Portable HDD or external enclosure for backups?

[Bandalo]

I currently have a pair of 2TB 3.5" drives in an external enclosure that I use for backups. The enclosure is attached to my NAS, and does a backup of the important data nightly.

I'm starting to run out of space though, and I've been looking at upgrading to a pair of 4TB drives.

Any real reason to stick with the old-school enclosure and desktop drives? It looks like WD and Seagate both have 4TB portable drives out that are actually a bit cheaper, and still have a 3 year warranty. How well do some of these big portable drives hold up? I haven't used any of the little portable drives for anything for many years. I know they used to be sub-par for reliability compared to regular desktop drives. Is that still the case?

 

[BlueWeasel]

I've always had good luck with WD and Seagate portable drives in 1TB, 2.5TB, and 4TB sizes. However, I just plug them in when needed.

Will you leave plugged into the NAS 24/7? In that configuration, I'd be concerned about the drive not entering sleep mode.

 

[Bandalo]

I've always had good luck with WD and Seagate portable drives in 1TB, 2.5TB, and 4TB sizes. However, I just plug them in when needed.

Will you leave plugged into the NAS 24/7? In that configuration, I'd be concerned about the drive not entering sleep mode.

I leave them plugged in 24/7, since the backups are automatic every night. Now the NAS they're plugged into SHOULD be able to let the drives enter sleep mode all day and then wake them up. No idea how it works in practice though. I'm not really concerned about the power savings, but I'll take it if it's no trouble.

 

[drescherjm]

Many USB externals will automatically spin down the drive after some period when not in use. With that said I have 2 HGST Touro 4TBs (bought separately months apart) attached to my linux sever / pvr. One of the spins down normally while the other one is always spinning 24/7 since the server is rarely powered off since I installed it in 2006. Both have their own zfs filesystem which is only used for the snapraid parity file..