I want a very reliable hard drive which also has a lower price. I’ve looked online and found an argument for practically every brand there is. I just wanted to ask here for recommendations, what do you guys use? Thank you!
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Remember to follow the 321 of backups. (3 copies, 2 different mediums, 1 off site)
I used to buy external drives when they went on sale, and I’d shuck the case off of them. In my opinion the quality of the drives in those externals went downhill sometime in the last several years. You might get lucky and get a drive meant for a data center, but I’ve stopped playing that lottery.
These days I just buy retired but warrantied data center drives from sellers on eBay. They’re big, tested, reasonably priced and the seller will replace them within their warranty period if they do die (I usually see 3-5 year as the warranty time). So far I haven’t had any of these die in the last couple of years. Seagates used to fail me constantly thought. I’m now down to only one Seagate still working.
Last time I checked, all the regular harddisk manufacturers were kind of similar in reliability. You can get lucky or unlucky with a specific model series or specific drive… But it’s not like there was a manufacturer to recommend which outperforms the other ones.
(Though the hdds aren’t all the same. There are definitely smaller and bigger ones, fast and very slow ones, some meant for 24/7 operation and consumer drives.)
Very reliable hard drives don’t exist whatever the price. You need RAID. But, look at backblaze drive reliability statistics to identify some obvious problem drives to avoid. It would help if you said what you are trying to do with the drives, what capacity you want, etc.
You need RAID
I’d say that one needs backups.
After one has backups, if it’s necessary, then I’d look at RAID for reducing downtime in the event of a drive failure.
But one doesn’t want to use RAID instead of backups.
https://serverfault.com/questions/2888/why-is-raid-not-a-backup
Why is RAID not a backup?
When someone mentions RAID in a conversation about backups, invariably someone declares that “RAID is not a backup.”
Sure, for striping, that’s true. But what’s the difference between redundancy and a backup?
RAID guards against one kind of hardware failure. There’s lots of failure modes that it doesn’t guard against.
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File corruption
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Human error (deleting files by mistake)
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Catastrophic damage (someone dumps water onto the server)
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Viruses and other malware
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Software bugs that wipe out data
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Hardware problems that wipe out data or cause hardware damage (controller malfunctions, firmware bugs, voltage spikes, …)
and more.
No disagreement with your broader point about a single drive ultimately being bounded in the kind of reliability that it can provide, though.
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As mentioned backblaze is a good resource as they extensively look into this very question. What I’ve noticed in practice is that all hard drives are pretty reliable these days. If they fail they usually fail early in the first 6 months. Regardless of what you go with always have a back up.
Buy multiple drives, setup some sort of raid, setup some sort of backup. Then set up a 2nd backup.
Done.
All drives from all manufacturers are going to fail at more or less the same rate (see: backblaze’s stats) and trying to buy a specific thing to avoid the death which is coming for all drives is, mostly, futile: at the absolute best you might see a single specific model to avoid, but that doesn’t mean entire product lines are bad.
I’m using some WD red drives which are pushing 8 years old, and some Seagate exos drives which are pushing 4, and so far no issues on any of the 7 drives.
