Reliable Hard Drive?

[jyl]

I seem to have at least one hard drive failure a year. Not sure if they aren't making HDDs the way they used to, or if we use HDDs a lot harder now.

The Western Digital 500GB external drive I use for Time Machine backups is acting bad. I'm going to replace it.

What is your recommendation for the most reliable external drive of 500GB-1TB capacity?

In general, are their any rules for getting a more reliable hard drive? Better and worse brands? Slow rpm better or high rpm? 2.5" vs 3.5"?

[stomachmonkey]

In general I avoid WD. Have had noting but bad luck with them.

Hitachi for 2.5 and Seagate for 3.5 have always been rock solid for me. Always 7200.

[id10t]

Go internal and go w/ RAID - RAID-1 at the minimum, RAID-5 preferred. Yes, this means you may end up building a cheap box to do it with... but you'll have redundancy...

[gr8fl4porsche]

I've had good luck with all brands and bad luck with all brands - in my opinion it's a crap shoot.

My currrent stable houses WD, Seagate and Hitachi.

My dead pile is full of WD, Seagate and Hitachi (used to be called the IBM Deathstar)

I just buy whatever Newegg has on sale and go with it. Plan on replacing every couple of years or at the first hint of trouble such as noise, clicking, hard to boot, etc.

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by gr8fl4porsche

I've had good luck with all brands and bad luck with all brands - in my opinion it's a crap shoot.

My currrent stable houses WD, Seagate and Hitachi.

My dead pile is full of WD, Seagate and Hitachi (used to be called the IBM Deathstar)

I just buy whatever Newegg has on sale and go with it. Plan on replacing every couple of years or at the first hint of trouble such as noise, clicking, hard to boot, etc.

Same thing here. Once upon a time the Seagate stuff was the best. Now it is all built with price as the main requirement. It is hard to find a drive smaller than 500 Gigs.

It is just amazing how cheap the hard drives have become. I bought a 500 MB (yes 500 meg not gig) Seagate drive at an employee price for a bargain of only 500 bucks. One dollar a meg. And 500 megs was a HUGE drive back then. The biggest drives were only one gig. We just bought several 2 TB drives that are the same physical size.

[jyl]

I'm now a big fan of SSDs for the primary (OS + apps) drive, and my Macs don't have room for >1 internal drive, so I am stuck with external drives for data and backup. Have debated buying/building a RAID enclosure with hot-swap, as restoring after HDD failures is a pain.

The iMac is going to be replaced very soon here, looking at a Mac Mini with dual monitors, 256GB SSD, 8 GB DRAM, then multiple external drives for data and backup. The external drives are cheap (1TB for $100!) but spending $100/yr to replace plus 1 day/yr on recovery is getting irritating.

[Por_sha911]

One thing to add: if you are using an external HD for backup then shut it off when not needed.
Personally, I've not had good experiences with Western Digital internal HD's. I had 3 go out in 4 years.

[Scott R]

All of our enterprise class systems use Fujitsu. They may be branded HP, or SUN, or IBM but at the core they are Fujitsu. I use the 15K's at home on my desktop, however I don't know if MAC supports SAS natively. But they are the fastest, and I believe rated the most reliable drives.

Newegg.com - FUJITSU - Storage/Hard Drive

[MysticLlama]

I used to use the Fujitsu and sometimes Seagate 10k and 15k rpm drives, super reliable.

My main system even had 3 of them in a RAID for redundancy and speed.

I've since dropped them for an SSD though. Save a lot of power, reduces all the disk noise, and my first gen Intel SSD is about 2x as fast as my 3x15k drives.

[gtc]

The only thing I have to add is that you might want to check your enclosure cooling. I've seen good drives fail very quickly when placed too close together in cases with too little air circulation.

[Eric Coffey]

You might try and source enterprise/server drives. They seem to be built to last (longer) and/or have better QC.

[slakjaw]

Lacie rugged for me. I also have a 2tb G drive but I don't know how reliable it is yet.

[peppy]

I had an Iomega external that crapped out after about a year. I think my problem was leaving it on all the time.

[azasadny]

I've been buying and using Western Digital Caviar Black hard drives, usually the 2TB model and I've been very happy with them. All of the cheap, fast hard drives out in the marketplace today are garbage, be sure everything is backed up!

[nynor]

i like samsung HDD's. YMMV.

[HardDrive]

The ladies say I'm always on time.

[porsche4life]

I've heard you tend to go out too soon....

[porsche4life]

Originally Posted by nynor

i like samsung HDD's. YMMV.

Didn't you used to like Hitachis?

[jyl]

Maxtor was bought by Seagate some years ago. Toshiba bought Fujitsu's HDD biz. Seagate is also buying Samsung's HDD biz. Western Digital is buying Hitachi.

There will be only three HDD makers: Western Digital will be the largest, Seagate next, and Toshiba/Fujitsu (mostly 2.5").

I am thinking I'll have to bite the bullet and get a RAID, hot-swappable storage box like the Drobo. With more of our lives stored on HDDs, and HDDs getting seemling less reliable, relying on a single HDD is not going to work, even with regular backups.

Link (no affiliation, don't own one, not endorsing) Data Robotics Drobo | DroboWorks.com

I recently realized we have 5 HDDs in constant use - MacBook, iMac, Time Capsule backup, TIVO w/ 2 drive. No wonder I'm getting a failure per year.

[GH85Carrera]

We have been real happy with our two Buffalo RAIDS. They are pure network drives. No computer is needed to run them, plug em in and go. They are not hot swappable so they are not for mission critical use. It is real simple to power it down, put in a new drive and it will rebuild. Low cost and easy to use.