Need Strategies for Downsizing

I agree on the size of the newer assets. Thy are really getting big.

I have shied away from Seagate since I had an HP server where I worked with a Barracuda RAID. One disk went bad, and it should have been a hot swap situation, but the new drive they sent me was 8MB smaller than the others in the raid. This is 8MB on probably a 100+ GB drive at the time! Somehow they managed to change some small detail. Well, the RAID controller would not accept it, so instead of a hot swap I spent a weekend backing up, shutting down, then reformatting the whole RAID to match the new drive.

Using Pitkin's strategy, I started exporting things to CDP files for archiving. But I am realizing that not only is it going to mean another terabyte of storage, but to use CDPExplorer, it is limited to 2GB files. I barely got Bridges into one file, but Buildings is now 9 files and I am just finishing the letter C, sorting by name. OY! Then I wonder if I should sort by KUID instead of type so if I go looking for a KUID.... This is just not going to be easy at all. I still think I want to uninstall 2019 and install it lean on the system drive, but I am going to end up with a whale of an archive if I want some of the assets back.

Just my two cents, I've used Seagate, WD and Fantom Drives for external storage. Seagate drives are good but when they fail they just die. WD drives fail in a slower fashion and I can get data off them. I've never had a Fantom drive fail. I have some that have more than 15 years of backup use. I don't let any external drive run more than it has to run. Now the Fantom drives use both Seagate and WD drives but to me the difference is that they use aluminum cases instead of plastic and therefore the case acts like a heat sink. I also use compress air to blow out dust at least once a month.

William

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/most-reliable-hard-drives/
Now we can list the most reliable hard drives, according to the Backblaze report.
1. Western Digital 12TB Ultrastar

2. A similarly reliable hard drive is the HGST MegaScale DC 4000.B, another enterprise drive from Western Digital/HGST. This 4TB SATA drive is designed to be efficient as well as reliable, using up to 45 percent less operating power compared to other 4TB enterprise hard drives.
3. Seagate is a recognized and trusted hard drive brand, and their Exos 12TB Internal Hard Drive is a good choice for reliable storage. This one is an enterprise model too, coming in capacities from 1TB to 12TB. The SATA drive is hermetically sealed to prevent dust or other debris from getting inside the drive and causing problems.
4.The Toshiba 14TB SATA 512e Enterprise HDD is a solid enterprise hard drive. It comes in a 14TB capacity, although there is a 12TB version as well if you don't need quite so much space. This SATA drive has a helium-sealed inside using precision laser-welding technology. And it has a lower operational power profile, keeping power usage down.
The most reliable drives I've had are made by buffalo, at least 7 years old and they have never missed a beat, sadly discontinued , I wish i had bought more of them.
WD have had issues, but most have been ok , the small portables seem to be the most likely to go belly up. Seagates just die with no warning, WD's usually play up for a bit first and give you time to back anything up..
I've got around 40 drives , the hitachis seem the best of the 3.5 internals so far none have fallen over.

So here is a side question for this. If I want to uninstall 2019 and reinstall without all the extra baggage, in my Windows Application Settings I see 4 Icons that say TANE and one that says TS2009:World Builders Edition. All of the TANE icons have the same date, of 7/1/2020. Three of them have the actual T:ANE icon, the fourth has the TS2019 icon.

Am I safe in assuming the one with the TS2019 Icon is my TS2019 Platinum, despite the fact that it is called TANE?

Two of the TANEs are 15.4GB, one is 13GB. I am assuming one may be T:ANE standard, one T:ANE Deluxe Bundle, and one TMR2017 bundle, as I have purchased and installed all of these.

The one with the TS2019 Icon is 13.5GB. Not sure why it doesn't have the correct name, but that would have been handy....

Forester1 said:

So here is a side question for this. If I want to uninstall 2019 and reinstall without all the extra baggage, in my Windows Application Settings I see 4 Icons that say TANE and one that says TS2009:World Builders Edition. All of the TANE icons have the same date, of 7/1/2020. Three of them have the actual T:ANE icon, the fourth has the TS2019 icon.

Am I safe in assuming the one with the TS2019 Icon is my TS2019 Platinum, despite the fact that it is called TANE?

Two of the TANEs are 15.4GB, one is 13GB. I am assuming one may be T:ANE standard, one T:ANE Deluxe Bundle, and one TMR2017 bundle, as I have purchased and installed all of these.

The one with the TS2019 Icon is 13.5GB. Not sure why it doesn't have the correct name, but that would have been handy....

Click to expand...

Be very careful when doing this. I blew away my TS19 install when trying to clean up my TANE installs as it was labelled TANE in the Windows app list.

Cheerio John

Thanks John, yes, that is my concern. Odd that they did not show the 2019 install as something other than TANE. I have backups, so could conceivably blow it all away and recreate it, but I don't really go that far right now.

Forester1 said:

I agree on the size of the newer assets. Thy are really getting big.

I have shied away from Seagate since I had an HP server where I worked with a Barracuda RAID. One disk went bad, and it should have been a hot swap situation, but the new drive they sent me was 8MB smaller than the others in the raid. This is 8MB on probably a 100+ GB drive at the time! Somehow they managed to change some small detail. Well, the RAID controller would not accept it, so instead of a hot swap I spent a weekend backing up, shutting down, then reformatting the whole RAID to match the new drive.

Using Pitkin's strategy, I started exporting things to CDP files for archiving. But I am realizing that not only is it going to mean another terabyte of storage, but to use CDPExplorer, it is limited to 2GB files. I barely got Bridges into one file, but Buildings is now 9 files and I am just finishing the letter C, sorting by name. OY! Then I wonder if I should sort by KUID instead of type so if I go looking for a KUID.... This is just not going to be easy at all. I still think I want to uninstall 2019 and install it lean on the system drive, but I am going to end up with a whale of an archive if I want some of the assets back.

Click to expand...

The only time I had issues with Seagate drives was when HP used to put their own ROM into them. This may very well have been your issue. HP used Seagate parts, but there was no indication that they were not a genuine Seagate drive until you went to use them. I too found this out the hard way when a replacement RAID drive wouldn't mount and I spent hours faffing around only to find out it was because HP did things to the drive to make it different. The 8 MB difference here is probably it. So don't blame Seagate. It was HP all along!

CDP backups are painful. I use those only for works in progress and for specific backups, but never do that for content. I did it once way, way back in the TRS2006 days and the content back then took up multiple CDs. Yes, CDs because this was back before DVDs. CDPs too are limited to about 2 GB size, making them useless for today's content. Sure, they compress the content down to roughly 50% of the installed size, but creating multiple CDPs and splitting them so to get the most in each file is a long painful process.

My method for backing up content is to copy the whole shebang to another hard drive. I have an 8TB external drive for that as well as another 8TB internal which I use for other stuff. Having the disk space, allows me to move content and data around without too many worries of stomping on the wrong thing.

As John says, be careful of the installers. They all say TANE, which makes it difficult knowing which "TANE" is the real one.

JCitron said:

The only time I had issues with Seagate drives was when HP used to put their own ROM into them. This may very well have been your issue. HP used Seagate parts, but there was no indication that they were not a genuine Seagate drive until you went to use them. I too found this out the hard way when a replacement RAID drive wouldn't mount and I spent hours faffing around only to find out it was because HP did things to the drive to make it different. The 8 MB difference here is probably it. So don't blame Seagate. It was HP all along!

CDP backups are painful. I use those only for works in progress and for specific backups, but never do that for content. I did it once way, way back in the TRS2006 days and the content back then took up multiple CDs. Yes, CDs because this was back before DVDs. CDPs too are limited to about 2 GB size, making them useless for today's content. Sure, they compress the content down to roughly 50% of the installed size, but creating multiple CDPs and splitting them so to get the most in each file is a long painful process.

My method for backing up content is to copy the whole shebang to another hard drive. I have an 8TB external drive for that as well as another 8TB internal which I use for other stuff. Having the disk space, allows me to move content and data around without too many worries of stomping on the wrong thing.

As John says, be careful of the installers. They all say TANE, which makes it difficult knowing which "TANE" is the real one.

Click to expand...

a little history...
Seagate had many problems a few years back, which is when I had a major fail on mine, they may well have improved since then, but their fail rate was quite high in 2015. https://www.kitguru.net/components/...-but-should-be-used-for-designated-workloads/
2015
In general, the findings of Backblaze are similar to those from the previous report that was issued in September, 2014. Consumer-grade 3.5” 2TB, 3TB and 4TB hard disk drives produced by HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) have the annual failure rate of around 1 per cent or below. Western Digital’s 1TB and 3TB desktop HDDs sport the annual failure rate of 3 to 3.5 per cent. By contrast, consumer-class 1.5TB, 3TB and 4TB drives from Seagate have abnormally high failure rates, which are around 14 per cent for select models.
do note however that these were not enterprise drives and some of the WD consumer drives like the 'green' models also were unreliable, I have had a few give me problems.

dangavel said:

a little history...
Seagate had many problems a few years back, which is when I had a major fail on mine, they may well have improved since then, but their fail rate was quite high in 2015. https://www.kitguru.net/components/...-but-should-be-used-for-designated-workloads/
2015
In general, the findings of Backblaze are similar to those from the previous report that was issued in September, 2014. Consumer-grade 3.5” 2TB, 3TB and 4TB hard disk drives produced by HGST (formerly Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) have the annual failure rate of around 1 per cent or below. Western Digital’s 1TB and 3TB desktop HDDs sport the annual failure rate of 3 to 3.5 per cent. By contrast, consumer-class 1.5TB, 3TB and 4TB drives from Seagate have abnormally high failure rates, which are around 14 per cent for select models.
do note however that these were not enterprise drives and some of the WD consumer drives like the 'green' models also were unreliable, I have had a few give me problems.

Click to expand...

It looks like we've all been burned by various brands. I was lucky as I missed that period with the Seagates, but I do remember reading about them. My WD consumer grade drive I had at the time toasted on me. It got warmer and warmer on its own then died. The drive was kind and waited until its warranty ran out before doing this. I swear the manufacturers put a warranty kill-chip in it so that devices die just outside of the warranty period.

You were lucky with the Hitachi drives. These were originally the IBM Death Stars. During that period when I was dealing with IBM, that IBM sold their hard drive business to Hitachi. The drives continued their awful death spiral then eventually got better, but by then the company was selling a different product that didn't require those drives any longer. The scary part is these were all enterprise-quality drives and not consumer grade. The consumer-grade drives were worse.

The current Seagate drives I have are all Enterprise NAS drives. I found that in general I beat up consumer-grade drives due to the high amount of data usage. This isn't all Trainzing and also includes a lot writing very large audio files and video editing. The quality of the consumer-grade hardware just isn't there with their longevity and warranty periods on the devices.

JCitron said:

It looks like we've all been burned by various brands. I was lucky as I missed that period with the Seagates, but I do remember reading about them. My WD consumer grade drive I had at the time toasted on me. It got warmer and warmer on its own then died. The drive was kind and waited until its warranty ran out before doing this. I swear the manufacturers put a warranty kill-chip in it so that devices die just outside of the warranty period.

You were lucky with the Hitachi drives. These were originally the IBM Death Stars. During that period when I was dealing with IBM, that IBM sold their hard drive business to Hitachi. The drives continued their awful death spiral then eventually got better, but by then the company was selling a different product that didn't require those drives any longer. The scary part is these were all enterprise-quality drives and not consumer grade. The consumer-grade drives were worse.
T.

Click to expand...

I've only used Hitachi drives in the last three years because they have a much lower fail rate than the opposition, I use the enterprise versions or the ones that they use on those servers mentioned in the article, their fail rate is very low. Again, each brand has clunkers and good models, often within the same model range..

Very sad to hear about some failure rates......

One would think, that with all the Technology around, expertise etc, and with something that is a major backbone of current Computer Architecture? We could get more Robust Drives to handle the consumer needs. But the fact remains, as it was back in the 80's and earlier for me with Computers.

Sometimes you just have very volatile situation at times getting reliability with computer parts.......Unfortunately on par with Software development.....In fact Windows has had some serious problems with their latest upgrades, but will let them be for another day........Someday maybe, our Trainz will play on Linux?

Personally I use WD and some Hitachi's when I run across them. I used to like Seagate back in the day, but something went wrong with them, company wise, I think I recall a merger with someone and products were not as well made after the merger........?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagate_Technology

As well mentioned here,

Western Digital had issues with some of it's green drives Etc.........I use all SSD's and M-2 Style Etc for my ASUS ROG, Laptop so far so good..........And absolutely agree with Spinner type drive for External Backups, SSD's do die on the spot, and your toast versus Spindle conventional drives....I have known some folks who paid a boat load of Cash to have their crashed Spindle Drive sent to Clean Room for recovery, which is never 100% guarantee to get your Files back or Files in pieces, either of which will end in bad day.......

The only other thing I would say, in talking with Computer Techs over many decades, one commonality in conversation, they all recommended when buying a drive, whether internal or external, try to buy the largest you can afford, because, chances are good, you'll use up all the space later....

Historically, I probably had a couple of dozen or more HD failures over say, 35yrs. Lost some email, and business files too, irretrievable or I couldn't afford the cost. It just forced me in the long scheme of things, to have more than one backup of my important information......

For the moment my other form of backup is Carbonite in the Cloud.

Thank you all for great insight regarding Drive choice and Reliability......:wave:

I've always used either WD or Seagate drives. The last couple of 2TB drives have been WD Black and they seem fast and reliable enough. I have a mixture of LAN based backup drives and have been thinking about a NAS for a while.

I'm a data bower bird. There are DVDs in my study cupboard with Trainz and software dev backups from 2009!

Well, I just did my uninstall/Reinstall of a lean-mean 2019. Oops, except 217 assets with newer versions available, and when I right-click I don't get the option to download. Seriously? I have to do EACH ONE SEPARATELY? UGH!