Mastodawn

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:

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

Charlotte Mar 1

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

J.M. Hill Mar 1

@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.

@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

Zimmie Mar 1

@mcc @jmhill @Foritus While SSDs can lose data when unpowered, that’s more of a boogeyman than a real problem. It’s like cell wear. Problems can be induced under extreme conditions. As long as you stick to the brands which make their own flash, SSDs practically never die from wear, and they almost never lose data even going without power for years.

Zimmie Mar 1

@jmhill @Foritus @mcc The average spinning drive retains data quite a while longer than any other commonly-available writable medium does. SSDs come close, but they’re not quite to the same level as hard drives. For most backup purposes, the right answer is to just trust the media.

If your backups are sensitive enough that spinning drives are untrustworthy long-term, then they’re also untrustworthy short-term, and you need to use something like ZFS with ongoing data integrity checks.

ROTOPE~1 ⭐️Mar 1

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

@rotopenguin @Foritus is this a serious suggestion?

In what way would it be better than NTFS straight?

Why not bcachefs on exfat?

ROTOPE~1 ⭐️Mar 1

@mcc @Foritus nah I'm just joshing about a much-worse-case setup. Especially considering that Mr. Bcachefs is a vibe coder.

@rotopenguin @Foritus Okay.

Assuming I understand these things in principle but not in detail and am looking for actual help— used to, when I used macs, I could create a "Sparse Bundle Disk Image" and it was like a hard drive in a file, which could grow and and shrink returning space to the host disk as it shrank, and could be encrypted, and could be compressed. Is this a thing I can do from Linux? What's the best way? (Assume for this one question I no longer care about Windows.)

aeva Mar 1

@mcc @rotopenguin @Foritus so like... a folder?

@aeva @rotopenguin @Foritus A folder has several limitations by comparison. It cannot be compressed, it cannot be encrypted with a different key from the drive which contains it, it cannot be mounted read-only, and it cannot be unmounted.

Sean Eric Fagan Mar 1

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

demize Mar 1

@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)

ideaPDish Mar 1

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

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 28

@mcc yes (partly based on knowing people working for WD)

@mcc with the addendum that sometimes people sell fakes on Amazon (more of a problem with flash media afaik), yeah, I'd trust them

(this is a general problem with storage on Amazon, not with WD in particular)

@ratsnakegames Do I need to worry about this if the seller/shipper is amazon.ca?

@mcc If the seller is Amazon, no, you should be fine.

If Amazon is just shipping from their warehouse, vendors have managed to get fakes in there in the past.

https://www.westerndigital.com/en-ca/products/portable-drives/wd-elements-portable-usb-3-0-hdd?sku=WDBU6Y0050BBK-WESN

Ben Zanin Feb 28

@ratsnakegames @mcc it's an extra $20 but it might be worth buying it directly from WD

5TB WD Elements Portable | WD

The WD Elements Portable is a portable hard drive with high capacity storage and fast data rates. It's perfect for value conscious consumers. Shop now for FREE shipping.

Western Digital

ROTOPE~1 ⭐️Feb 28

@ratsnakegames @mcc I suppose the "fake" here would be "a drive that was retired from a datacenter, had its power on hours reset, and has a totally non-suspicious ten billion head un/loading events on it".

@rotopenguin @mcc in the flash/SSD space, the "fake" is usually "a 128MB flash drive with a controller that lies and claims to be 2TB large, then writes your data into nowhere, and also WD definitely didn't make it"

@rotopenguin @mcc anyway, you can avoid these if you pay attention (don't buy suspicious looking shit and look at the packaging carefully), and Amazon will generally refund them

ROTOPE~1 ⭐️Feb 28

@ratsnakegames love seeing the 8TB Lenovo microSD cards on Aliexpress

@rotopenguin yeah, like, ideally don't buy those

ROTOPE~1 ⭐️Feb 28

@ratsnakegames there's another version of flash card fraud going around, cards that *do* possess the advertised size. These are included with a lot of emulation systems, I don't know if they have escaped containment into any other market yet.

The thing with them is, the cards come loaded with stuff, you can write to them somewhat, but they die from a wholesale rewrite. I suspect that they are leaving out the erase circuitry, for however much die space/process steps that saves.

arutaz Feb 28

@mcc I've had a few WD My Passport for some years and they have been wihtout problems

Hugo Mills Feb 28

@mcc IIRC, WD have good hardware, but the firmwares can be dodgy. (There's a couple of specific versions that are known very bad).

Seagate have decent firmware, but the hardware has a tendency to go phut.

Not sure what the drawbacks of Hitachi are.

I tend to go for Hitachi or WD.

[Edit: This is for HDDs.]

@darkling if i am looking at a specific WD drive, is there a way of finding out if it's one with a dodgy firmware?

Hugo Mills Feb 28

@mcc You can get the firmware number out of the SMART info. I don't think there's a published list of known bad drives (for reasons of avoiding lawsuits), but I can ask someone I know on the btrfs IRC channel who keeps such a list for work purposes.

Model number and firmware version, if you have hands on the specific device.

shironeko Feb 28

@mcc @darkling
Durability wise any of the big brands are fine. However the intended use case for different SKUs is gonna matter quite a bit for getting reliablily/performance.

These external drives are tricky because they don't specify what actual hard drive is in there. Sometimes they put some decent drives in there for a lower price than internal and people would shuck them, but it's the exception not the rule.

IMO if you just want cheap mass storage and don't care about the performance (the use case these drives are targeting (say it's to store media/backup)) then just look at GB/$ and pick the cheapest. Otherwise, buy a known quality internal drive and put it in an enclosure.

Clifton Royston Feb 28

If you get the Western Digital "Red" product line of drives, which are officially blessed and branded for NAS use, they're very good and very stable.

I have found over time that across several manufacturers it's worth buying hard drives labeled for NAS use, because they seem to be built and tested to higher standards, so I now use them for backups as well.

@CliftonR hm interesting, that will require an enclosure though I guess

Clifton Royston Feb 28

Now I see you're thinking about those portable drive-in-a-box things, I would not trust any brand of those. I've seen too many, of many different brands, abruptly die on people.

My wife has a WD Passport from & for her job, and that's been doing OK but I still wouldn't trust it.

On my desktop computer I use one of the USB-3 to SATA adapter thingies that you can plug any SATA drive into and have it show up.

If you want to carry it around, then ya, you have to figure out an enclosure.

Clifton Royston Feb 28

This, specifically:

Tristan Mar 1

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

🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦Feb 28

@mcc I’m pretty happy with the WD 5TB spinning rust that I use for backup. It has served me well for a few years.

Hugo Mills Feb 28

@mcc Hmm... just spotted that this is an external drive. Those have two additional problems: it connects via USB, which is often flaky and can drop writes if you have the wrong USB hardware on the host (or in the enclosure); and the model numbers on the wrapper don't necessarily correspond to the same drive model internally.

Anyway, I'll ask...

schrotthaufen Feb 28

@mcc I’ve only had WD drives die of old age. (As in several years actually powered on.)

Ayla Feb 28

@mcc yeah. I've had a couple usb WD hdds over the years, they've always been stable and their USB implementation is better than most of the generic caddies. Wouldn't recommend doing RAID or anything similarly fancy on it but for a single drive setup, absolutely fine.

@mcc @gnomon knows.

@mhoye @mcc you'll get better value for money by buying an internal 3.5" WD mechanical drive and a cheap dock, but that USB drive is fine. Nothing wrong with it.

Un Bourguignon Feb 28

@mcc
You'll pay this a premium+ price, or more.

Kimiko-obasan ⭐Feb 28

@mcc Not sure if relevant to an external hdd you'd buy in 2026, but I have had an internal 5TB WD drive running 24/7 for uh, I think it's been 16 years now. So yeah, decent quality there.

@Kimiko_0 is the quality level of a 2010 WD drive necessarily equal to the quality level of a 2026 WD drive?

Kimiko-obasan ⭐Feb 28

@mcc Considering capitalism, probably not necessarily. That's why I said 'not sure if relevant'. If it came to picking WD or another brand though, I'd pick WD based on my own experience, is what I meant to convey.