HGST Ultrastar

I currently support many NAS servers in the 50TB - 2PB range, many of them being 10, 12, and up to 15 years old for some of them. Most of them still run with their original power supplies, motherboard and most of their original (HGST -- now WD -- UlstraStar) drives, though of course a few drives have failed for some of them (but not all). 2, 4, 8TB HGST UltraStar disks are particularly reliable. All of my desktop PCs currently hosts mirrors of 2009 vintage, 2 TB drives that I got when they're put out of service. I have heaps of spare, good 2 TB drives (and a few hundreds still running in production after all these years). For some reason 14TB drives seem to have a much higher failure rate than Helium drives of all sizes. On a fleet of only about 40 14 TB drives, I had more failures than on a fleet of over 1000 12 and 16 TB.

I just replaced my 2013 Mac Pro's 256 GB factory SSD and an external SSD array with a 4 TB Samsung 990 Pro with one of these in an old Thunderbolt 2 PCIe 2.0 enclosure I had sitting on the shelf, and it works perfectly. It's obviously limited by Thunderbolt 2 transfer rates, but it's still faster than both the sluggish factory SSD and the SSD RAID, consisting of 4 Samsung 850 Pros in an 8-drive Areca SAS enclosure that also contains 4 2 TB HGST Ultrastars that are somehow still running without a single uncorrectable error after more than 13 years of 24/7 operation in a dusty apartment with questionable climate control. At this point, my money's on both the enclosure and at least two SSDs failing before any of the hard drives. I'd say they don't make 'em like they used to, but since I've yet to see a failure or uncorrectable error on any of my newer 8 TB and 16 TB Ultrastars either, I lack data to support this conclusion.

This is broadly consistent with my own experience at smaller scale. Out of a dozen or so 2TB HGST drives in use for 10+ years (mostly Ultrastar SATA, with a few Deskstars that may or may not be mechanically identical), I've had only one failure, and that was of a bare drive that was outside my control, so I have no idea how it was handled. And this was in a dusty environment with no air conditioning, not a datacenter. Likewise with SSDs. Given their slightly more write intensive than ordinary desktop workloads, I'm reasonably confident that the capacitors in my 10-year-old enterprise SSDs (HGST SAS with Intel flash) will fail before the flash.

> 4x the 14 TB WD Elements Desktop. I recommend staying away from SATA drives (huge consumer rush) and look for SAS drives on eBay, particularly HC520 Helium drives from HGST/WD. Need a SAS3008 PCIe adapter ($20) and a SFF-8643 splitter ($30). No backplane is required. Huge lots of decommissioned drives frequently appear. I bought Qty 10* of HC520 (12TB) SAS drives for $1000 about 3 weeks ago, avg age is about 2.5 years, still well within its rated lifetime. Yea may be some of the stuff is fear mongering and cargo culting. I was told ECC is necessary for ZFS. When the article was written, it was cheap af (2024) to buy ECC RAM so not much consideration was given to it. -- (*) I have no idea what to do with it. Anyone has any good idea for using 120TB space? I have about 40TB unused bandwidth in the datacenter, may be host a Debian mirror? Donate storage/bandwidth to Internet Archive? Please contact me, appreciate it.

The HGST Ultrastars, which were bought by WD and so now are WD Ultrastars, have a great reputation and despite being marketted as enterprise drives, are not much more expensive than consumer drives. My data point is that I've bought several of them and never had any trouble.

CERN publicizing about their HGST Ultrastar use [0] in 2013 was what got me started buying their drives and I never had issues with them. HGST is now part of Western Digital [1]. The last time I had to buy disks I switched to Seagate Exos X and thought I'll continue buying them. I think it was one of the Backblaze Drive Stats which made me buy them. I like the drives. So CERN is now doing again such an advertising campaign: > When Bonfillou shared the requirements from the next generation collider, the team suggested testing the company’s new series of JBODs (Just a Bunch of Drives), the Ultrastar hybrid storage platforms. Since the project is expected to start in 2029, add about at least 5 more years for CERN to collect data on the drive stats, that's a long time to wait. Does anyone here know if WD's Ultrastar are still as good as back then, when HGST was HGST? Was it just a brand change and all the rest, R&D-team, design, production, was still the same, separate to WD? [0] https://rog.asus.com/articles/news/hgst-ships-6tb-ultrastar-... [1] https://www.westerndigital.com/en-us/products/internal-drive...