What brand hard drive is recommended?

Zascar

I just had a Seagate Barracuda 2TB fail on me, was not that old but it died. Have not even tried data recovery yet but will do, need a new drive in the meantime.

What would you guys recommend? 2TB or possibly 3TB if its not much more - although I may just get 2x instead eventually. I have a 120gb SSD as my C drive and this will be my D drive for data. Want it as cheap as possible but don't want to buy something rubbish.

Any recommendations?

ED E

Assuming:

• This is for a desktop
• You don't care a huge amount about performance a secondary disk

****BB Abuse their disks so results should be taken with a pinch of salt****



The weird thing about that chart? HGST is owned by WD! They do well across most skews so are probably the most reliable choice, but are also more expensive.

http://geizhals.de/?fs=HGST+Desktstar+2TB&in=

WD on a large scale arent great but the absolute failure rates are still low enough at 3yrs with smaller disks (4TB suffer a little, 6/8 havent been tested) so I dont care so much. Run WD reds in my NAS and have a Blue on the way for my desktop.

moc moc a moc

Western Digital haven't let me down yet

Gadgetman496

ED E wrote: »

Assuming:

• This is for a desktop
• You don't care a huge amount about performance a secondary disk

****BB Abuse their disks so results should be taken with a pinch of salt****



The weird thing about that chart? HGST is owned by WD! They do well across most skews so are probably the most reliable choice, but are also more expensive.

http://geizhals.de/?fs=HGST+Desktstar+2TB&in=

WD on a large scale arent great but the absolute failure rates are still low enough at 3yrs with smaller disks (4TB suffer a little, 6/8 havent been tested) so I dont care so much. Run WD reds in my NAS and have a Blue on the way for my desktop.

That graph only tells the failure rate without the quantity, so it could be a quantity of anything really?

WD have always been kind to me too.

NIMAN

Its a very complicated technology, any brand can fail.

I try to burn anything I really don't want to lose to CD/DVD as well as keep a copy on HDDs.

the_syco

Avoid Maxtor. As Seagate owns them, avoid them as well.

Prefer WD HDD's, as they haven't failed on me as much.

ED E

Gadgetman496 wrote: »

That graph only tells the failure rate without the quantity, so it could be a quantity of anything really?

WD have always been kind to me too.

Quantities are in the full annual report.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/




SGs 1.5TB is a small sample size so it could b a bad batch, but its not confidence inspiring. That said, WD Reds at 2/3TB are not great either.

yoyo

moc moc a moc wrote: »

Western Digital haven't let me down yet

Had a 3TB WD drive fail there earlier in the year! Mostly contained my Steam library so nothing much lost thankfully.
I purchased three Toshiba 3TB drives after and no problem with any of them (yet!).

Nick

the_syco

yoyo wrote: »

Had a 3TB WD drive fail there earlier in the year! Mostly contained my Steam library so nothing much lost thankfully.
I purchased three Toshiba 3TB drives after and no problem with any of them (yet!).

Nick

Do you know what colour the WD HDD was? Found that the green ones would go after a bit if used for gaming. Luckily I didn't lose anything; when computer started being slow starting up, investigated it, and found the HDD at fault, and disconnected it.

Have never used the WD Reds, although I was told that, as they'd be used for NAS drives, that they're meant to be very good.

=-=

Looked into the ST4000DM000, and found that there are several versions of the one drive, with a load of crap ones being sold under the good name.

yoyo

the_syco wrote: »

Do you know what colour the WD HDD was? Found that the green ones would go after a bit if used for gaming. Luckily I didn't lose anything; when computer started being slow starting up, investigated it, and found the HDD at fault, and disconnected it.

Have never used the WD Reds, although I was told that, as they'd be used for NAS drives, that they're meant to be very good.

=-=

Looked into the ST4000DM000, and found that there are several versions of the one drive, with a load of crap ones being sold under the good name.

It was a Green, rubbish drives really as they spin down and take a few seconds to spin back up when accessed. I did get it replaced by RMA, but it failed within 12 months! Interestingly it was mostly holding my Steam library, so the gaming connection would be likely!

Nick

davo2001

NIMAN wrote: »

Its a very complicated technology, any brand can fail.

Correction, any brand WILL fail, no disk lasts forever!

ED E

davo2001 wrote: »

Correction, any brand WILL fail, no disk lasts forever!

Exactly, as humans we're naturally bad at analysing risk but anyone in the SAN business will tell you all disks fail.

A good rule of thumb is to look at warranties: Consumer drives 3yrs, NAS/Prosumer drives 5yrs. That says the OEM knows fail rates will be low(sub 4% probably) up to then. Thus if you get to 4 or 6 years you know that odds are rapidly turning against you.