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Dabbler
- Joined
- Sep 26, 2017
- Messages
- 14
You're wasting your time with getting multiple drives from different manufactures. It's much easier to just get all the same drive in one big order and then test them. If a drive is going to die it most likely will die in the first 72h of heavy usage. So use badblocks to test them, that test alone will probably last 3 days.
I've had two drives from a batch I bought die very close to each other after years - that's one experience, so could be complete coincidence, but it can't hurt. It ends up costing me only a little more to mix it up, given I already need to order from a selection of places because of availability of the parts. The cost is like £30 in price difference over just getting 6 of the cheapest from the cheapest supplier (which I couldn't actually do as they have an order limit at 3 drives), and it takes virtually no time and doesn't result in extra shipping costs. Maybe matched drives would be faster? It's not going to be a difference I care about, I think. As I said before, it's mostly for backups and long-term storage. It seems at least plausible to me that there is more risk of some kind of systemic failure within a batch and within model lines. Probably not enough to be worth worrying about, but as I say, if I'm doing it, I'd rather do it properly.
I contacted Kingston and they confirmed the kit on Amazon should work with the motherboard - and my supplier for that has agreed to update it to the latest BIOS before shipping, so I've placed my orders, I think I'm happy with the build. Thanks for all the help in this thread, I'll make sure to post about how it comes together for anyone following my footsteps.