Most Reliable 1-2TB?

[ExcaliburMM]

Due to a recent issue which may or may not be due to my overclock, I realized that harddrives, like everything else, die at some point.

Since I have a lot of data I consider irreplaceable and extremely important, I decided it was time I get a storage drive. Currently I have a 500GB OS drive and 2x 250GB for storage, (not in RAID or anything.), and the 250GBs are full while the 500GB might have a good 50GB of stuff I need to save, equaling roughly 550GB of data I need to keep.

My main concerns are reliability and price, speed isn't a priority, thus 5400/5900 RPM drives are not out of the question, but I don't know if rotation speed is a factor in lifetime. I'd prefer a Western Digital but if there's something more reliable / cheaper, I'd like to know.

I'm currently considering the following:
WD AV-GP WD10EVDS 1TB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136496

Seagate 7200.12 ST31000528AS 1TB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148433

WD Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136284

If you'd like to recommend something I haven't come across, feel free. 🙂

All help very much appreciated,
Ex

 

[HendrixFan]

Any brand of drive you buy will have a few duds here and there. Hard drives have a "bathtub curve" where the majority of failures are either at the very beginning of the hard drive's life or many years down the road.

How important is your data? You say irreplaceable, so you probably want a back up onsite and another offsite. How often does that 550 GB of data change? How much of it changes regularly? Are all 550 GB irreplaceable or only a portion? First things first, I would get a 1TB drive for your data, and another 1TB for backup. Depending on how lazy you are about backups you may wanna do a RAID-1 and just mirror the drive. This would also be good if the data is changing often. Otherwise, an external drive or external enclosure with a regular drive would be good for backing up the data. Lastly, depending on some of the above factors you may want to have online backups or you may just want a third drive that you copy the data to and keep elsewhere in case of theft or fire. Relatives house, safe deposit box at a bank, etc.

For specific recommendations the Western Digital green drive should be sufficient. It runs cooler, which is good since you are running hot with the overclocking. My green drive runs 5-7C cooler than my other spindle drive. If not, the black drive will work well and has a 5 year warranty. Your board can do RAID-1 if you want to go that route. A good enclosure is the Antec MX-1. I don't really know much about external drives, maybe someone else can offer a recommendation there. Same with online backups, I couldn't really help.

 

[jsedlak]

If the data is truly irreplaceable you should also consider backing up to other media (tape drive, DVDs, etc) that can be stored or at least moved off site.

 

[ExcaliburMM]

Any brand of drive you buy will have a few duds here and there. Hard drives have a "bathtub curve" where the majority of failures are either at the very beginning of the hard drive's life or many years down the road.

Good to know.

How important is your data?

Music, movies, and custom game content I personally created. My writings, and just about anything I create, and I am constantly creating.

I consider them irreplaceable because if I lost them I'd lose years of work. In the customs community your reputation is as important as your contributions. My writings would be lost forever and I've already lost a sizable amount of work due to the websites I was a part of going down.

How often does that 550 GB of data change? How much of it changes regularly? Are all 550 GB irreplaceable or only a portion?

Most of the data doesn't change. It gets read a lot when I watch movies and listen to music, but none of it really gets deleted or moved. However a lot of data gets added to it as it is a growing collection.

First things first, I would get a 1TB drive for your data, and another 1TB for backup. Depending on how lazy you are about backups you may wanna do a RAID-1 and just mirror the drive.

The RAID sounds nice but I'll want to keep these drives longer than this motherboard. Would that be a problem?

Otherwise, an external drive or external enclosure with a regular drive would be good for backing up the data.

Considered this, not a fan of externals, and if I got one, it would have to be quite large. 2TB minimum. Perhaps one of those RAID enclosures that house 2-3 2TB drives? Or should I buy an enclosure and drives separate to put together?

Lastly, depending on some of the above factors you may want to have online backups or you may just want a third drive that you copy the data to and keep elsewhere in case of theft or fire. Relatives house, safe deposit box at a bank, etc.

I wouldn't go as far as to say I'd store it somewhere else, in fact a lot of my documents and things are not what I would share with anyone, family or otherwise, so I wouldn't want them out of my sight, much less out of my home. I know I could encrypt or something but that isn't an option I'd prefer.

For specific recommendations the Western Digital green drive should be sufficient. It runs cooler, which is good since you are running hot with the overclocking. My green drive runs 5-7C cooler than my other spindle drive. If not, the black drive will work well and has a 5 year warranty. Your board can do RAID-1 if you want to go that route. A good enclosure is the Antec MX-1.

Since the environment the PC is in is never above 60F, I think either drive would be sufficiently cool. The inside of my case is very close to the ambient due to the high speed of the fans I use, no controller, full blast, 24/7. However this is information that's good to have.

Thanks Hendrix, good info. 🙂

 

[wwswimming]

the Samsung 103SJ deserves a place on the list.

Newegg has trouble keeping them in stock. very popular, good price.

i have a WestDig 640 Black. i'm not sure about the WestDig 1 TB Black, but i can recommend the 640 Black.

 

[COPOHawk]

Hands down...WD 1 TB Black at $100 price point.

Starting about 2 years ago...I bought my first one...bought 8 of them myself over the next 14 months...so the newest one has been in service about 10 months...all with zero issues.

Also, I have a few IT colleagues that own them...so 14 owned between 3 of us. No issues so far.

Regardless of the drive...I would purchase an additional drive to backup the 1TB to. Use something as simply as Syncback if you dont want the hassle of RAID.

 

[alyarb]

reliability of large drives has not been good. Things seriously started dropping off after 1TB. I would not trust seagate with anything larger than 500GB, and that isn't strictly because of firmware issues. They ship a lot of dead drives (so does WD and hitachi). I would not trust WD or hitachi with anything larger than 1TB.

none of them compare to samsung though. they are just great. if you're shelling out for a 2TB disk from anyone, it's probably the largest drive, by far, in your machine, and you have no way of backing it up. i wouldn't take that risk on anyone but samsung.

 

[sxr7171]

The answer is:

A second 1-2TB drive


I hope that was one of the choices.



Also it's funny I own 7 of those "deathstar" Seagate and they haven't failed yet. Anecdotal evidence means nothing. When you have a platter spinning at 7200RPM and a head sitting several microns away a lot of things can go wrong. Especially on those external/portable drives. Which makes me wonder why people think its really safe to store things on an external drive. I love the manufacturers who like to use terms like "data vault" it's more like "data disaster waiting to happen". The dual drive RAID-1 externals are a better bet.



EDIT: You said your livelihood depends on this data? E-mail your important files to Google at the very least. Create a new account just for this and you will be able to search them until the end of Google which is likely to be the same as the end of the world. Also look into online backup services.

I personally use Sherweb hosted Exchange and I can easily access my data on my phone and e-mail stuff to myself as secure backup. I also run a WHS at home. I think the $200 (machine) + $99 (OS) is the cheapest insurance policy I have bought. Better than State Farm no doubt.

 

[ExcaliburMM]

Currently I think I'm going to RAID-1 two 1TB WD CBs.

 

[jimhsu]

I think it's advisable to tier your data. Your personal work and game content could be, for example, the highest priority, which can be mirrored daily on an external, and additionally duplicated offsite using one of the many online backup services (paid ones such as backblaze, mozy, s3, rsync.net as well as free ones such as Google Docs, Microsoft Skydrive). Personally I commit important work to a SVN repo that I host in a VPS and mirror to 2 locations - you really can't beat that for data security. In addition, I use Backblaze, and have been trying to fit Skydrive into my backup scheme as well. That's at least 4 redundant copies of data (distributed in Houston, Palo Alto, Kansas City, and Redmond) for my most critical work. All this is more or less automated by tools, task scheduler, and custom scripts.

Data that is less important (movies, music) can then be simply mirrored onto an external, which saves you from having to spend hundreds of days uploading through a narrow upstream, and exorbitant bandwidth/storage costs.

 

[sao123]

stay away from seagates, lately they have had a large rash of bad drives from 7200.10 to 7200.12... ive had at least 8 drives go bad in 2 years...
recently i switched to WD blacks... hoping they are more reliabale.


i suggest raid 1 + external usb weekly/monthly backups.

 

[LikeLinus]

stay away from seagates, lately they have had a large rash of bad drives from 7200.10 to 7200.12... ive had at least 8 drives go bad in 2 years...
recently i switched to WD blacks... hoping they are more reliabale.


i suggest raid 1 + external usb weekly/monthly backups.

I have (3) 1.5 TB Seagate 7200.11 internal drives and (2) 1.5 TB Seagate drives in external enclosures (eSATA for backup) and have never had one fail. I also have (3) WD 1.5TB Green drives and have never had one of those fail either.

I have a crap load of storage between my video editor machine and my NAS, but I need it for HD footage. Those Seagates have been awesome and never had a problem with them.

If you've had 8 drives go down in a personal enviroment...you have a powersupply problem or another issue with your system. It's complete BS to believe that 8 drives would go bad on their own. I don't buy that for one second.

 

[Russwinters]

There is no such thing as most reliable. They are all about equally bad.


Go for performance, and:

Always keep a backup.