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What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 1:38 pm
by robbro
I just had one of the drives I use for dedicated storage for WMC recordings fail (got most files off it, not all, it was a Seagate 3 TB). ANyway, it sounds like WMC recordings/live tv buffer etc may be kinda rough on disks. What do you guys use for storage? I'm looking for something in the 4-8TB range most likely. I see all kinda of colors/companies etc... some dedicated for NAS, some for video storage etc.... Lots of choices ( I thought the hard drive market had conslidated to 2 or 3 companies, but I'm seeing lots more, are they just rebadges?).

At any rate, whats a good drive dependability/performance/value wise to become a primary storage device for WMC (windows 7, I use it for cable/distribution to my whole house and 4 tv's, so it gets LOTS of activity)?

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 2:13 pm
by webminster
I like the WD Red drives, I find them quiet enough and quite reliable.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 2:41 pm
by robbro
Does 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm matter much for WMC recordings/playback?

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:42 pm
by cwinfield
robbro wrote:Does 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm matter much for WMC recordings/playback?
In my experience no. I've been using a WD green AV-GP 4 TB 5400 RPM for close to 4 years with no issue whatsoever.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:43 pm
by adam1991
robbro wrote:Does 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm matter much for WMC recordings/playback?
No. You could even go slower and not see any difference in performance for video. Slower is cooler.

I guess you could see some performance hit if you're recording 6 shows while simultaneously watching 6 recorded shows. But overall, slower is fine and is better for being cooler.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2017 2:02 am
by jtx
FWIW - I have removed 2.5" Seagate Backup Plus 4TB and 5TB Drives from their enclosures and used them in my WMC PC (x1), my SageTV PC (x2) and several desktop PCs (with SSD cache) with no issues. You can get them for around $100-$120. I haven't seen any issues with recordings on either DVR system and I know there have been occasions where 4-8 shows have been recording at a time.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2017 5:29 am
by marvin-miller
I'm running two Seagate 8 TB drives. One for movies and one for Series recordings. They are archive drives and they get treated mostly as WORM drives. I've been quite happy with them but.....they power themselves off all the time. So when you do certain things in Media Center they don't always show up as Media Center doesn't always wait long enough for them to spin up.

I'm pretty leery of Seagate but these ones have been good so far. They sure hold a lot of stuff though. If I had one more I don't think I could ever fill it....

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 9:43 pm
by Sharks
I use these guys and they seem to do pretty well:
Seagate SATA 6Gb/s 3.5-Inch 4TB Desktop HDD (ST4000DM000)

I would suggest however if not doing a RAID setup then select something like this:
Seagate 4TB IronWolf NAS SATA 6Gb/s NCQ 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive (ST4000VN008)
or the Western digital RED that has already been suggested.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 1:50 am
by Doctor Feelgood
I have a pair of WD 4TB drives in RAID0 for live TV recording, and then 3x Seagate 3TB drives in RAID5 for all other movies, music, and video storage. OS is on an SSD. All of it is backed up to a NAS with 5x Seagate 4TB drives in RAID5. Made TV recording its own array about 2 years ago just because sometimes multiple simultaneous recordings would suffer when shared on that other array.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Sun Jan 07, 2018 8:09 pm
by mercalia
I am using a pair of the newish 8 tb Toshiba N300 8TB drives which are cheap and seem well specced. No problems at the moment

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Sun Jan 14, 2018 2:38 pm
by mercalia
I dont use RAID but use the previous Hitachi 4TB drives as backups and have an ICYDOCK so I can insert them into the pc from the front without opening the case to add the new files to. works well.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Sun Feb 25, 2018 4:24 pm
by mercalia
have now replaced the 4x 4Tb Hitachi 5900 rpm with 2x8 Tb Toshiba 300 or some thing.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Wed Feb 28, 2018 3:33 am
by jtx
jtx wrote:FWIW - I have removed 2.5" Seagate Backup Plus 4TB and 5TB Drives from their enclosures and used them in my WMC PC (x1), my SageTV PC (x2) and several desktop PCs (with SSD cache) with no issues. You can get them for around $100-$120. I haven't seen any issues with recordings on either DVR system and I know there have been occasions where 4-8 shows have been recording at a time.
Update: These type of drives have an issue where the heads want to park every 8s or so - this leads to premature wearing of the drives - to avoid, you must change the APM settings from default of 0x80 to something larger, like 0xC0 or 0xFE (max). I am using stablebit scanner and it warned me that a drive had parked 600,000 times. To fix this, I have CrystalDiskInfo loading at boot time which changes the APM settings of the drives to keep them spinning when the PC is not asleep.

Re: What hard drives do you use for WMC storage

Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:11 pm
by mercalia
I have moved from 4x2TB to 4x4Tb to 2x8Tb drives. All the drives are still functional, just a matter of upgrading to fewer discs and retiring them when not too old. So I now use the 4Tb drives as backups to the 8Tb drives. If you have a large number of video files I think having a backup is essential incase the worse scenario happens. It does mean you have to be meticulous in backing up new files. I have an Icydock external drive bay so I can insert hd on the fly and then keep new files in a folder which I then backup when I get a decent number.