the warrantee. 3 months is nothing.

 

Raid partitions are arrays of drives, many drives working together as one. To understand why raid may or may not be important:

Typically nas/server drives (and unlike desktop drives) don't include any error protection because they rely on the partition's redudancy and/or fault tolerance to recover from any errors occuring. Desktop drives are meant to be used as single partitions and usually are geared towards either cheap storage or performance and they all include some type of error recovery technology. Drives like the BarraCuda Pro also offer a 2 year data recovery service for free along with a 5 year warranty.
RPM and ram cache are important in mechanical drives but most important is the tech they incorporate to write and read data.

Nobody uses 10k rpm drives anymore. They were the high end norm when scsi ruled 20+ yrs ago. There are some rare server cases where they still use 10k rpm enterprise drives and that's it. And enterprise drives means server/nas oriented. To sum this there are even 15k rpm drives lol. These 10k and 15k drives though are low capacity, expensive and really noisy, their natural environment is stacked in a server rack in a ventilated room in some basement.
For history's credit, WD used to make the VelociRaptor which was an enthusiast/performance SATA desktop 10k drive. The last one they made was a 1tb drive back in 2012. I 've had 3 or 4 of them in the past, sadly they all failed after some time.

That's the Toshiba X300 drives, they are even cheaper than some 5400 rpm drives and come with a 3 years warranty. Keep in mind when shopping for hdds,warranty should not be neglected. Thus i wouldn't recommend buying a refurbished drive unless you know exactly the reason it was repaired and it was anything other than any kind of mechanical malfunction. Also refurb'd drives come with 3 months to 1 year warranty tops.
The cheapest way to achieve great performance without sacrificing capacity, is to use a cheap ssd (30-50 euros max) as additional cache for your hard drive. This will need some software tweaks on your side but will give you much better performance than any stand alone hard drive. Win10 has some tech already incorporated for this type of function which is a smart algorithm which learns over time which files you use a lot and prioritizes them. This tech works with boot drives as well as storage drives. The caveat with all this is your cache ssd will occupy a sata slot on its own, a slot that otherwise you may need for storage.
Next and a bit higher on your pocket, should be the split of the libraries to two drives, a cheap nvme m.2 ssd like an Intel 660p (1 or 2 tb) for the heaviest libraries and a fast 7200rpm 4tb hdd for the rest of them. I have explained in some other thread the differences in ssd technologies, the important part here is the 660p is perfectly fine for read only purposes (storing libraries in our case), a 1tb drive goes for about 100-130 euros depending where you buy it from and comes with a 5 years warranty. The particular drive, although cheaper than most equivalent Sata ssds, will be 2-3 times faster than any of them when loading libs, due to its pci-e interface which allows it to achieve ~1800mb/sec in sequential read (which is what loading libraries is). This "solution" is also what i implement on many of my clients' builds who work with Kontakt or Falcon samplers and i have none of them complain- ever
Cheers

 

Last edited: Apr 7, 2020

Wouldn't DFD count as 4k reads?

 

Well, my hard drives are on my left so I can't help. Sorry.

 

@taskforce Thanks a lot for your detailed reply. I understand the pros of SSD drive, I have 2 RAIDED for my system. I wish I could go for SSD drives for storage but not enough money or slots for all the space I need!

Now what do you think of the idea of getting a fast 72000 rpm performance desktop drive as my main sample drive and RAID it with a cheaper regular NAS drive? Is that a good idea or is preferable to use identical drives? My understanding if the drive that is empty automatically becomes the mirror although I guess there are option in the BIOS to set the order of the drives.

 

Last edited: Apr 7, 2020

Yes and no, mostly no. Let me explain please.
Let's take the practical explanation first, if sample libraries accounted for the "4k random read" category, a simple 1gb Kontakt instrument would take about 30 minutes to load even on the fastest hard drives such as the BarraCuda Pro 14tb, which on the 4k random (32QD) achieves at best a mere 3mb/sec.
Now for the theory part, "Sequential Read" is when the storage drive is called to access large adjacent blocks of data written on it. "4K Random Read" is when a storage drive is called to access very small data blocks which are placed on random locations on the drive.
Now for Kontakt it's a bit trickier, because it uses both 4k and sequential read to load instruments. Sequential for the largest bulks of data which is the samples and 4k for all else that is contained within a preset.
And because i have seen in the past the NI forum moderator saying loading Kontakt instruments is 4k read, lemme say imho he is wrong.
Typical example, a Kontakt instrument consists of many smaller samples but usually each of those samples is many megabytes in size not kilobytes and as blocks of data -normally- they are adjacent, therefore when loading a sample instrument in Kontakt we practice mainly Sequential Read. Surely it's not as fast as say loading files that are 500mb each but in practice i 'd call loading sample libs, is reading mid-sized files not small ones.
A very good example of 4k random read/write is midi files. Anyone who messes with midi files knows that transferring a simple 1gb of midi files with mechanical drives can take even hours to complete because those files are usually anywhere from 40 to 150kb each.
Now in comparison, fast ssds excel in 4k random reads/writes, a top consumer sata drive like the Samsung 860 Evo can achieve ~400mb/sec in 4k random reads (QD32) and 300mb/sec in 4k random writes. That is about 150 times faster than the Barracuda Pro 14tb mentioned earlier before which is one of the fastest mechanical drives atm. On the plus side the BarraCuda Pro in the example can achieve ~200mb/sec in sequential reads and over 220mb/sec in seq write. A cheap 120gb ssd for cache drive with such an hdd, will raise the Seq reads to 300-350mb/sec putting it very close to the Samsung 860 Evo's 530mb/sec.
Cheers

 

Last edited: Apr 7, 2020

Ooooohh, dangerous. If you like living on the edge...
Jokes aside that 's not a good idea mate. You will be running the risk of losing your data (which is already high with raid 0) and you will experience inconsistent performance because you 'll be using different drives, not to mention a desktop hdd is not suited for raid no matter what you may hear.
Toshiba has very cheap 7200rpm NAS drives, the N series. A couple of N300 4tb drives will set you back about 200-220 euros. Go for Raid 0 and you will get good enough performance. I dunno if they have 2tb N300 drives. Of course what happens with backup is entirely up to you man.
Also raid 0 with ssds for a system partition achieves nothing more than a higher total bandwidth, which is mostly useless unless you store library data there too. The everyday case scenario for a system partition is 4k random reads and writes and in this part the raid 0 partition is actually slower than a single ssd due to the raid header
Cheers

 

Last edited: Apr 7, 2020

I use RAID 1 for my system and storage. So I have 3 sets of 2 drives (SSD for system and 2 data drives each RAID 1 ie mirrored ) That's what I was advised so in case of failure I can keep working and replace the failed drive. I've always bought drives in pair when I uprgrade but I thought perhaps I didn't need to use the same exact drive for the mirror. Same size of course not sure why it wouldn't work though.

 

Last edited: Apr 7, 2020

I take that back then, my bad. Too many kids go on a craze striping ssds thinking their system will be faster. I was fast to judge, excuse me
Raid 1 is totally approved for ssds and nas/server drives. But even raid 1 with identical size drives, is prone to failure if one drive is proper (nas drive) and the other is not because it 'll be a desktop drive. Desktop drives as i mentioned earlier, include error correction technologies, in case of a partition failure the desktop drive will keep trying to correct the error but since it's not meant to be used for raid it will keep failing because it won't be able to "understand" what kind of error that is, thus halting the whole partition to a seemingly non functional status with an unrecoverable error although it' ll be a raid 1.
Ffff, i hope i said that right, lol

 

Ok that makes sense so if I am to use a pair of drive in RAID 1 I should use NAS drives then? But since my purpose is for streaming samples you don't recommend such setup?

 

Each to their own is my recommendation. Nas and server/enterprise hdds are meant to be used in raid partitions, desktop drives are not.
As i said earlier, this is mainly because if an error occurs in any raid partition that includes a desktop drive, the latter will not be able to handle what kind of error that is and will keep trying to fix it, until it decides it's an unrecoverable error. In practice this may take from minutes to hours with the partition functioning at floppy drive speeds, it may also halt the whole system and may very well result (but not always of course) in a broken partition where both the main drive and the mirror one include an unrecoverable error and the only solution is either advanced software recovery or format. I hope this was clear enough.
If it's backup you want just use the second drive as backup with some Acronis or similar image software, i find no reason to mirror a desktop and a nas drive.
Cheers

 

As he said. RAID 1 using the motherboard (desktop) is for pussies. With desktop if you're a man you use RAID 0. Hell yeah


PS. I'm joking. Don't do RAID 0 at home with system or sensitive partitions lol.
BTW, @taskforce, I'm about to try Windows Storage Raid0 (WS) and Windows Tiered Storage (WTS).
2xHDD in Stripe Mode (Raid 0) plus a tiny SSD for caching 'em (WTS)
Wish me luck