bickfor903

I started using M-Discs that are supposed to last a millennium (some of us won't live to see about that), but only as a last resort. I have 2 WD drives that I read and write to all the time. They're 8 years old and still hearty as ever. The price of externals drives has dropped considerably over the years. They're worth the investment.

JaiGieEse Loc: Foxworth, MS

Hm. I suppose there might be lemons in every batch. I've got nine WD externals, encompassing three different models, and capacity ranging from 1TB to 4 TB. The oldest has been in service for 6 years+, and so far NO failures.

Loooking at the BackBlaze stats posted here by someone else, WD drives seem to have a far lower failure rate than do other brands, particularly Seagate.

You might want to look into the possibility that something else in your system is tanking your HD's. Power surges? Wide temperature swings? Very heavy usage? Are you unplugging the USB or powering down the drives without first ejecting them? Might be worth a look, as your failure rate is a bit high.

Beyond that, I keep SMARTReporter running, always, and I use Disc Utility and TechToolPro to regularly check all my drives - ALWAYS a good practice.

I have a MacBook Pro with a 2 TB drive installed in the optical drive bay. SMARTReporter started telling me that the drive was about to fail. Other utilities were saying it was fine. But after several warnings from SMARTReporter, I bought a replacement drive, installed that into the MacBook Pro, restored it from TimeMachine, and the warnings stopped. I bought an external enclosure and put the drive just removed from the laptop into it. Tried to reformat and it crashed mid-format.

THAT is the only HD I've had to fail, so far. Keep your utilities and watch-dogs up to date and you'll be fine. Can't do that with optical discs.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

The cost of a 1T drive just 3 or 4 years ago would get you a 4T drive with a faster connection (USB-C or Thunderbolt 3) today. So even if drives are likely to last longer, I annually look at the cost/benefit of switching to new drives. If I think it is cheap enough to upgrade, I just move the older drives to off-site archival use.

rck281 Loc: Overland Park, KS

Yes! I use an LG Blu-ray writer that is rated for M-Disc. Be sure it's rated to burn the M-Disc as they require a stronger laser. They work for me and I am confident in the long term. I just don't know if anyone will have a reader.

Dikdik Loc: Winnipeg, Canada

That's one of the advantages of using a hard disc drive... but, a caution. I have a couple of 5-1/4" drives here for some 5-1/4" floppy diskettes, but, don't have an interface to connect to a new computer. Also have an old 80meg MFM hard drive that my programmer buddy gave me... he paid over $5000 for it originally.

Dik

Dngallagher Loc: Wilmington De.

80 MB MFM, wow, that was a HUGE drive in its day!

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

I believe back around 1973 we had a minicomputer with 4K of memory. We increased that to 8K for about $5K. The program fit in there to control a piece of research equipment, record the data and do preliminary analysis.

Kuzano

It's called CD ROT and it affects (eventually) ALL CD's... even the gold archival.

Google CD ROT... Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

Or more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Disc_rot

Have not used Optical disks for other than temporary transfer for about 15 years now.

Kuzano

Yes!!!!

Convenience over reliability every time.

BrentHarder Loc: Southern California

OK, I have read most of the responses to this question and it seems that most photographers are saving their photos on external hard drives. I am too. Everyone has heard horror stories of an external hard drive going bad. No one wants to think of loosing all their photos.
My questions are these: How many people really do loose their photos? Are external hard drives really unreliable? Can we trust them? Should we back up our photos on two external hard drives in case one goes South?!?!?

fotoman150

Flash drives would be better. Cds go bad after a few years.

AzPicLady Loc: Behind the camera!

I had 3 Seagates die in a very short period of time. My guru was able to recover the data from two of them. The other was mostly gone. So now I don't use Seagates and I use the smaller HD's instead of the huge ones. At least if they die, I haven't lost quite so much!

Bike guy Loc: Atlanta

Interesting and pertinent question. My old Imac died. First the hard drive and then the CD drive. I was still using it until I could back up everything to the 'cloud'.
While shopping around for a new one, I am finding that new IMacs don't have CD/DVD drives. You can purchase them separately.
Years ago I copied many video cam files to DVD's. I still have a PC that I can use, but now I am trying to figure out how to archive the videos.

cjc2 Loc: Hellertown PA

Years ago I spent nearly a thousand bucks on my first, full-form-factor, 10MB Hard Disk Drive. Today, I am buying 10 TB, higher end HDDs for $ 300. Just that fact, alone, could tell you something. It's a known fact about hard drives: "It's not IF they will fail, but WHEN". That's what you need to live by! Every Hard Drive will fail eventually. YES, ABSOLUTELY you should not trust your images to only one hard drive. In my specific case, it's actually five, sometimes six. All of my uploads go to a Thunderbolt 2 attached drive system, which runs RAID 1 (drives are mirrored) and, simultaneously, to a Synology NAS system which is running RAID 5. In addition, there is an off-site copy, normally kept on an additional hard drive, sometimes two. It's anal, but it has worked well. I have had no recent hard drive failures, especially with the higher end drives I am now using, and I am not looking forward to one, just preparing for the possibility. Best of luck my friend!

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

Unfortunately, I'm another guy with terrible luck with WD drives. The two WD and three LaCie drives I've bought over the years crashed (head crash, data unrecoverable with the usual utilities). My OWC drives have all been great.