[hcfmax]

I agree.  WD HDDs are not very reliable.  I greatly prefer Seagate.

 

[germanium]

I agree.  WD HDDs are not very reliable.  I greatly prefer Seagate.

I've had the opposite experience where the Western Digital drives were more reliable than Seagate drives though I don't like the vibration they give off. Hitachi drives are much better in that regard than WD drives. Almost no vibration at all with Hitachi drives. Unfortunately Hitachi drIves are no more as they bought out I believe by Western Digital.

 

[Mike-48]

It's been a while, but I remember reading that the largest factor affecting drive reliability was whether that individual drive had undergone mechanical shock after manufacturing. In other words, how was it handled by the distributor, shipper and installer?  It is critical to buy drives from an outfit that will pack them properly, not pack them to rattle around in the box while shipping.

 

[craftyhack]

  It's been a while, but I remember reading that the largest factor affecting drive reliability was whether that individual drive had undergone mechanical shock after manufacturing. In other words, how was it handled by the distributor, shipper and installer?  It is critical to buy drives from an outfit that will pack them properly, not pack them to rattle around in the box while shipping.

That really shouldn't make much of a difference (unless someone is throwing drives against a brick wall ).  The reading heads park when not reading so they are not over the platters unless necessary in order to avoid head slap due to unexpected shock.  OTOH, if a drive is seeking when it is dropped, then bad things could happen.  Most drives nowadays (at least the 2.5" drives) have accelerometers or similar and if they detect free fall, excessive vibration, etc. the head is also parked, this takes a fraction of a second, so even if you drop your laptop it might make it out alive.  As far as the platter bearing, the control board PCB, etc., the bearings are pretty stout... they have to be in order to have 1,000,000hr MTBF or similar and spin between 5.4K and 15K RPM (90-250 protations per *second*, that's crazy ) during that rather long time frame.  Mechanical drives are tougher than you would think.
 
The main killer besides bad QA and acts of God would be power cycles and heat.  Leave your NAS on 24/7 if you can, and keep them under 40C when under load and your drives should last a while.  I have 5 1TB DeathStars that have been running in a 247 rig for 5.5 years (barring reboots for updates and power outages that last longer than my UPS), and not one of them has yet gone bad following those rules.  Wish I could say the same about my Seagate 3TB Barracudas, with an array of 9, I have lost 3 over the last two years, and getting URE's on two more of them right now :/.

 

[Mysteri0]

Hi Jude, so at the moment I have 86GB worth of FLAC and 192GB of MP3 files, I have two copies of these living on different storage devices in the house. 

 

[Olavs73]

10TB of media files with I collect. 128GB of music I listen to at daily basis on headphones. On 2x64GB mcro sd cards that i switch on using. 

 

[rune-san]

I currently have a little over 1TB of cd rips / MP3s, and needle drops on my home storage array.

 

[bcschmerker4]

  ...Most drives nowadays (at least the 2.5" drives) have accelerometers or similar and if they detect free fall, excessive vibration, etc. the head is also parked, this takes a fraction of a second, so even if you drop your laptop it might make it out alive.  As far as the platter bearing, the control board PCB, etc., the bearings are pretty stout... they have to be in order to have 1,000,000hr MTBF or similar and spin between 5.4K and 15K RPM (90-250 protations per *second*, that's crazy ) during that rather long time frame.  Mechanical drives are tougher than you would think.
 
The main killer besides bad QA and acts of God would be power cycles and heat.  Leave your NAS on 24/7 if you can, and keep them under 40C when under load and your drives should last a while.  I have 5 1TB DeathStars that have been running in a 247 rig for 5.5 years (barring reboots for updates and power outages that last longer than my UPS), and not one of them has yet gone bad following those rules.  Wish I could say the same about my Seagate 3TB Barracudas, with an array of 9, I have lost 3 over the last two years, and getting URE's on two more of them right now :/.

Not having an air-conditioned office for my 'puters - a Central Valley summer can be brutal on electronics with low max-safe temps - I am forced to select replacement drives for maximum operating temperature.  My eMachines®/Acer® EL1210-09 (which now packs a 500GB Western Digital® Scorpio Blue®) was hamstrung with a poor HDD installation that may have hastened the demise of its 40°C-rated 320GB Hitachi® drive - a thermal failure in the logic board derailed the entire Microsoft® Windows® 6.0.6002 installation thereon, not to mention all-too-consistent general, seek, &c., errors when warmed up.
 
The Seagate® ST31000852AS in my Asus® CM1630-06 is also rated for a 40°C max operating temperature, and Seagate Technology hasn't any 60°C drives without SCSI (Ultra/320 and/or serial-attach), so I'm forced to get a Western Digital® Caviar Red® or Scorpio Red® for an upgrade - both are among the few SATA drives safe to 60°C. (Neither my hybrid LinUX box nor the CM1630-06 packs a SCSI host adapter.)

 

[zorin]

Jude, save yourself hassle reading all the posts and tell the manufacturer / manufacturers to make audio sources with 10 Terabytes capacity. This should cover, at the rough estimate, about 14 000 CDs.

 

[Jimmty]

wow!

 

[RobSys]

I have about 200 GB for music (mostly flac) and another 2 TB in movies, etc. Music files are stored on a 3 TB internal hard disk and on a 3 TB QNAP NAS (RAID 1). I also keep a music back-up on a 2 TB external RAID 1 enclosure. Finally I use a 2 TB RAID 5 array for general media files. OS and program files reside on a 500 GB SSD. Movies are kept on a separate media PC...
 
Rob

 

[blades]

I store all my music as 256K or 320K MP3 so I get by with relatively little drive space.  I use a 500gb drive on one of the computers in my network and back it up to a NAS.  That's room for over 7000 albums.

 

[rune-san]

In the modern day we live in, I would expect an "audio appliance" being sold to me to contain nothing less (and would expect nothing more) than a 4TB hard drive, or a 1TB "mini audio appliance". Both of these are the largest hard drives available in today's technology in a 2.5" and 3.5" form factor. With the huge profit margins these boutiques charge for their appliances, and the difference between a 4TB drive and a 500GB ancient drive being $70 (and the difference between a 1TB 2.5" drive and a 320GB drive being about the same), there is no excuse (and I seriously cannot think of a single one), as to why they can't provide this bare minimum. I can certainly understand the costs of implementing RAID controllers (even slow cheap ones) to create RAID 1 or RAID 5 arrays, but singular drives should be capable of at least 4TB in standard home appliances right off the bat.
 
That even said, another feature the appliance should have is SMB (CIFS) connectivity so that the drive can be easily synced and swapped with a larger (and reliable) datastore if there is going to be any network connectivity involved. There should be at least the ability to connect a USB drive to sync and backup music to.
 
High capacity, and built-in tools needed for off-device syncing are standard, low-cost features that I expect off any boutique device nowadays. I know the low cost of these features, and understand the premiums involved enough to know that I just wouldn't be able throw down the money on such a device without it having those 2 main bullet points.

 

[SelfAwareLlama]

I don't really keep a lot of media on my PC apart from a couple of Electronic tracks I mix together and some I produce. I keep a fair amount of my media (and when I say fair amount, I really just mean 5 gigabytes :3) on Google Drive, which does enough for me really. It's a good thing I don't use much space as well, since I am on a 128GB SSD with no additional storage. :3 Hahaha...

 

[craftyhack]

  In the modern day we live in, I would expect an "audio appliance" being sold to me to contain nothing less (and would expect nothing more) than a 4TB hard drive, or a 1TB "mini audio appliance". Both of these are the largest hard drives available in today's technology in a 2.5" and 3.5" form factor. With the huge profit margins these boutiques charge for their appliances, and the difference between a 4TB drive and a 500GB ancient drive being $70 (and the difference between a 1TB 2.5" drive and a 320GB drive being about the same), there is no excuse (and I seriously cannot think of a single one), as to why they can't provide this bare minimum. I can certainly understand the costs of implementing RAID controllers (even slow cheap ones) to create RAID 1 or RAID 5 arrays, but singular drives should be capable of at least 4TB in standard home appliances right off the bat.
 
That even said, another feature the appliance should have is SMB (CIFS) connectivity so that the drive can be easily synced and swapped with a larger (and reliable) datastore if there is going to be any network connectivity involved. There should be at least the ability to connect a USB drive to sync and backup music to.
 
High capacity, and built-in tools needed for off-device syncing are standard, low-cost features that I expect off any boutique device nowadays. I know the low cost of these features, and understand the premiums involved enough to know that I just wouldn't be able throw down the money on such a device without it having those 2 main bullet points.

TL;DR:  Any investment in mech storage when engineering the devices of the future is not a good idea IMO, please make device based on SS storage only, with *the option* for at least 1TB SS on board, but given the main stream is migrating to small local storage needs given online service use exploding, low cost/space options should be available as well.
 
I definitely agree that there doesn't seem to be parity between what is available from a storage perspective for consumers vs. what is available in audio/media devices.  I assume the disparity is based on engineering concerns, cost controls, market pressures, etc.  When thinking of devices like the AK240 though, I don't think cost was a constraint, at least not when selecting how many memory packages to put on board .  I would guess constraints were 1) size of device and battery life and 2) where the target was to match or beat the storage of the largest SS storage based device available in the market but not to eclipse it even though it was certainly possible to do so to leave room for new models like the AK240 Titan later .
 
Regarding expectations on future products; for anything portable, I never want to deal with a mechanical drive again.  I have had (and still have) plenty of them, and even with the CF sized mech drives(not 1.8", I mean drives smaller than that), there is too much of a compromise regarding storage density (in the size of the ultimate device)/power usage/responsiveness.  Just considering browsing speed, collection scan/update/indexing speed when making changes to collection contents, etc... mech drives suck once you are used to the responsiveness of SS devices.  When you add in the transfer speeds for large(>500GB) collections, forget about it. Given all this, at least IMO, 4TB on board is a pretty big expectation *today*.  Even for home based solutions, I wouldn't want my "player" to be mechanical, only my archive location for back-up purposes.  That is ONLY because mech is still much cheaper per GB, not because it is more reliable... because it ISN'T more reliable, and with each generation it becomes much LESS reliable .  For many folks I know, their main locations for *music* media storage are their portable devices and the cloud (whether Google Drive/Music, MS Skydrive, Dropbox, etc.), and most I know only have laptops with SSDs as well, therefore space is at a premium.  They won't have anything to do with mechanical based storage in *anything*, and I don't blame them.  Many don't even have video media storage concerns (or very little, where what is stored is personally created vs. commercial stuff), where they instead rely on Amazon VOD, Netflix, etc. for their content.  A few folks I know have forsaken collecting music even, instead going with iTunes, Google Music, Spotify, Grooveshark, Pandora, etc., where choice of service depends on whether they own a lot they need to store vs. relying on the provider for content, how specific their taste is, etc.
 
Digital sales have surpassed physical, and I believe that vinyl sales are greater than physical digital formats as well... this all points in the direction I am describing.
 
A very interesting trend IMO... and my assumption is that someday in the near *very* future it will be common place to be able to stream hi quality audio (lossless).  We have 1080p and even 4K(sort of) video today, the audiofile needs to be taken care of next .  It has already started... like Qobuz FLAC streaming:  http://www.qobuz.com/ie-en/offers/music-streaming-subscription, where several mainstream services are doing 256k and/or 320k now.  IMO, that is the best combo, a device that integrates with online storage *and* content providers that stream in hidef along with portable SS storage enough to cache large collections in FLAC(DSD?) for offline use.  Google Music is AWESOME on this front, I don't know of it's equal in the seamless integration of personal collection and online content, and they stream in 320K to boot (although not very efficiently like Spotify in ogg vorbis, but no one is perfect I guess).  If you are a music lover, $8/mo(well, $10/mo if not an early adopter) is a small price to pay for unlimited access to their library integrated with your own(which doubles as a backup for your locally stored content) IMO.  This is why I would very much like to see 1TB portable devices (SS of course) with the capability to expand via microSD, primarily for caching/backup (even Google could lose your data).  Like this device for which I am still waiting :  http://www.head-fi.org/t/712487/april-fools-astell-kern-ak480-music-player.
 
A media device with this amount of storage could also serve as the data source in the home system of course (whether permanently purchased or temporary ownership via subscription, cached or not).  Integrating with an online content management service would solve syncing music collections in multiple places too... a total PITA unless everything is setup right,. where setting everything up right is also a PITA .  If you have multiple family members with their own media tastes but you are sharing devices/storage locations, as music/media devices and NAS type storage locations rarely recognize multiple users gracefully... forget about it!  Online service kill the alternatives for this use case.
 
I think that mechanical based media storage is on it's way out, where in maybe 10 years even DVRs will be based on SSD, if DVRs aren't themselves obsoleted by VOD services.  In the consumer setting this has already happened in portable media devices (iPod classic is the last main stream mech storage device still available for purchase, with no new generation in roughly the last 5 years). It is happening in portable computing right now where several brands and types are going exclusively to SSD, and it is even starting to happen in desktop computing as form factors are shrinking.  Once the production costs of SSD are cheaper than mechanical per GB, kiss mechanical goodbye.  I don't think we are far from that with 3D NAND that Samsung has just announced and will available with the 850 Pro this month, maybe 5-10 more years?  Add that to when "broadband" wireless connectivity is available *anywhere*... we will be in a beautiful, new world!  As far as that goes I am certainly going to do my part, no more of my $ will ever go to a media device that relies on mechanical storage, my $ goes to SS!
 
That said, until the price per GB change happens (which implies the supply problem has been solved), and for some special use cases (I think, not sure which), mech drives certainly have a place in the digital world, but not in media devices.  The ONLY advantage for mech is cost... like for the 45PB(last time I checked) of storage in my datacenter .  Although... as we speak we are replacing our mech based SAN and NAS with SSD where we can so that at least all Tier 1 storage for Tier 1 clients/apps is SSD, and we are also investing in SSD caching to front other storage as well (basically a hybrid approach to make mech "feel" like SSD).  But... holy moly... enterprise, SAN/NAS vendor supplied SSD is *EXPENSIVE*!  Much higher than the high density, 2.5", 15k SAS drives were at release.  Thank goodness OpenStack is to the rescue, putting incredible price pressure on vendors, which I think will accelerate price drops... which will trickle down to consumers... making that new "SSD only" world that much closer.
 
To circle back around to this thread, if the point of gathering this data is in regards to designing a media device... oh please, oh please do not make that device based on mechanical storage.  To support those who wish it, make it expandable via USB3, Thunderbolt 2, etc. so that users can add mech storage if they wish.  Regarding the topic of reliability as has been mentioned in this thread, I can tell you that in the enterprise setting that SSD is orders of magnitude more reliable (and has better longevity, at least so far ) than mech based storage *on average*.  Just the heat concerns alone will make this true with media devices unless the device is made to be huge.
 
I have had the same experience personally with probably 300 TB or so of storage devices I have owned over time, where my first embarrassingly expensive SSD was an Intel X25 (2008ish?), but man was it AWESOME, and I have never looked back!  I will never boot of a mech drive again in my life if I can help it!  I have seen both the performance and reliability of SSD go up exonentially in production over the last 5 or so years, I cannot fathom users not wanting to use this technology.  I understand being burned by a device failure (and not having a backup), and never having been burned by a mechanical drive failure causing such a phobia.  But, unlike vinyl whose existence is justified(an old tech, but still the only mainstream tech that maintains a pure analog path), other than cost I am not aware of any other advantage mech has over SS.
 
The technology that made *cheap*, reliable SSD possible has already migrated back to the consumer space, and part of that has just been economies of scale, not *just* technology.  The early adopters were the ones that suffered from unfortunate, rush to market, attempts at "cheap" SSD and the resulting high rates of failure and poor performance(stuttering) given poor testing ( OCZ, JMicron )... which is probably the source of some current phobias.  Those that spent the $$ on Intel SSDs didn't have the same problems... that I read about anyway... so it WAS NOT a fundamental SSD problem, it was a market driven problem.  I am included in both sides BTW, as I did both, and suffered the associated problems with being cheap(but I always have backup ), but that is the price one pays for being on the bleeding edge, just gotta stick with it.  Being an early adopter should be the exception to the "fool me once" mantra IMO.  Heck, I still have my NEC Multispeed HD "laptop" (that still works), and remember folks saying they would NEVER go to HDD storage back then, that floppies and tapes were the only safe mechanism, LOL.
 
I don't even want to think about how much $$ I have spent on storage devices in the last 25 years, but I am certain it would be the same as the price of... say a new house (small one in the midwest, not in NY or southern CA or anything)... AT LEAST .  The place I work for has spent... probably the price of a few islands... nice islands... over the last *10* years, and our storage needs (both in space and performance) are growing at a hyperbolic rate with the advent of "big data" and real-time analytics use cases.  Relative to some other companies (MS, Google, Govt, etc.) our storage needs are miniscule.  All of this will make mech storage just disappear IMO, kinda like floppies and tape, neither of which I miss AT ALL .