Eternal quest: Does ANYONE make a reliable external hard drive?

Long story short: I own 23 external hard drives, all 250 or 500 gb.

 

I have 16 LaCie hard drives; 5 have failed.

 

I have 7 Buffalo hard drives (I only started buying them recently after giving up on LaCie); 1 failed on me today.

 

[No tragic data loss yet, with any failed drive, because everything is on at least two external hard drives. I

used to *double*-backup everything, but once I saw what was going on, I now *triple* backup.]

 

Yes, I read reviews for all of the brands: Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi, Western Digital, Iomega.

 

For EVERY model of every brand, there are two ratings: 4 or 5 stars ("No problems / just minor feature wishes")

and 1 star ("Failed after only a few months").

 

I have seen no exceptions to the previous paragraph.

 

I'm not even sure what I'm asking, because I know one respondent will say "I've had good luck with my 7 hard

drives of [brand X]" and another will reply, "Are you kidding? I've had two failures in three months with that

brand!"

 

Thoughts, suggestions welcome. In the meantime, I'll keep triple-backing up....

[[i have seen no exceptions to the previous paragraph. ]]

 

Nor should you. All products have a failure rate. Every single one.

 

You can certainly buy from companies that offer longer warranties so you can get replacements but that doesn't

mean you won't see failures.

 

You buy for redundancy and you buy when things fail. You already have the solution.

They will all fail eventually which is why I back up on DVD Rs. I use Seagate internal and external drives and they're fine so far (4 years).

It seems to me like you need some sort of NAS RAID array rather than a pile of external drives.

 

In my experience, external drives really depend on what you are doing with them as far as their failure rate goes. My external drives aren't for anything but backups and archiving, so they don't get accessed or run very often. When I have attempted to use external drives constantly as part of my storage/work process, they have had a much higher failure rate.

 

But that's just my experience.

In my own personal and profesional experience (23 years of high end mainframe repair) this is what I found

works the best.

1) Make sure you are using a good brand of UPS and/or power filtering

2) Avoid turning drives on and off...that alone it the most single stressfull even a disk drive has to endure.

 

I have many WD drives (internal and external) that have been powered on and spinning for years (literally)

and never once have i had a fallout.

Does anyone make a reliable external hard drive?<p>You might research online storage.

Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.

 

I have personally had very few drive failures ... two in total over the past 20 years. I've had nothing but excellent service

from Seagate and Western Digital drives, either packaged complete or bare drives that I fitted into quality enclosures

myself.

 

I've had a number of issues with LaCie drives purchased on direction by various clients.

 

Good power supplies, good cooling, clean power ... they're all essential.

 

Redundancy, redundancy.

 

A good RAID fitted with an appropriate number of drives and configured properly is a more reliable storage device than a

single drive can ever be. And having two of them, in two locations connected via a network for mirroring, beats that

hands down. I hear the Drobo unit is excellent but I haven't used one myself yet.

 

Redundancy.

 

Multiple copies of your data is the way to ensure its safety. Hardware is transitory.

 

Godfrey

And having two of them, in two locations connected via a network for mirroring, beats that hands down

 

In case anyone is wondering, the reason to have two mirroring RAIDs is if the RAID controller fails. The drives don't have to fail. If the RAID controller fails, the drives are still good, but there (as for as I know) is no way to recover the data on them.

 

If I'm wrong on this, it won't be the first time I've been wrong.

My half dozen Maxtors have run 24/7 almost every day since 2000. I'm certain on/off stresses them more than running. If they get warm or you often hear them working something's wrong...like inadequate RAM. Maybe Maxtor's heavy aluminum case is important. I'm sure setting them up vertically (per Maxtor's stands) is helpful with cooling. 300G and 650G.

You're asking for a car that never ever breaks down. All mechanical devices are subject to wear and tear and will eventually

fail. Hard drives are complex and delicate by their very nature.

There are two kinds of hard drives. Those that have failed, and those that will fail. I'll second the suggestions regarding a RAID NAS (preferably two in RAID5 mode with mirrored data). It's the only way to get any kind of reliability out of fragile spinning magnetic platters.

 

Drobos are worth looking into if you can afford them. They're dead simple to use and very reliable. If you can tell red from green, you can use one.

Maybe there's a subliminal suggestion in your title: "Eternal" sounds a lot like "internal". ;)

The best one I've owned is a Fantom. It's lasted almost three years and seems to still be going strong. The three I owned before that all failed within a year or less. I turn the Fantom off except when I'm using it.

Maybe on car.net somebody is asking what car tires are reliable because they dont want to have a spare;and they have gotten a flat tire with all the brands they have owned? Why do pros have more than one camera? Your seeking a mythcal thing; 100 percent reliablity. What single wedding camera should one use thats "reliable" if the grooms dad is a Mafia Boss and the brides mom is a hitman?

western digital makes enterprise class drives that are a bit more reliable supposedly. I have approximately 12 or 15 of them spinning at least 12 hours a day for a while and have had no failures. These are all internal drives in cases with very good ventilation.

 

I think the insufficient fans and tight enclosures of external drives are the culprit in your situation. I would never buy one of those things for that reason. Look at an antec 900 or antec 1200 case, which has massive hard drive cooling and can hold six or eight drives per case, I think.

 

I set up three computers in those cases, with four drives in raid 10 arrays, plus one or two operating system drives each... Each raid 10 array is just for images, and a single drive failure will lose no data. They aren't portable, obviously, or fire proof, but they are reliable as anything I have seen and its easy to cram 2TB of storage into one machine, or even 4TB with a raid card that supports eight drives.

 

The bonus is that they are lightning fast too.

Ditto this answer:

 

** I think the insufficient fans and tight enclosures of external drives are the culprit in your situation. I would never buy

one of those things for that reason.**

 

Sounds environmental to me. Many drives have poor cases, ventilation etc... Go for enterprise level NAS: Snap

servers are great. Lacie also do some low cost NAS that can be configured as a RAID or mirrored and is in a good

case...

Hard drives fail, though not frequently. If you have 16 drives, you can expect one to fail per year, perhaps more if you switch them on and off or they get too hot. Sorry, but that's a fact of life.

 

I have had reasonably good luck with Lacie drives. However, they tend to use Maxtor (not my favorite) and have no cooling provisions. I build my own external drives using Western Digital SATA, 7200 RPM and 500GB or more, using Aluratec SATA-USB2 enclosures. I also have fan-cooled enclosures, but they are too bulky for routine use. The Aluratec enclosures are 5x7 inches and fit on a bookshelf (I need another bookshelf too).

 

Use hard drives for convenience and optical media for archiving. With the size of image files, it's getting harder to backup even to DVD's. However, if you keep up with your work, the time it takes seems less onerous. You can achieve a very high degree of security with a RAID Class 1 or higher. However the cost per MB is high and the capacity is limited. A RAID is only practical if your volume is very low or you keep only selected files hot.

For the volume of work I do, DVD archiving is impractical. And there's no efficient way to do a media check on 50+ DVDs

on a regular basis like I can do with hard drives.

 

I now use two 2T RAIDs which are mirrored as an archiving system. They work flawlessly, a disk-check is run

automatically every month, and all the data is instantly available if I need it. If one goes down, a replacement slots in and

is back up to date within a few hours.

 

Godfrey

I use western digital drives and the principle of redundancy. They have a 3 or 5 year warranty and I have had no difficulty

in replacing failed hard drives...and since I regularly have 3 copies of each picture, I can usually rescue with a modest

amount of work. More recently, I have been using the Drobo RAID system but with western digital drives.

 

I also verify my disks about once a month or so.

I like Hitachi drives. Because like everyone else's anecdotal reporting, they're the best.

I'm running only Hitachi and old IBM, never failed, all others exept WD failed, and always, unfortunately

Hitachi has no external boxes, my suggestion is to buy simple USB cable for connecting internal bckup ATA/SATA drives.