nikon123 Loc: Toronto, Canada

I had a Seagate fail. Unless I shell out between $750 to $1,500, those images are gone. I recently purchased a 1TB Solid State external hard drive by Samsung. It’s more expensive but apparently way more reliable. The manufacturers will shortly be increasing storage size. No more vulnerable ‘moving parts’ for me!

Amielee Loc: Eastern Washington State

go to BackBlaze stats for their evaluations. They keep track of the hundreds of hard drives they use.

picsix

I've used Seagate for years and haven't had any problems. All TB's.

Fotoartist Loc: Detroit, Michigan

You can use any drive you want and not worry so much about failure if you buy two drives and put them in a case like this and use them redundantly:https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MED3ER0GB/ In other words one drive backs up the identical other drive in the same case (for convenience). It counts as one of the three backups you should have.

It is a boot and suspenders system which is part of what I always use on all of my files.

speters Loc: Grangeville/Idaho

A few month ago, I added another 4TB ext. hard drive, it is a Seagate and I like it (liked the price too, under $80)!

A Frame

I recently purchased a 5TB SSD WD "easy store" before going on an extended vacation. I really like it.

jldodge

I use Seagate drives and have recently purchased their 8TB drives. No problems so far ...

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

I'd stay with either. They are what I use.

jcolton

I have three G drives up to 6T and have never had a problem (unlike with former Seagates).

stogieboy Loc: Marlboro, NY

I have two of these, and really like them a lot. Not that it matters in regard to performance, but they look way cooler than other drives I've seen. If they're going to sit on my desk, might as well enjoy looking at them...

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=g+drive&N=0&InitialSearch=yes&sts=ma&typedValue=&Top+Nav-Search=&token=dd86fd7d1d0a67fdcfed7c9764dcc65f

Real Nikon Lover Loc: Simi Valley, CA

I couldnt agree more. I am a disaster manager by profession. I have 3 copies of everything and offsite backup in a secure location. All NON-Cloud!

russelray Loc: La Mesa CA

I have moved on from HDD to SSD simply because of the tremendous increase in speed, and since speed savings equal time savings, and time is money, and I depend on money to pay my bills, speed wins out.

aubreybogle Loc: Albuquerque, NM

2 WD Black 6TB Performance Hard Drives - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD6003FZB, one backing the other up. The 4 TB MODEL is available online FOR $174.

srt101fan

I've been following the external drive issue for some time on several threads. I've seen frequent, strong recommendations for HGST UltraStar drives, and recommendations against using "consumer" drives such as MyBook, Passport, etc.

Two questions:
Apparently WD took over the HGST UltraStar brand. Have they maintained the quality and reliability that supported past recommendations, i.e., are the WD made drives just as good as the original drives?

I gather that one strong point for "enterprise" drives is that they stand up well in 24/7 use. If you only use your drives intermittently, should the enterprise drives still be the choice over consumer drives?

Thanks!

Ednsb Loc: Santa Barbara

go to backblaze.com. They publish a quarterly report on the failure rate of thousands of hard drives (112,864 in the last report). Best place to look because everything else is based on a small sample size (like 1 or 0). Generally, the reliability has dropped over the years as the drives have gotten larger in capacity. The failure rate avg is now at 2.5%. It was as low as 1.5 in q2 of 2018. The current review is for q3 of 2019 so a new one is due out shortly. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-hard-drive-stats-q3-2019/


They even show the model number because all of the drive companies put out a ton of drives of the same sizes. They don’t all work as well.

Hitachi drives have been the best performing in the last report I read and many of the ones before. They are harder to find and I'm not sure they do any external drives (though you could easily buy a drive port cheaply). But Seagate and Western Digital have drives that are close. The avg Lifetime annualized failure rate for that qtr. It is 1.73%.

Hitachi has 5 drives ranging from 4 TB to 12 TB with AFR or .46 to .8.
Seagate has 7 drives in size from 4TB to 12TB. AFR ranges from 2.67 (the 4TB) to .57 the 10TB.
Toshiba (Western Digital) has 2 drives in size from 4TB to 14TB. AFR is .81 and .74 respectively

Any AFR under 1.0 is great BY THE WAY they dropped all WDC drives in q3 of 2018. Their AFR was 4.64 for a 6TB drive