hdd reliability

[mdram]

so i have an older 500gb seagate (8+ years old) thats been great as a backup drive

my wd 1tb (2 1/2 years old) just bit the dust

replaces it with a 500gb samsung evo

i want a new 1tb (or more) secondary hdd

whats reliable and will last 5 years?

my google fu says hitachi, but i have never used them

 

[CiPHER]

WD or Hitachi sounds like good choices to me. But any drive can fail after a month or so. No guarantees here. Most harddrives now have very limited warranty as well, as opposed to the past where 5 years or even 10 years was pretty common. Those golden days are behind us; the market for mechanical storage has become an oligopoly with all the acquisitions lately.

 

[mdram]

yeah, reading reviews at new egg and amazon, there are tons of failures right after the warranty expires on so many brands.

man i miss the good ol days of long lasting drives

 

[CiPHER]

To be honest, drive failure rate shouldn't be a big issue if you got everything properly arranged for.

I always asserted that you should have any harddrive able to fail at any moment, without you having a bad day. It that's true, then you have properly configured your storage setup I think. But many people get into trouble if a mechanical drive fails, and to those people I say: you are doing it wrong. Don't depend on mechanical technology to save the day. Make your own choices to be independent on mechanical failures.

 

[mdram]

oh, my data was, i always back up. its just a pain to reinstall windows and software. maybe should image the drive when its done

 

[Charlie98]

That's what I''ve done... a fresh W7 reload with all the updates and drivers installed, saved to an Acronis image. That way an OS reload will take 15 minutes instead of 4 hours.

As far as HDD? Just buy whatever is on sale... buy two of them, and keep a backup copy of your data and files on the second drive. I don't use any program for that, I manually copy my updated files to both storage drives... that way I know it's done.

As far as HDD brands? My experience has been basically opposite of what most people here have seen... I've had very good service out of my Seagate drives (including one of the evil 3TB ones) but have had a WD Red go bad right out of the box. Toshiba seems to be the darling these days... I have two and both run about 5C degrees hotter than any of the others. The one consistent thing would be Hitachi... I have 3 500GB Hitachis in service, one just broke 30K hours, and while they are noisy, they certainly perform.

 

[mdram]

i keep seeing reports of hitachi being great, but when i look on newegg/amazon/ect they get mediocre to horrible reviews for failure

but then backblaze reports them as the lowest failure rate.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

My experience for HGST mirrors that of Backblaze.
Been using HGST drives in my fileservers for the past decade, 24/7/365, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, now 8TB.
Never any problems, loud bearings, SMART reallocs, or any other failures.

Have a bunch of 4TB WD Greens (modded with wdidle) in a secondary fileserver that have been holding up very well too.

 

[ronbo613]

For the past few years, HGST has been my hard drive of choice. HGST performance, reliability and customer service have been good. WD would be my second choice; good drives but not as good of a value as HGST.

 

[PliotronX]

I am partial to WD RAID Edition SATA drives myself. I would be comfortable recommending Hitachi as well.

 

[mdram]

interesting, the hgst ultrastar has a 5yr warranty

it did just shoot to the front of the pack