Looking for a good STABLE single harddrive

After to many issues with a seagate 3tb disk that I regret buying, I'm looking for a new stable harddrive that will be used together with my SSD. The programes and games that dosen't fit on the SSD will be put on the harddrive.

I was first thinking about getting a WD Red 3TB, but after looking at: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/ the hgst drives seem superior. (I do however understand that they are being run in an extreme environment compared to being used in my desktop, so I assume those failiure rates will be lower in a desktop environment)

But I've been looking at the HGST Deskstar NAS, either 3 or 4 TB versions, but are there any other harddrives that you would recommend?

Does it matter that they are NAS drives? Will they work just as fine in a single configuration(not NAS)?

NAS simply means Network Attached Storage. It isn't indicative of the number of drives being used together.

HGST is the top of my suggested list, but WD is just below them. A NAS drive is meant to run 24/7 and have better compatibility with RAID cards. Won't hurt anything to use them directly.

Another difference with the NAS drives is TLER (or other acronyms used by other manufacturers.) It means that the drive can be configured (or is configured by default) to not spend too much time trying to recover from a read error. Standard drives can try for a long enough time (seconds?) to cause them to be dropped from RAID. In a RAID it is better for the drive to report the error quickly so the RAID can get the data from another source (unless it is a striped set with no redundancy.)

I have had no issues with non-RAID drives in RAID setups (Linux md-raid) and doubt there would be a problem using a RAID drive in a non-RAID configuration. If the drive is retrying a lot in order to retrieve data, it is likely already on it's way out.

I agree with the recommendations for HGST and WD as well. (And have been burned by Seagate's fall in quality. It's sad. I have several 200GB Barracudas with years of service that just keep going...)

seagate is the best hands down.

just kidding, no one in their right mind would ever buy seagate.

hgst / WD do it.

After looking around hgst seem hard to find in my area, so I will probaly get a WD black for programs/games, and a WD red for storage.

Hi there.

Since you're looking for a secondary drive to run your apps from I would suggest to look for one that has the right firmware for such usage. For instance from the WD line I can recommend either WD Blue or WD Black, depending on the programs and games you want to install.

So, WD Blue is your regular everyday drive that is most commonly used for regular computing, light gaming and workloads and combined with SSD. It is fully capable to run most games as well as many programs for editing or programming, and it comes with capacity up to 6TB.

WD Black on the other hand is a performance oriented drive, and if you want to run demanding apps that require fasting loading times I would recommend you this one. It is the fastest among them and has good features (such as a built-in dual-core CPU that makes the drive great for multitasking). It is designed for heavy gaming, big workloads and intensive file usage, and comes with 5-years limited warranty.

As for WD Red, it is a NAS/RAID class drive from the consumer series that is designed specifically for RAID environments and NAS devices. It is tuned and optimized for 24/7 performance, RAID arrays and up to 8-bay NAS systems. Basically this drive is often used for backups, stable secondary storage and in streaming builds, as well as NAS and RAID, so you can use it as an additional storage unit for your PC.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Cheers!

seagate definitely not drive to buy looking at annual failure rates...

WD Blacks, and HGST NAS. I did buy a Toshiba brand 4tb for $120 on sale. Supposedly has the newer design with 128mb cache. Seems great so far for my HTPC/server rig that's on 24/7. It's been in service for 2 months which is not nearly enough time to say it's a good drive, but we'll see.