what do you think it the most reliable ext hard drive?

[bgelfand]

...I "assumed" that an external desktop drive is more robust and maybe more reliable just from the extra bulk; but, I don't know that and have found nothing to back up that "assumption."

 

For reliability, no.

 

Here is the Specification Sheet for WD 2.5 (Laptop) Black drives

 

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-771435.pdf

 

and hers is the one for Black Desktop Drives 3.5 inch:

 

https://www.wdc.com/content/dam/wdc/website/downloadable_assets/eng/spec_data_sheet/2879-771434.pdf

 

Be sure to compare equal drives (1 TB drives) from both sheets.

 

The 2.5 inch drives have better specifications for both Load/Unload cycles and the ability to withstand shock. The ability to withstand shock is very important if you will regularly move the drive.

 

If your external drive will always sit on your desk, use the 3.5 inch drive. If you will move it offsite on a regular basis, use the 2.5 inch drive.

[Jochen_S]

have had experience with various brands of external drives in the past. The only one that conked out on me was because I dropped it - at least once or twice. Some endured dropping very well (haha). I am more troubled by the many different, confusing cables and very often it took a while to figure out which was for which, if at all. What a pain

A friend sticks labels "year & purpose" on his wall warts.

My suggestion: Invest into an assortment of different adhesive tapes and mark stuff that belongs together with the same tape. Example: My Netbook here is marked with a strip of white medical near the power socket, the matching cable has a matching strip straight behind the plug going into it and the PSU box + the cable leading to it are marked the same way. The external 3.5" HDD its cables and PSU are marked with xmassy owls on cyan background. The cables are marked roughly every foot, to make dragging them out of a mess with their brothers and sisters easier.

 

FTR: I can still enjoy a book on a train without reading glasses but I am planning to get old. Planning worst cases I recomend imagining a friendly grandma in law, way too vain to out her reading goggles, volunteering to fetch your stuff and drive it to the hospital.

• No comment on drive brands; follow @Spearhead 's link and keep in mind that wars don't get won by classy equipment in way too short supply.
  

I had issues with the PSUs of external 3.5"s sold most likely "Medion" rebadged at German cheapo Supermarket chain Aldi (who just started expanding into the US?) - The drives themselves worked transpanted into PCs and that anecdote happened a decade ago.

When I bought fancy metal cases for external drives, I had a minor issue with tiny screws holding their power socket in pace coming loose.

Having some adapt anything (IDE, SATA, Floppy etc.) to USB cables at hand is surely a good idea.

If you have kids, cats and similar running around (or over?) your desk, ponder a pseudo climbing hook hanging from your ceiling to secure drives &/ camera straps.

[Ed_Ingold]

Wall warts. I hate them, but can't live without them (even the pure white ones). I found, to my regret, that 16 VDC supplies have the same connector as 12 VDC, even 9 VDC. When the smoke escapes, the device stops working. Most portable hard drives are now powered through the USB or TB connection. At least I don't have to travel with these infernal devices (except the white ones).

 

I use silver metallic pens to write on the black wall warts, designating their matching device. It's harder to see than tape, but relatively permanent. If you prefer to use tape, "spiking" tape comes in a variety of colors. It is thin, cloth based, and non-gumming. It is used to mark (spike) the location of stage gear or anything else (including cables).

 

The polarity of wall warts is wrong half the time, and they don't fit in the same extension or outlet along other devices. I keep a few short extension cables, about 1' long, for this purpose. They're also useful for plugging into power strips located deep within road cases. I also use short power cables to connect gear mounted in road cases, to keep down the clutter.

 

This is the drive case I use for ongoing project work. Orico also makes cases for single drives, including SSDs which are very compact and durable. I like these because no tools are required to mount the drives. they just slip in and are held by a latching door. The case is also available with a RAID interface, if you want to build your own.

 

https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-Aluminum-3-5-inch-Enclosure-Drive-Sliver/dp/B00K7W5RGI/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&qid=1518098729&sr=8-12&keywords=orico+hard+drive+enclosure

Edited February 8, 2018 by Ed_Ingold

[john_harper9]

WRT power supplies, the wall warts and other external supplies are replaceable, find an adapter with the same output voltage, amperage, barrel pin size and polarity. (Jameco is my goto source) Having a power supply fail in an external RAID is a different issue. Had a ReadyNAS die on me recently when the power supply failed. Fortunately, replacement PSUs are still available from a vendor in England. While I waited for the PSU to arrive, I tried the disk set in a slightly newer ReadyNAS that was running the same firmware revision. It booted and ran fine, saving me the PITA process of finding another 4TB of storage and restoring backup copies to another device. Once the PSU arrived, I had to cut a hole in the case for the fan, installed the PSU, returned the disk sets back in their original enclosures, and was up and running. (Netgear built my vintage ReadyNAS box with a single large fan and circulated air through the PSU via a system of baffles. The PSU gradually cooked itself. The replacement PSUs have their own fans and need a case mod to install.)

 

What I have learned from using "redundant" systems over the years is the redundancy always seems to have some fatal point of failure. PSUs in particular. I've had fully redundant servers go down because the dual power supply management board failed (not an easy replacement to obtain in a hurry), plug in redundant PSUs fail within hours of each other, non-redundant PSUs in storage devices fail, etc.

 

While RAIDs address the problem of failed drives (and they will), they do not solve the failure of the circuitry that controls and powers the RAID. In my recent case, I was fortunate to have a compatible ReadyNAS that saved the day. RAID on motherboards is a risk, as I have found out, when the motherboard dies. Unless you can acquire spares for the suite of PSUs and boards at the time of purchase of the storage device, you have to accept that data may not be easily recoverable from a RAID.

 

WRT to disk reliability, my experience is "it varies". Purchasing "Enterprise" grade drives (about a 30% premium) provides a 5yr warranty, and I have 10 year old drives still spinning. I also steadily replaced one vendor's premium drives at 9 month intervals and always pre-ordered spares to cover the warranty exchange wait time.

 

Since my ReadyNAS failed, I have been thinking about my future storage purchases and RAID is probably not in the picture. A couple of single disk NAS devices, with some sort of scheme to mirror the file systems (not real time) is probably the most cost effective. If one fails, the other is available until a replacement is acquired (and since I'm not trying to rebuild a discontinued RAID box, replacement is simple and quick). Cloud storage over my DSL connection it painfully slow so I use external portable drives for backup.

 

I also use external SSDs to extend the storage media of my notebooks and will probably extend that approach to my photo editing workstation ultimately replacing its internal RAID.

[Mary Doo]

Invest into an assortment of different adhesive tapes and mark stuff that belongs together with the same tape.

 

Thanks. I did wise up later and began to address identification in some way, but not before the problem became apparent. Now there are still unidentified cables of course. Balls of bunched up cables are not a pretty sight to behold. :eek:

[tomspielman]

BTW, The IT director at a company that I worked for, laid-off/fired the guy doing the server backups. But he did not replace him, nor did he have any of the other IT guys do the backups. So for one month, there were NO BACKUPS being taken of ANY of the company's servers. And this situation was only discovered by accident. Man, talk about loosing respect for the IT department. This was the third, most serious and last nail in the IT coffin. After that incident, we in Finance did not give IT control over our new servers, which until then we had planned to hand over to IT. I became the Finance server admin, and I owned the servers; doing the daily on-line and monthly off-line backups, until I left the company.

 

Seems like an odd solution to that problem and a strong indicator that management of that company is messed up. If the Finance department appears not to be capable of handling basic accounting, do you turn over the books to someone in Marketing or do you fix the Finance department? What would have happened to the servers and backups if you had gotten hit by a bus? A better solution would be a different IT director or at least giving the one that's there the necessary training and resources.

 

Anyway, you're right about not relying on a single drive no matter how good the model is by statistics or reputation. That is no guarantee that any particular drive won't fail long before you would expect. A raid array will protect you against a single drive failure and can improve throughput but you need at least 3 drives for that to happen. And raid array or not, you still want a backup solution of some kind.

 

In my case, my pictures are stored on a raid array and then backed up to another drive. Both the raid array and the backup drive are also backed up to the cloud. This is done automatically.

Edited February 14, 2018 by tomspielman

[RaymondC]

Maybe there is some truth what is the more reliable hard drive generally speaking but it's not absolute. For me is why pay more for that when it's not guaranteed. I would still need a no. of different hard drives. So I don't use RAID, I have a data drive inside the system, a internal backup as well as a SSD boot. then i have 2 externals in my drawer and 1 in a custody box. HDDs generally come with a 2 or 3yr warranty now min. Used to be 5yrs but that has generally reduced, you can still get 5yr with some more expensive hard drives but they cost more.

 

It's also not just the HDD cos what happens if the computer goes bad, like the motherboard?

 

Should my PC go bad or the SSD boot go bad. Since I use synching instead to my drives. I can just plug a external drive into my laptop and away it goes. I dun have a spare SSD with Windows installed sitting in a drawer for that if .. situation.

 

Should my data drive go bad in my PC. I just change the drive letter to the internal backup drive and my data will be there.

Edited February 14, 2018 by RaymondC

[tcyin]

Cloud backup is only good for cold storage. If you have another convenient way to back-up offsite, for $50 or less annually, then go for it.

 

I'm not sure exactly what 'cold storage' is, but my interpretation of the term and of cloud storage by BB is the opposite. If you delete a file on your computer or external drive to make room for other files, I believe BB will then delete the file from the cloud within a short time period. So it's not good for long-term, what I would consider 'cold storage.' Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[dcstep]

Do have a question?

[Jochen_S]

@tcyin I believe the big cloud storage related issue is the mismatching of file size & transfer speed. So if we are splitting hairs maybe let's call cloud storage "luke warm"?

"If you delete a file on your computer or external drive to make room for other files, I believe BB will then delete the file from the cloud within a short time period" Isn't that relevant when you consider the eternity it will take to re-download a huge drive from the cloud or even worse, to upload it into the cloud, as @dcstep described.

[dcstep]

"Cold Storage" to me, is cloud, tape, disk or whatever storage that is permanent and not accessed for daily or even occasional usage. It's mainly for Disaster Recovery and, hopefully, you never have a disaster, so you never use it.

[Gary Naka]

Tom

Yes management was to a degree 'messed up.'

We thought that the IT director got his job by some connection to the president.

[tcyin]

"Cold Storage" to me, is cloud, tape, disk or whatever storage that is permanent and not accessed for daily or even occasional usage. It's mainly for Disaster Recovery and, hopefully, you never have a disaster, so you never use it.

 

But BB backup is not permanent

[dcstep]

But BB backup is not permanent

Yeah, so?

[Gary Naka]

I am thinking Mary's solution may be the best for me...I "assumed" that an external desktop drive is more robust and maybe more reliable just from the extra bulk; but, I don't know that and have found nothing to back up that "assumption." As they will not be used as portables-they will just sit there, the smaller form factor and no a/c power brick has appeal. Two 2 tb drives won't break the bank and I can do staggered backups.

 

Most external drives are the same drives as what is put in the computers, just in a small case.

The only physically robust drive is a Solid State Drive (SSD), because it does not have any moving parts.

But electronics can and do fail, less than mechanical, but it can still fail. So even SSD does not guarantee total safety.

 

BTW, do NOT use just one backup drive.

Get THREE backup drives. Label them 1,2,3. Then rotate through them sequentially in whatever time period is appropriate for you, I do quarterly. This way you have 3 generations of backup.

And get them OUT of the house, and into some place safe, like your bank safety deposit box.

 

BTW2, backing up to an external drive will take time, even with USB3. Your hundreds of gigabytes of data will take time to download to the drive. I do my backups overnight when I can let it run for hours. The more and larger files you have, the longer the backup will take. If you have a LOT of data, you will have to plan and do the backup over several days.

 

Don't let that long backup time discourage you, just plan for it. One way is to separate your files, into active and archive.

Archive data does not constantly change, so what if it takes 3 days to back it up, you are not accessing it. So you can even run that backup during the day or over the weekend. And you don't need to take another backup of your archive until you add more files to it. So the frequency of backups is reduced.

[tcyin]

Yeah, so?

 

So it's not cold storage.

[dcstep]

So it's not cold storage.

 

If I don't make daily changes, it IS cold storage, but it's being updated every day and if I delete file, then it's deleted on BB. The aspect of cold storage that remains is that it's impractical for daily usage. I work with files on my local drive, unlike iCloud, where you might actually call up the file from the cloud and work it. BB doesn't work that way. You're only going to use it for disaster recovery. I guess I'd modify and say there's Cold Storage and there's Deep Cold Storage, where files are never deleted and almost never called on.

[Gary Naka]

BTW, I do a tiered backup myself

• I do quarterly FULL backups to an external drive.
  
• Then I have a daily cloud backup of selected files that change. This is primarily for my accounting files and similar active files, which can change daily, not photo files.
  

I do not do a cloud backup for photo files, cuz it just takes toooooo long.

• My cable upload speed is 6MB/sec, compared to 60MB/sec download speed. 6MB/sec is painfully slow when you have a lot of files to upload. I have had to run some of my school uploads overnight, cuz I did not want to watch it for more than an hour, during which internet access (like to this forum) on my computer is slow.
  

• A separate dedicated computer to upload from a NAS to the cloud would make daytime backups possible, and not affect your working computer much.
   
  
• If you do cloud backup, I strongly suggest you buy the faster upload package from your ISP. Or plan for a long backup time.
  

If I do a serious project, like my nephews wedding, I take project backups. This is in addition to my quarterly backups. And in this case, it can be restricted to the project files, so the backup does not take so long to run.

• #1 As soon as I upload the pictures. So that I can clear the memory card.
  
  • This is the biggest most time consuming backup as it is ALL the image files (pre-edit).
    

  [*]#2 In the middle of editing. When I have done enough editing that I do NOT want to have to redo it.

  • Depending on how big the project is, you may have more than one intermediate backup.
    
  • The old backup guideline is, "backup when you have made enough changes that you do NOT want to have to redo it."
    

  [*]#3 After I have completed editing.

If you do project backup, you will need more drives. Because like time based backup, you need to get the backup OUT of the house/office ASAP, to where it will be safe.

If you have small projects, you can use USB thumb drives.

• Note: Some of those thumb drives are SLOW to write to.
   
  
• The newer ones may be faster than the ones that I used. It was so slow that I gave up and switched to a USB hard drive.
   
  
• You need to test whatever thumb drive you buy, to determine if the write speed is fast enough.
  

A backup drive next to your computer is of no value if you have a fire. Both the computer and backup will be destroyed.

This is why you need to get the backup OUT of the house/office, ASAP.

Edited April 5, 2018 by Gary Naka

[dcstep]

Gary, how many TB of images do you have? In the Bay Area, I'd think that you would have decent upload speed. With about 3.5 TB, my first upload to Backblaze only took about three weeks. Once that's done, it's seamless.

 

I used to do much as you do, but maintaining two on-site HDs and BB is much easier and more current for me than moving files physically to an off-site NAS drive (at my office). It takes discipline to keep current, when dealing with off-site physical drives.

[Gary Naka]

DC,

About 1TB of pix.

I could buy a plan with a faster uplink speed, but I generally don't upload enough to make it worth the additional $$.

iDrive will send you a hard disk to copy files to, to kick start the initial load. That is what my friend did with his computer.

I think Carbonite is just internet backup, so like BB the initial backup takes time.

 

Yes, doing local backups takes a LOT of discipline. It is very easy to keep putting it off; tomorrow, tomorrow, next week . . . before you know it, it is the next quarter :-(

And taking the backup to the bank is an effort, if you don't already do a regular bank run.

That is where the automated cloud backups shines. It just runs in the background, requiring no effort, after the initial setup and test.

 

I am just more comfortable with local backup and restore. That comes from being an old foggy. I remember 8 inch floppies, punch cards, paper tape, and 8k DIP memory.

Although cable 60MB/sec download speed is 30-60x faster than my old DDS2 tape drive which was at in its day a blazing 30-60MB/min. Yes I said MINUTE. That was one reason I switched from tape to hard disk as my backup media. The other was that the drives and amount of data got too big for the tape drives that I could afford. My DLT tape was 20GB native 40GB compressed. That was HUGE back in the day, but today, I have a 2TB hard drive.

 

BTW, my 2nd hard drive failure happened just a couple days after I did a full backup to tape. That backup saved my butt. The restore was a piece of cake, compared to what it would have been without the tape, as my first drive failure was. Oh that one HURT.

I am a survivor of TWO hard drive failures. Lightning struck twice. And I fully expect a third drive failure some time in the future.

 

I have worked on stuff on Google Drive. Editing an image was painful, primarily because of the slow save/upload time. It just frustrated me. So the cloud as working storage is a no-go for me.

 

Oops time to head out to help my wife move her office, and play IT guy.

[scott_eaton5]

Working in Data Centers and supporting hundreds of SANs the past 15 years I've replaced hundreds of spinners. I've had EMC units blow 10 drives in a month simply because the drives had the same sequential problem on the production line. When SSD's fail they tend to die without warning and about the same statistical rate as 10k enterprise spinners in my experience. 15k spinners have lousy reliability, but they are incurring wear and tear at a 50% faster rate. I've also not found SAS more reliable than SATA. Budget USB enclosures (or budget NAS units) tend to come with high MTF / cheap drives, and those should be avoided. Buy em' empty and use better drives. WD blacks, HGST, and more premium drives seem statistically more robust in my experience than the absolute cheapest drives bought via column sorting on Newegg.

For home use I run 'caddy' type USB 3 externals where I can plug any SATA drive in at a whim. I recycle my drives this way -vs- tossing them out. With high quality backup software like Veeam or Macrium Reflect available for free on desktop there's no reason to not have bullet proof backups anymore.

I have big debates with other system admins about tape, which I hate. Yers, you can boot an AS-400 from LTO, but it's not reliable as people think because tape units themselves are very unreliable. You just don't go out and replace an iSCSI or fiber LTO unit when it fails, and I don't have to 'clean' and 'tension' a bulk SATA drive.

[AlanKlein]

When you die, your wife's new husband will trash all your stuff. :)

[AlanKlein]

I use a 1.5 TB WD My Passport Ultra to back up my files in real time. No problem to date, about two years. I haven't got any error messages and set up initially was minimal. I like that I don;t have to deal with it. It seems to do it's job. It's so quiet, every now and then I get concerned and check to see of it's backing stuff up - and it is.

 

Any throughts on the My Passport Ultra units?Should I replace them at some time and use the old for archival?

[dcstep]

I use a 1.5 TB WD My Passport Ultra to back up my files in real time. No problem to date, about two years. I haven't got any error messages and set up initially was minimal. I like that I don;t have to deal with it. It seems to do it's job. It's so quiet, every now and then I get concerned and check to see of it's backing stuff up - and it is.

 

Any throughts on the My Passport Ultra units?Should I replace them at some time and use the old for archival?

 

You need two back-ups, with one off-site or on the cloud. Are you doing that? (Just because a drive is quiet doesn't mean that it won't fail tonight).

[davecaz]

Working in Data Centers and supporting hundreds of SANs the past 15 years I've replaced hundreds of spinners. I've had EMC units blow 10 drives in a month ..

Scott's example points out the futility of relying on MTBF figures. We have to remember that we're talking about the mean time between failures, and a mean is what normal people call an average. So, unless you deal with large numbers of units, like on a data farm, the statistics are almost irrelevant. Sure, a unit rated at 250,000 hours MBTF theoretically will outlast one rated at 125,000, but it's not a guarantee. It's a statistic. And remember that there are three categories of untruths; lies, damned lies, and statistics.

 

Without knowing the variance and standard deviation in the data, the MBTF is likely to be misleading. A 250K MBTF unit with a huge variance and deviation may be a worse purchase than a 125K unit with a tight variance and deviation, because more of the 250K units could fail in a month than would fail in an equal number of 125K units. And when you're talking about 1, or even a handful, of units, it's a total crapshoot. You could get one that dies in a day or one that lasts a 500K hours. The odds say you'll get one from somewhere near the middle of the range, but this kind of data really doesn't become meaningful until you're dealing with large numbers of units. And that's why RAID was invented.

 

If a company could rely on all, or even 80%, of the 250K units they bought lasting 250K hours, it might be more economical to purchase nothing but the best. Since they can't, price becomes a much larger factor, to the point that it's often more economical to buy 2 cheap units instead of 1 expensive one. That's the rationale behind RAID. And it's not a bad idea for home or studio use, but it's probably not necessary. Multiple backups, as many people have said, is the way to go.