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Reliable external HDD?

O

Operaghost

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 4, 2004
Messages
1,315
So I've been looking to purchase an external HDD.

Browsing newegg, it looks like there are zero options for anything reliable. Even the devices that have a 4+ egg reviews seem to have multiple 1 egg reviews that describe drive failures, corruption, power failures, etc etc.

Are external HDD's just THAT bad? I mean I know there are exceptions to every rule, but these exceptions seem to be pretty common. A lot of people reviewing saying that thier drive failed after very minimal use.

Could anyone point me in the direction of a solid, proven drive? I'm only looking for about a 1TB drive.
 
Are external HDD's just THAT bad?
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I say its all hard drives (internal / external / even enterprise). I mean consider there is a ballpark 2% to 10% annual failure rate for all drives. If you were in that unlucky group of individuals who had a drive fail you would complain and rate the drive as crap even though the 90% of people who did not have their drive fail were happy. Remember that drive failures do not always mean bad manufacturing or quality.

Could anyone point me in the direction of a solid, proven drive? I'm only looking for about a 1TB drive.
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Get 2 and make backups.
 
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That's what's nice about not actually needing 6TB or more... just snag a couple 1 TB, and replicate. You can pickup portable 1TB drives 100 or less all day long... great for storing backups off-site, safety deposit box, etc.
 
The customer review ratings do seem to be lower for externals than internals. My wild/useless guesses:

1. External drives are handled more during manufacture. Instead of going from the production line to testing to the shipping container, before being boxed they probably get sent a separate factory that puts the internal drives inside external enclosures, and that factory is a lot less sophisticated and does a lot more work by hand.

2. People who buy internals tend to be more technically knowledgable than people who buy only externals.

3. Externals are banged around more by customers, and externals designed to sit vertically are often knocked over. I never let an external sit vertically, even if it's something wide like a WD MyBook, because I've seen people tip them over. It wouldn't surprise me if 2.5" portable drives are handled even more roughly than 3.5" drives because they're so light, and many come with cables too short to let the drive sit flat on the desk while it's plugged into the computer's front USB port -- I've seen some drives dangle from their cable.

4. Many USB 3.0 cables don't fit the ports quite right and limit speed to USB 2.0. I've seen that a lot with Seagates and USB 3.0 adapter cards but never with the replacement cables Seagate sent out, all which happened to be a slightly different shade of black.
 
Heat kills many hard drives, at least many of those that die prematurely. The overwhelming majority of external hard drives do not have a fan in the case, so naturally they'll have a higher death rate than internals that get some fan cooling. I've had a few die prematurely, but because I back-up my back-ups little of significance was lost. To better my odds of having zero Ext. HDD failures, I recently put a HGST 2 TB Ultrastar 7K4000 into a Rosewill RX-358 U3C external enclosure that has a fan to cool the HD. This set-up is a bit pricey, but if it reduces HD failures it is well worth the extra expense up front. In a few months if all is well I'll assemble a few more and put them to work. I'm still backing up my back-ups though. Nothing is perfect.

Here are a few articles from the Back Blaze blog that speak to hard drive durability and that helped me decide to switch to HGST and a fan cooled enclosure.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/01/21/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/11/12/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/12/04/enterprise-drive-reliability/
 
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Operaghost said:
Are external HDD's just THAT bad?
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USB is not particularly reliable and the controllers typically used in external HD enclosures are crap.
If eSATA is an option, you can avoid many of these issues.
 
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