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 <[email protected]> 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 > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > -- Chuck Hast -- KP4DJT -- Glass, five thousand years of history and getting better. The only container material that the USDA gives blanket approval on. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
