Re: [LUG] OT: Hard Disk Reliability - Which manufacturer to choose?

Roland Tarver <roland.tarver@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Folks,

Perhaps this topic is not really worthy of your collective experience, 
however since its been mentioned recently I thought I'd try my luck....

So, as BA recently guessed (I think when Phil's external hard disk went 
pop), I am one of those guys with a "half arsed approach to backups."! I 
have happily been plugging in an external WD 1TB drive (via usb) and 
rsyncing my files across..... Can you see what's comming?....

....that's right!.... lol.... the drive seems to be having a bit of a 
wobble. As per advice, I stopped using it immediately and it has not 
been powered up since. I will worry about recovering any data when I 
have some drives to recover it too....


So, I have been researching hard disks and considered buying an internal 
drive and putting it in a caddy myself (the you tube videos look dead 
easy). However, there seems to be very little
difference in cost or any 
other benefit that I can fathom (?). Apart from perhaps including an 
eSATA connection?  Since there does not seem to be a huge speed 
difference between USB 3.0 and SATA 6gb/s and given that virtually all 
computers these days have usb ports, I was going down the usb 3.0 route 
only.  (good plan?)

So, I need x2 external USB 3.0 disks from a decent manufacturer. Which 
leads me to the most important of questions....  What are the decent 
manufacturers?

I have had a look at a few studies and it seems that Fijitsu, WD (eeeasy 
BA!!) and Seagate are some of the most reliable.? To be fair, the data 
is a little out of date and is lacking on many models of hard disks (the 
less popular ones).

http://www.storagereview.com/php/survey/survey_result_tree.php?k1=uHdG9BGYn6&id=0&ph\=

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-reliability-storelab,2681-2.html


Before taking the plunge and spending my hard earned cash, any final 
advice from those here would be much appreciated.

Many thanks
Roly :-)

PS, eventually I will make a backup box and / or a NAS. But for me that 
represents *a lot* of learning - which i just don't have time for right 
now.... :-)