Bitcoin Forum

I am gearing up for the upcoming block size change. Can anyone give me their opinions of these hard drives (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QX0ZGO6/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00QX0ZGO6&linkCode=as2&tag=amazon.com_ii-20&linkId=25HEWYULU44JXQ4A) to use as storage?

I am planning on getting a few and running them in RAID.

Thanks.

did some quick looking around on hard drives, one on the "customers also bought" section looked alright, what about this one (http://www.amazon.com/Red-6TB-NAS-Hard-Drive/dp/B00LO3KR96/ref=pd_sim_147_2?ie=UTF8&refRID=1D3DX09YTZBWQTJ032TD)? the max capacity is a tad smaller (6 GB down from 8) though.

Do you know the read/write speed, overall quality, average lifespan or any other differences between Seagate and Western Digital drives?

Thanks.

Speaking from past experience, WD drives are incredibly reliable. However, the drives I am currently using a Hitachi drive and are probably the most reliable by far; I have been using a 4 TB drive for my PC around 3 years now and have had no problems with it whatsoever.

It should be noted that r/w speeds may depend on the specifications of each drive (spindle speed / SATA) as well as the accessories used (cables).

I also did a quick search as I do not have much experience using seagate drives, but this may dissuade you from using seagate:
http://i.gyazo.com/5b72af5a997cc9b6488d826da08c7bea.png

Seems excessive.

Even if the blocksize limit were to be increased to 20MB per block (seems unlikely at the moment).
And even if the very moment the limit is increased, EVERY block were to be instantly and continuously filled to the limit with transactions.

You'd still only be looking at:
20,000,000 per block X 52,560 blocks per year = 1 TB per year.

Just a single one of those drives is likely to take more than a decade to fill with the blockchain, and larger, cheaper, faster storage is likely to be developed and marketed before then.

Do you really need fast hard drives to write a block to every 10 minutes? I guess a very reliable server drive at 5400 rpm would be more durable and energy efficient for this type of task?

i would not buy one mechanical ever, if you really want to extend your storage size, it is better to look at ssd, faster synching, like for example an Evo

500mb should be more than enough for now, when we will reach 20mb, 1 tera evo would be cheaper and more affordable

Aren't most blocks today well under the 1 MB limit anyways? If so, then increasing the maximum block size shouldn't affect things too much.

Seagates are known to break faster, or at least the desktop line.
I would go for WD Red, probably better than the Caviar Green.
Or the Toshiba ones, which use parts from Hitachi anyway, so they are solid drives.
If you just want to store blockchain get NAS ones, not fast ones (7200+rpm)

I would second the stay away from Seagate advice. I had a Seagate Drive fail on me after 4 years. I went with 3 TB WD Red drives when I built my RAID 6 array (18TB Raw 12TB home partition on Ubuntu) back in 2013.  Now of course I would use 6TB WD Red Drives and build an array roughly twice the size for about the same cost.   ;)

By the way Bitcoin (XBT) accounts for a mere 37.0 GB, Namecoin (NMC) comes in at 2.5 GB and Monero (XMR) comes in at 4.1 GB. I run full nodes for all three.  

im using a 2tb green for my blockchain, i do have a has to backup to in case the hard drive fails, weekly backups are made during Am hours.

A bit of FUD there.
You don't need to be so desperate, anything that can be bought today is enough for a few years.
The only thing you should be aware is the RPM, HDD that are higher than 10k RPM are interesting but more expensive.

I have had both, and both have worked well for me.  No complaints.

I would also suggest looking at slickdeals.net, they have some really good prices on HD sometimes, although I don't know if it is the type you need.  Fry's.com can also have good deals once in a while.

from my own experience, seagate was good in the pass, but now i preffer WD the RED series are pretty good and dont forget are cheapest than seagate., well maybe not a lot but a little bit cheap.

About hitachi dunno i never had one hitachi HDD, but from what im reading here maybe my next HD will be hitachi ;)

True, 6-8 TB does indeed seem a tad excessive for running a full node, assuming thats the intention here, but it may be that op is planning for the long term, or using the storage space for other media. Either way, the general consensus seems to be that Seagate is a definite no-go.

wouldn't use that hard drive in the link if I were you, Seagates are known to fail easily, i've actually used a seagate drive before and had it break on me in a little over a year.

hardware prices are always a falling knife....buy it in 6 months and safe 200 USD  ;) ...

this is true as well, it might actually just be a better idea to wait and see what will actually happen with the fork, and in the meantime prices might fall quite a bit, or a new hard drive might be released with even better specs for the same price

and in the meantime:

http://up.picr.de/22117308am.png

It seems this needs to be said a few more times: Increasing the maximum block size will have absolutely no immediate effect on the block size.

+1

yep. so your 8 TB harddrive will be enough for the next 10 years i guess.

Why not wait for the outcome of this transition (if ever there will be one) first before buying a new storage? Who knows while waiting for what would really happen in this fork, you are actually saving a couple of $$$ for a new drive. Remember, prices of gadgets and storage devices tend to decrease over a period of time as new generation of devices and gadgets appear in the market. ;)

Seagate has a high fault rate. WD not.

Thanks a lot for your help folks. I steered clear of the Seagate drives.

right, all this has made me remember the whole story about pci-3 .0 and how it was not needed at that time, until now when is still not fully saturated

we are basically in the same boat

and there are many more comparison with the general pc hardware story...

I'm sure there will be further massive improvements to existing alternatives soon. There are already 1TB USB3 pen drives with 450MB/s read speeds. Some of them are almost as fast as hard drives. In another year or two the prices of the top range ones should come down, and both their capacity and speed might increase further.

This works to back up your Bitcoins  ;)

If OP is running a hot swap raid system, you should need to worry about the capacity at all. You can swap out one or two of the hard disks and automatically rebuild the raid on a larger set while the system is online. In this case, you need to buy the most reliable and cost effective hard disks.

Oh boy. Used a Seagate HDD for my new computer - kind of worried now after having looked at the stats.

As to HDDs, 5400/5900 RPM would be fine - you don't need the additional reduction in latency from a faster drive when you're basically doing archive work. As to space, I wouldn't be too concerned, the math checks out - you won't be using that 8TB anytime soon.

As said before, if the block sizes change, they won't be immediately filled up to the top, so the blockchain won't start to grow at a faster pace all of a sudden. But I do approve of new disks for nodes, it will make them future proof!

That being said, I've also had bad experiences and bad feedback from Seagate. Maxtor isn't bad, but if you can go for WD, go for it. As for Hitachi, never used their drives, so I cannot vouch for them, but I've heard they have amazing drives :)