Looking for most reliable drive

[Liver]

I know there are horror stories on all brands and models, but what do you consider to be a very reliable drive.

Will be used for backups of pictures, music, files (not a true drive image). I'll only connect the drive to perform that. So performance is less of an issue. Hell, even a 5400 or 4200 RPM drive is acceptable.

Just needs to be reliable.

[MrsOldMX]

I've had good luck with Samsung and Western Digital, but i highly recommend to get a decent power supply with clean and stable voltage rails.

[Ockie]

Really you should be fine with any brand. There is not one out there that stands way above the rest. My recomendation would be to avoid seagate at this very moment until they can sort out their issues and go with a vendor who offers an entprise drive (RE2, NS, etc)

Or better yet, get two smaller external drives, do a double backup.

[Liver]

Or better yet, get two smaller external drives, do a double backup.

That is my current solution and I am seeing the wisdom in keeping it unchanged.

[DonDon]

Be careful using Enterprise class drives. Some are meant for RAID 5 use only, such as the Western Digital RE drives. They have a system called TLER on them that limits the on board error recovery to 7 seconds to keep them from dropping out of RAID arrays.

TLER explained here. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery)

Basically, you should never use a TLER drive in in single drive or RAID 0 system. Consequently, you should always use TLER drives in a RAID 5 or 6 system.

Don

[ruu]

Have you looked into StorageReview's reliability database?

click "Reliability Survey" (http://www.storagereview.com/)

You have to register to see the database, and obviously the database is limited by what people own, so newer, more reliable drives might have not-as-impressive results because they have a smaller data pool to draw on, but people also provide comments about drive noise and such that are helpful to know.

Just a thought.