Are Western Digital drives trustworthy these days.

[lumiworx@mastodon.social]

@Orca @mcc

I would remind everyone that WD screwed every customer with the SMR debacle not long ago. They flat out, lied about their components, and rendered NAS devices useless for those expecting ultra-reliable hardware.

My experience with WD externals, ala 'Passport' and 'MyBook', is that they struggle to stay connected and fluctuate wildly in transfer speeds.

I switched over to Seagate IronWolfe, or at least Barracuda for desktops, and EXO or Helium filled.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/

[lumiworx@mastodon.social]

@Orca @mcc

I think in the long run, it's better for me to get the drive I want as an internal and buy an enclosure to fit it for external use. USB 3.1 if possible, and USB-C if it's practical.

[orca@nya.one]

@lumiworx@mastodon.social @mcc@mastodon.social
Yeah that's why I said "Red Pro", not "Red", because "WD Red" is where WD slipped SMR in. Damn them.

Also isn't Seagate Barracuda also have a few SMR models?

[lumiworx@mastodon.social]

@Orca @mcc

For Barracuda... yes, most have SMR until you get to the 'Pro' series, which are mostly CMR.

I suggested "at least a Baracuda" as they were engineered to be business-class drives and had better performance for standard hard drives. If you're stuck at purchase time with fewer choices, then they will offer a minimum of quality for heavier demand users.

After getting stung on 3 consecutive WD Red failures after the silent switch over from CMR to SMR... ugh!

https://www.seagate.com/products/cmr-smr-list/

[mcc@mastodon.social]

ME: I want a 5 TB hard drive

Amazon: We can do that

Canada Computers: I can give you 12 TB for twice the price

Christine: Wait, Canada Computers has 12 TB drives for *how* much? Get two

Me, walking back from yonge-dundas square the next morning, absolutely twisted, carrying 24 TB of platter drives:

[kithrup@wandering.shop]

@mcc I got the last of my disks shipped to me from the US, and I have about 200TB of storage in the house.

[tristan@catnest.net]

@CliftonR @mcc many of those external from the factory HDs are "shingled" sectors, which write a lot slower and have very high failure rates.

[demize@unstable.systems]

@mcc they’ve got 14tb drives for about $500 apparently, which

I need another couple 14tb drives but I don’t $1000 need them… but what if they get more expensive…

(alas, now is not the time for me to buy new hard drives anyway)

[ipd@universeodon.com]

@mcc

I'm not keen on TB, Makes it hard to breathe, fortunately there is medicine for that these days, so far.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

Hey if I want to format an HD for archival purposes, and I want it to be accessible from both Windows* and Linux** without problems, do I use… exfat? Will exfat freak out if I format it at absurdly high sizes like 12 TB, or give me an annoyingly high "minimum file size" or something? Are there any more-reliable/journaled FSes that both these OSes are happy with?

* 10
** Let's say Debian Trixie

[blair@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@mcc My mind immediately went to this scene from Contact (spoilers!) https://youtu.be/Et4sMJP9FmM?t=127&si=Ruwy77OYl3usRac5

[foritus@toot.dusepo.co.uk]

@mcc chaos option: ntfs as the Linux ntfs driver is pretty good these days.

[jernej__s@infosec.exchange]

@mcc I've had some weird corruption on exFAT on Windows, so I'm not really sure what to suggest here.

I played with UDF in the past, but had some corruption as well. IMHO you'd best use separate partitions for Windows and Linux.

[demize@unstable.systems]

@mcc exfat is broadly fine for this, but comes with the usual restrictions on filenames/etc

NTFS is arguably also fine for this depending on how much you actually want to write to it from linux but exfat is better (though I think the ntfs driver on linux has gotten decent enough? idk)

unfortunately as far as I’m aware there is no stable driver for windows for any modern linux filesystem so while technically you could btrfs or maybe xfs or zfs you really should not

[jmhill@infosec.exchange]

@Foritus @mcc was gonna suggest this myself. NTFS is perfectly adequate on Linux nowadays and I imagine it will still improve with time.

Now, assuming we're talking about an actual HDD, data longevity on magnetic media is more likely to present an issue in the long term.

[porglezomp@mastodon.social]

@mcc I used exfat for this, it was fine for a 7TB hard drive. After doing this for a while and being rude to the drive, I ended up damaging the drive or filesystem and Linux just completely failed handling that, instead of giving useful errors the driver would lock up and make filesystem syscalls block forever.

[blair@mastodon.gamedev.place]

Now in meme format!

[elladan@kind.social]

@mcc my understanding is exfat supports large disks / files and has mature drivers, and I expect is much more reliable than NTFS on Linux. So hypothetically it's an appropriate choice.

But personally I wouldn't trust either and would just use ext4 or something -- windows should be able to use Linux filesystems reliably with a VM after all.

[rotopenguin@mastodon.social]

@Foritus @mcc put one giant bcachefs file on ntfs, and mount into that.

[mcc@mastodon.social]

@jmhill @Foritus What other options are there? I was told that flashdrives can lose data if they are unpowered for more than a year and this claim is repeated often on the internet