Reliable USB External Hard Drives ?

I agree with this completely.

For every customer angry about data loss from a bad Western Digital drive, there's another customer angry about data loss from a bad Seagate drive.

There is no perfect, 100% safe data storage manufacturer.

 

as i said i own a pc business and we order tons of hdd's. at least from my experiences in the last year i dont order in wd's anymore. where wd has been steadily declining imo in quality seagate has been fantastic. though performance wise most of the time wd's are a hair better. the samsung f3's were some of if not the fastest platter based drives out and now those are being re-badged and seagates but they are in fact the same drives.. i agree its personal opinion but when i go through a couple hundred drives or more a month at times; i can honestly tell my experiences i also agree no mechanical drive should be considered 100% safe

 

same here. i work for the biggest dental IT support company in the UK so we go through many many drives a month and we have defo noticed that seagate's are more reliable than WD's

 

Placed order for Seagate External drive.

 

Are you referring to consumer drives, or enterprise drives, or both?

 

http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

Out of 9000 SATA drives in current use, they see a failure rate of 5% on average and find Hitachi drives to be by far the best with only a failure rate of 1%

Cheers, Nick.

 

Nice one. I love that kind of articles.
Mrk

 

consumer drives. as stated above, hitachi drives have long been known to be the best enterprise drives and the worst consumer drives.

 

lol i do local support for ezdental...

 

treehouse786,

In terms of "drives a month" that you go through and "reliability of drives", can I assume that you are referring to "Internal 3.5" Desktop Drives" ??
... I can *not* imagine that "Pre-Built" - External USB Drives (like wd MyBook, seagate GoFlex, etc) of any Vendor could be as reliable as Internal Desktop Drives.

 

@zfactor haha dental's where the money is baby, we exclusively provide IT help/assistance/hardware to dentists and let me tell you, they pay anything to have a smooth IT infrastructure with as less down time as possible, for anyone out there wanting to create a startup, dental's where its at

@JosephB we support around 7000 dental practices in the UK each with an average of 7 workstations and 1 server, i cant give you the exact numbers right now as i would need the info from the stock manager, but he did say that seagate 3.5 inch internal consumer drives were more reliable than WD's by around a few percent (which equals to hundreds of drives for us).

pm me in a couple days and i shall have the exact info for you, will have to be by pm as to avoid upsetting contract holders

 

Never trust your information to one single drive, always 2 copies at a minimum.

 

this i DO AGREE WITH

@joeb i do support as well for companies like dell, acer, etc in my local area on MANY laptops each month as well. a 2.5" portable external drive as well as a 3.5" style external desktop drive are internally EXACTLY identical to the drives used in desktops and laptops WITH THE EXCEPTION of wd drive's (which i HATE!!! that they do this) which if taken apart lack a sata connector on their "portable" 2.5" drives altogether and have a usb plug soldered straight to the board of the drive. im also a reseller for hornettek and a few other external enclosure companies and i sell a LOT of my "own" branded drives. i can say with total confidence that i now will always sell a seagate drive in one of these enclosures before i do a wd. and this past year the failure's have just got higher for wd to the point of not wanting to even use them since they have been failing OFTEN. i just dont see this with seagate or samsung over the last couple years. now if we go back 5 years my opinion would have been exactly reversed. especially when seagate got maxtor this was A BAD BAD time for seagate since maxtors failed all over the place. thats been weeded out now and personally i would currently recc any seagate first over a wd. this for sure includes the external drives. imo the mybook and wd portable drives are terrible..

 

I missed that There's generally little correlation between reliability of consumer and enterprise drives from a particular manufacturer, I think. So it can be misleading to just compare Seagate vs Western Digital vs Hitachi etc. Seagate Cheetah is my favorite enterprise drive, but I don't trust Barracuda any more. I've heard that it's really Maxtor now. On the other hand, both Western Digital VelociRaptor and RE3 have worked well for me. Although I haven't used their true enterprise drives, I suppose that they're very good. Thanks for the warning about Hitachi consumer drives. I'm not very familiar with them.

 

In the report I linked to, they use consumer SATA drives.

Cheers, Nick.

 

Thanks. I somehow missed your post That is a great article! Backblaze certainly likes the 3TB Hitachi Deskstar. Maybe that drive represents a design breakthrough. Generally, maybe it's not even safe to lump all consumer (or enterprise) drives from a given manufacturer. I wonder which Western Digital enterprise drive(s) they used, and found so unreliable.