most reliable HDD?

[Chum]

barely find any consistent reviews on the Egg. WD or Hitachi? 1 TB or higher

 

[rayraysfunhouse]

I've always been a big fan of WD. Caviar black and caviar blue are great drives. With any HDD you're going to have mixed reviews.

 

[Theocnoob]

Drives can fail. Hard drives especially. It's a crapshoot. That's why there's redundant RAID. Lol. Seriously though I like WD personally and I've never had a WD drive die on me.

 

[EarthDog]

Newegg reviews, LOL.

Here is something concrete and not just how people feel... : http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/741728-Hardware-Failure-rates-(2013-Edition)

As you can see, the four major companies have less than 1% overall failure rates. There are some individual bad series of drives so long as you stay away from those, brand really doesn't matter.

 

[Janus67]

Go by whichever warranty is longest IMO and make sure you regularly backup your data if it is important to you.

 

[Mpegger]

According to BackBlaze, Hitachi/HGST currently holds the best track record on reliability.



Their report: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

Keep in mind, if the report doesn't make it clear, they purchase mostly consumer drives off the shelf, from whatever source they can get the most cost effective solution from (BestBuy, NewEgg, usb enclosures that they remove the drive from, etc). So I would say this is more relevant to us normal consumers, then data from companies that buy in bulk direct from manufacturers and distributors (mostly enterprise drives), that we normal folks don't usually buy.

 

[EarthDog]

I like that resource too except that the environment its in is not close to ours (theirs are getting beat up constantly and consumer level drives are not intended to take such a beating really).

 

[Mpegger]

I like that resource too except that the environment its in is not close to ours (theirs are getting beat up constantly and consumer level drives are not intended to take such a beating really).

It's closer to a normal consumers setup then most companies. Again, they go with whatever is cheapest, and in many cases, this means buying the same drive, from the same places that we all buy drives from.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming-2/

They don't use enterprise drives for the most part, and I don't see how their drives are being "beat up constantly", other then when they are purchased and transported back to their sites, which would be the same as if we had ordered a drive online and had it shipped to us, or went to a store to buy it and bring it home. It then goes into one of their storage pods, and resides there till it dies or is replaced. I could see possible temperature problems with the way the storage pods are designed, but seeing as how it is going into a rack in a normal data center, I doubt they have quiet fans (not enough air for cooling all those drives) or have no A/C.

 

[EarthDog]

As I said, its the environment the drive is in... enterprise. Its is being used constantly which is not a typical home use model. So sure a drive may fail more frequently in such an environment (that it is not supposed to be in first of all), but will it fail if its not being thrashed for its entire life? That is why I like the subset link I posted better than this one.

Not to mention, another site did tests with drives and the WARMER they are the less they fail (to an extent of course) so the physical environment of a data center, which is typically cooler than your home and PC case, could also play a role there.