HDD ? in 2024 ? sounds fun !

 

The drives connected to my music PC are all SSDs. I use HDDs for back ups (stored safely in my cupboard!).

 

If you need reliable long term storage with 16TB+ capacities, go for enterprise class hard drives like Seagate exos or WD ultrastar, TOSHIBA also has the MG series for enterprise I guess. Enterprise drives are made to work 24/7/365 without interruption, they are faster, more resistant and reliable than normal consumer drives which are rated to work for 8 hours per day, also bigger capacities are cheaper than normal consumer or NAS drives, and they usually come with a 5 year limited warranty.

 

i see no reason to collect 80gb kontakt libs anymore of the same character. i keep only the best(s). i have 80gb music software and 50gb libraries and i feel it's too much sometimes so i go trim them even further

 

Well. The bigger the drive the better the performance, that is if you manage to leave enough space empty hehe.
This Toshiba MG08 released in 2020 is very good for sequential reads especially when handling big chunks of data.
There is one caveat with all these Enterprise drives that too many people seem to ignore or flat out don't know about it. So I need to get into a bit more detailed explanation if you bare with me
Enterprise drives are better than desktop drives in almost everything except one but really crucial thing: Error tolerance.
When a bad sector is detected on a desktop drive, a "long error timeout" may happen, the drive will perform many repeated attempts to recover the data from a bad sector, where in the meantime the drive becomes unresponsive and users are forced to wait for the system to finish. Nevertheless the recovery process will finish at some point but it might take minutes to do so.
An enterprise drive will straight out not tolerate a long error timeout. One of their main features is TLER, which stands for Time Limited Error Recovery. A typical timeout for an enterprise class drive is 7 to 15 seconds and retries are limited to a few attempts. This is typical, as the drives are meant to be used in various types of RAID arrays and depend mostly on the file system for error correction. And RAID systems do not tolerate unresponsive drives, they consider them offline. And that's also why you shouldn't use desktop drives in raid arrays, because you run the risk of having your array being corrupted much more often than usually due to the fault tolerance differences haha. (I laugh because in the ReFS thread @Xupito and i were discussing how we both went mad on raid0 with WD VelociRaptors some 15+ yrs ago).
I won't tell you don't get it because it's big. More is more in this circumstance. At this time, the biggest single hdd is 28tb, so 16tb sounds quite reasonable to me.
Ideally a desktop performance drive (an X300 14tb if we 're talking Toshiba) with some form of external backup could be a better choice, for the reason i mentioned.
But if you are keen on getting this one though, think of getting an identical drive and run them on raid 1 to have a backup drive that can be instantly up and running in no time. If you can afford the double price that is and if time is precious to you. If not an external backup drive can always come handy.
Cheers and here's some bench metrics.

 

Last edited: Oct 7, 2024

nowadays HDDs are still quite slow (compared to cheapest SSDs), and once they get full performance drops to 30MB/s at best,
if you were building a server/NAS with RAID, then be aware server/NAS-designed HDDs have sensors to mitigate vibrations across disk array, which is crucial for multi operation within a chassis,
maybe if you were buying 4 of them for a RAID5 setup (which, for hoarding sounds reasonable to me), those could be fine, but there are also plenty other options like Seagate Exos series (up to 24TB now), IronWolf Pro, WD Red Pro, you gotta calculate best value at the moment of purchase, prices fluctuate all the time nowadays

 

some people have libraries of movies made over the last century, silent,talkies, black and white, technicolor,panavision etc.
its amazing if you limit yourself to mostly 7 star or better films just how many will fill a 14tb drive. Some may even have mulitple cuts of the same film, Blade Runner for instance has more versions than Microsoft Windows does,

There are many more libraries than just sample libraries.

Some people have libraries of music going back to the folk recordings of the 1920's & 1930's.

some people have libraries of books, novels, comix and other printed media going back centuries in some areas of interest.

 

I think for huge film, music and book libraries HDDs are still better, mostly. I don't really need SSD speed for this. But I rather buy 2 8tb HDDs instead...

Or if you collect classical music often you want to collect different performances for the same works. I think I have at least 5 versions of the Well-tempered Clavier...

 

I love it but, I think the Well adds too much reverb, they should just take the Clavinet out of the Well and play it dry......

 

Bad stuff could happen to either storage medium (NvME, SSD, or HDD). This is why we have backup drive/system imaging ware.

 

I'm using 4 of those 16TB HDD in my studio . The are rather cheap at least here in my place but make a lot of noise! That' s a major drawback!! So beware of that dude...

 

With big numbers and enough money I would go for tape backup (e.g. LTO).

 

16TB is quite interesting to consider.

I am currently using 3x8TB, 1x4TB, 1x3TB, 1x2TB HDD.
I use all the slots on my PC Motherboard. (there are 6 slots in total).

I also use 1TB NVMe for OS, and 2x500GB NVMe for some Kontakt libraries that I often use as the main ones.

I keep making music until now.

For my case... A good stabilizer, UPS, and PSU are the best friends in this HDD matter.

 

@ARTHEMISC Without UPS I don't even turn on my computer

 

Except for some professional music composers (someone who make a living of this), who really needs 16 TB of sample libraries?

 

I think the most important thing to look at is the failrate of a drive. I think second hand HGST/hitachi or WD ultrastar He10 drives are (still) good, especially the helium ones. They've proven their failrate is low on backblaze sites. Just beware that if you buy a supposedly new, but rather deleted smart values version, so just make sure the hgst packageing is coherent with the original hgst packaging, since the fake ones usually have more generic packaging.

 

I agree with you.

Spoiler: Well...

The last time I turned on my PC without UPS was during a sudden power outage, one SSD died completely and one two HDDs are not detected until now (but still spinning) .