Topic: Which 3TB Serial ATA drive should I get?

[Hypnocracy]

Been living on external USB drives for archiving...the wifes old XP Media Center Desktop system drive shit the bed and it's time to rebuild. I picked up a cheap 160 Gig for the system disk...blew out the dust and got it up an running.

She lost a lot of photo's and what not...I guess instead of a RAID array I don't have money for we will get a cloud based backup service for her and a couple of 3 TB drives to have multiple backups of my stuff...which drive is the most stable for this old desktop?

Western Digital, Seagate or Toshiba?

[larrysellers]

I recently changed out a WD 2TB drive from my media server that seemed to be collecting bad sectors. I replaced it with a new 3TB Seagate and luckily only lost a little of the data. I have had better luck with the bigger Seagate drives but the WD that was going bad still had 3 weeks left on the warranty, so I am not too upset about having to replace it.

[Ultfris101]

Knock on wood (knock knock) but I've had pretty good luck with drives in general but I tend to stick with Western Digital and haven't been disappointed. I bought quite a few WD My Books and never had an issue. Ended up cracking them all and loading bare drives in a home built FreeNAS raid array and drives are still doing fine. Found they were all WD Green SATA drives, 1-2 tb.

Undoubtedly somebody will post and say they've had nothing but trouble with WD drives. YMMV

Local backup and a remote or cloud backup like Carbonite is the way to go. An important file needs to exist in three places to be considered backed up. Drives fail eventually.

Can't tell for sure your intentions, but be aware that a lot of cloud backup services don't backup external USB drives at least with their base service. I got sick of all the external disks laying around so I have the raid array and several internal drives in my main PC. I don't back everything to Carbonite but quite a bit. takes a while to get it all uploaded but eventually it will. I don't plan to restore multi terabytes of data but individual files here and there.

[H₂O]

I would buy 2 3tb drives from different manufacturers (one SATA online, one USB offline)  - backup the online to the offline USB every month

[stevetoney]

I would buy 2 3tb drives from different manufacturers (one SATA online, one USB offline)  - backup the online to the offline USB every month

Yup, I think this is the answer.

This 'which drive is best' question comes up all the time time and the answer is that you're fooling yourself (no disrespect intended to anyone) if you put any faith whatsoever in any drive by any manufacture.  So I personally think that answering that X manufacturer is better than Y is giving a false sense to someone that perhaps X drives might not fail, where Y's may fail...nope, THEY ALL FAIL.  Assume absolutely that, whatever you buy, it'll fail tomorrow and then you're on the path to data security. 

I generally also subscribe to more smaller drives than less bigger drives, but that can get cumbersome in terms of making sure everything is frequently backed up unless you're like me in that most of the data on the small drives is not accessed often...in that case I like having smaller drives because then I don't have all my data on a single pair of drives...less info is lost if I do have a drive failure.  That said, drive size isn't my main concern.  As long as you keep essential data backed up, it really doesn't matter if you're committing to small or large drives, as long as redundancy and reasonably frequent backing up is the key component to your 'safety' plan.

[Fatah Ruark (aka MIKE B)]

As others have said...it is not possible to say which company is better. Everyone has good runs and bad runs on drives. Regardless if your drive is from a good run or bad...it WILL DIE EVENTUALLY.

My plan is:

2 x drives in desktop. Drives are automatically cloned each night.

1 x drive OFFSITE (currently in my safe deposit box). This is case my house gets robbed, burns down, hit by a comet, etc. I back this drive up several times a year.

I also have a server in Europe that runs my torrents so I try to keep any shows not on the offsite drive still running as torrents. That way if the house does get hit by a comet I can retrieve the offsite drive and then back up what isn't on that drive from the server.

The server is optional...the 3 drives listed above should be MANDATORY for any taper that is even moderately serious about not losing their hard work.

[Ultfris101]

The server is optional...the 3 drives listed above should be MANDATORY for any taper that is even moderately serious about not losing their hard work.

Totally agree. Regardless of manufacturer and even media the rule of 3 holds and one of the copies should be offsite. Ideally on a different media type if practical but with climbing drive sizes tape and optical media just isn't worth the hassle for most people. Also the more it can be automated so you don't have to remember to do it and it can be done frequently the better when data changes frequently.

Seems like most people develop an affinity for a particular drive manufacturer for one reason or another but it really doesn't matter although I do recommend paying attention to things like warranty length which can give a little guidance on expectations. I looked at the box of a super cheap black friday maxtor drive at Office Depot a few years ago and it had a 3 MONTH warranty. No thanks.

[Gordon]

the problem with the wd green drives is the heads are set to park every 8 seconds!  this causes large amounts of load cycle counts causing lots of wear and tear on the drives.  luckily there is a fix for this.

http://www.synology.com/support/faq_show.php?q_id=407

I have two 3 tb greens and a 2tb green in my home server running 24/7 with no issues for about a year now.  I don't touch seagates anymore!  way too many failing seagates these days.

Remember there are now only TWO manufacturers of drives in the world.  WD and Seagate.  They bought all the others so no matter what "brand" it's one or the other.