On 11/30/2010 12:14 PM, Dan Crutcher wrote:
Does anyone have any recommendations on reliable external hard drives? At Louisville Magazine we seem to go through them like candy, especially the ones that we use for photo storage and backup. Now, we are using them much more heavily than most people would — we write and read several gigabytes of new data almost every day. We keep a backup of all files on the main drive that is automatically updated every night (essentially giving us always a duplicate of the main one).I have used Western Digitals, LaCies, Seagates, Maxtors and various other brands, and they all seem to fail regularly and frequently. I usually buy them at Best Buy or wherever I can find the most bytes for the least bucks. At this point I rarely get anything less than a terabyte, which under the best circumstances will hold only about a year's worth of photos. I'm frustrated by the amount of data corruption and/or mechanical problems that these drives are having. It is rare that one lasts a full year without developing some kind of problem that requires replacing it. Because we keep multiple backups we haven't lost anything yet, but I'm afraid it's only a matter of time until we do. Is there some REALLY GOOD external hard drive out there that would give us better reliability, even if it cost more? Or some other type of data storage (burning DVDs for backup is not really an option, as we simply don't have the time or manpower to do that on any regular basis)?
I'm far from an expert on the subject, but I'm not shy about giving my opinion.
After having replaced many drives for many people, my conclusion is that all the companies make pretty good drives, but the drives you get cheaply from places like Best Buy aren't their best models. When I'm after a good drive that will last, I don't look at the brand; I look at the warranty. The drives for server use have warranties of 5 or even 7 years.
When I set up my new server at home, I bought two 1TB Seagate Constellation ES <http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/enterprise-hard-drives/constellation-es/> drives that are being used in a RAID. They have a warranty of 5 years and are far from being the most server-worthy of drives, but they're better than most of the low-end drives you find discounted and are one of the few better drives that regularly go on sale. They live in a small tower case in the basement running Linux. All the Macs think it's an XServe.
The other thing to consider is the box you put them in. Most of the cheap boxes you get from Best Buy and other such places are just that: cheap boxes. The power supplies aren't well regulated, and, worst of all, they're too small to have a real fan to dump heat. Keeping your drive in an oven will kill it in a hurry.
If I had the need to get really serious about this stuff, I'd most certainly get a Drobo <http://drobo.com/> or two. This is certainly the easiest way to handle moderate amounts of data because you can just pop bare SATA drives in and out of the box like a toaster--even while its running.
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