On 25.01.2019 22:24, James H. H. Lampert wrote: > Fellow List members: > > Would anybody care to voice an opinion on USB external hard drives in > the 2 terabyte size range, for automated backup purposes? > > We've been looking at the Seagate "Expansion" and the WD "Elements"; > I've noticed that on Amazon, both have a fair number of negative > reviews citing reliability issues. (We recently discovered that our > current Seagate had apparently failed on us.) > > Any opinions? Seagate? WD? Toshiba? Something else? > > -- > JHHL > All modern HDDs are a bit of a gamble, especially higher capacity ones. They could fail even while still being under warranty and it is no matter what make\model they are. IMO all those external USB storages with 3.5" disks are made to fail within a couple months after warranty expiration date. Because, they utilize cheapest hard disk models with reduced firmware functionality, some of them can't even show SMART table, because of cheap USB-to-SATA controller, and they also lacking adequate cooling.
If you value your data, my recommendation is to get inexpensive NAS with iSCSI, like Synology DS218j and run two disks in RAID1 for redundancy. This decision has many advantages, like: 1. You still will have your data even in case one drive fails or gets multiple bad blocks, so that 60Gb Virtual HD image will not turn out to be a punch card when you will try to use it as a backup. 2. It helps with drives' cooling and monitor their health. 3. Synology runs on Linux under the hood and allows end user to access shell. This could be used to check RAID array for consistency on demand, so you will not be caught off guard when drives eventually develop bad blocks. 4. Using NAS as iSCSI target allows you to get the same functionality as if it was USB connected hard drive, among the other functionalities. Not all disk drives are the same, so search in specifications for RPM speed (performance), cache amount, presence of vibration sensors (so drives could safely function close to each other) and Error Recovery Control (so drives won't hung entire RAID array in case one of them fails). In general they are marketed as "NAS drives". Seagate IronWolf and IronWolf Pro series. WD Red and Red Pro series. Toshiba N300 Series. The ones from Toshiba are my personal choice. They are cheaper, have all required functionality and offer 7200RPM performance without flashy marketing with "Pro" suffix. The only down side is they have 3 year warranty, while Seagate and WD offer 5 year warranty. Still, I had WD Black drives that also come with 5 year warranty and they failed within 3 years with various reasons. Of course they were RMA'd, but still lost their data. Like I said it is a gamble, so it's better to have some insurance. -- With kindest regards, Alexander. ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian - The universal operating system ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://www.debian.org ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
