I wish other companies would publish yearly hardware failure rates like
this one:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-benchmark-stats-2016/
Based on my cursory glance - failure rates do not correlate to warranty
lengths all that much.
There seems to be positive correlation to plater count - so getting the
biggest state of the art HDDs does not seems to work for reliability
and cost looking at the past trends.
If you care about your data - there is no substitute for RAID plus
backup.
As Galen noted unless you buy drives separate from your enclosure - you
have no idea what you are getting AND you cannot access the drive
itself for recovery, SMART and diagnostic in general.
Tomas
On Fri, 2017-03-31 at 10:14 -0700, Chuck Hast wrote:
> My experience has been that WD appears to have a much better
> longevity. I
> have a box littered with Seagate drives, indeed I have a 4TB drive
> that has
> my movie collection on it, I started it up one day and heard the
> "click of
> death"
> I keep the drive with the intention of getting the electronics from
> another
> drive
> and trying to recover the thing. It was not that old, and I believe
> the
> failure was
> in the electronics rather than the hardware.
>
> I have had a lot of Seagates die, but every few WD drives, and never
> had one
> just up and quit, the WD's always gave me some sort of warning prior
> to
> taking
> a dive, the Seagates were bad about just failing.
>
> The idea of purchasing a external drive case and buiding your own
> drive is a
> good idea. That way you can pull it out and plug it right into the
> Mobo,
> viewing
> what you might not be able to view at the far end of a USB link.
>
> On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 10:05 AM, Galen Seitz <gal...@seitzassoc.com>
> wrote:
>
> > On 03/30/17 19:39, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> > > So what should I do? There are 8TB external USB 3.0 drives out
> > > there,
> > > and that was my first thought. But there are a bewildering number
> > > of
> > > them out there and trying to figure out warranties is
> > > challenging. For
> > > example, there is a WD Mybook that Amazon says has a three year
> > > warranty, but the same drive at other stores says it has a two
> > > year
> > > warranty. And there is a Mybook Pro that costs three times as
> > > much but
> > > has only a two year warranty. Some of the advertising data has to
> > > be
> > > wrong, but figuring out what is wrong and what is right is a
> > > confusing
> > > task. And then each drive has competitors, but trying to assess
> > > which
> > > drive is best is another task. (I'm mostly only interested in
> > > warranties - I don't need speed or other whiz-bang features.)
> >
> > Not sure what your best solution is, but personally I would avoid
> > all of
> > the prepackaged hard drives. With those, it's difficult to know
> > what
> > you're getting. Should you decide to continue with an external USB
> > drive, I suggest shopping for a bare drive, and then picking up a
> > suitable external USB enclosure. This way you know exactly what
> > you are
> > getting. For instance, the WD Black and Datacenter drives appear
> > to
> > have 5 year warranties, as does the Seagate BarraCuda Pro.
> >
> > galen
> > --
> > Galen Seitz
> > gal...@seitzassoc.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > PLUG mailing list
> > PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org
> > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
> >
>
>
>
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