Who do we like for portable hard drives?

[dogmush]

I need a new portable hard drive.  My WD and Toshiba are full.

I am looking at a Seagate 4TB

That's about the price Iwant to pay,and I normally just go for as much capacity as I can get for the money.  Those that keep up with hardware trends, Is Seagate still putting out decent drives?  Are there others I should look at?  I can move the budget a bit for compelling reasons.

Thanks.

[Unisaw]

I have had very good luck with Lacie Rugged for years.  However, some others have reported problems.

[Ben]

I have the Seagate Expansion 1TB, 3TB and 4TB. The 1TB has been running since 2011. No problems with any of them.

[lee n. field]

I sell whatever brand and model we have on hand (or from Staples).  Don't notice any particular problem with any of them.

[cordex]

According to Backblaze HGST has the lowest failure rate in 4TB drives.

[AJ Dual]

According to Backblaze HGST has the lowest failure rate in 4TB drives.

This. I check their ongoing stats. Recommend HGST's to people.. then they don't listen, and just buy something cheap.

[freakazoid]

Whenever I buy a new one I go to newegg and check out the reviews.

[zahc]

It doesn't matter. Everyone hates the brand that crashed on them last. Everyone has stories about this one supposedly bad brand drive they have that's been spinning 15 years. Read the reviews, buy the supposed best, and you might be on the leading edge of a bad batch. It's a dice roll.

[Ben]

It doesn't matter. Everyone hates the brand that crashed on them last. Everyone has stories about this one supposedly bad brand drive they have that's been spinning 15 years. Read the reviews, buy the supposed best, and you might be on the leading edge of a bad batch. It's a dice roll.

Lotta truth there. I've used Maxtors, WDs, and Seagates over the years, and they all ran out of room before they had a chance to fail.

[cordex]

It doesn't matter. Everyone hates the brand that crashed on them last. Everyone has stories about this one supposedly bad brand drive they have that's been spinning 15 years. Read the reviews, buy the supposed best, and you might be on the leading edge of a bad batch. It's a dice roll.

Yes and no. Yes there is a chance that any drive will fail. No, it is not an equal chance.  If someone is recommending for or against a drive or brand based on a sample size of a few drives that they have owned then sure, those data are of limited value. If you have someone who buys consumer drives by the tens of thousands then trends start to be useful.

Just because you can get always get a lemon does not mean that you can't avoid some risk by looking at the experiences of people who are in a position to have something worthwhile to tell you. We are talking the difference of cumulative failure rates between less than 1% and more than 28% in the case of 3TB drives.

[Fly320s]

What about SSDs?  Are they getting reliable and cheap enough to replace conventional HDs?

[KD5NRH]

Yes and no. Yes there is a chance that any drive will fail. No, it is not an equal chance.

Very reliable: http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Paper-TapePunch-Card-Maker-and-Reader/

[RevDisk]

What about SSDs?  Are they getting reliable and cheap enough to replace conventional HDs?

Yes. Stick to Samsung or Intel. Scratch that, just buy Samsung ones. Little more expensive, worth every penny. Not a biggie for the consumer world, but I nearly had tears when Samsung started shipping their 16TB SSDs. Because it's going to screw SAN vendors in a couple years, and those rat bastards deserve to have their industry shattered.

Switch to SSDs, seriously. They're relatively cheap these days and provide a massive performance boost.

You want conventional HDs for bulk storage. I'm very fond of WD Red for my NAS devices, and use a lot of them. We RAID6 so unless a batch is very bad, we don't care. By the time the warranty rolls around, we generally want larger disks anyways. As AJ and cordex say, watch Backblaze for their recommendations but don't sweat it too much. Bad batches happen everywhere. Replace your hard drives every five years anyways.

[cordex]

What about SSDs?  Are they getting reliable and cheap enough to replace conventional HDs?

In my opinion, SSD replacement of HDD is still largely situation dependent.  The primary advantages of SSD are speed and lower power consumption (and to a lesser extent shock and heat resistance), but the disadvantages are a tenfold increase in cost per unit of storage and slightly increased chance of losing data even on an otherwise operational drive.  SSD also tend to experience increased failures based on age, not just usage.

In broad terms, at the moment SSD will cost something like $0.30 per gigabyte vs. somewhere around $0.03 per gigabyte for HDD. 

For a laptop I would definitely go for SSD without question.  Boot drives and application storage on high-end desktops would be beneficial as well.  Backups, media libraries and long term storage I'd still buy HDD.

No matter what you go with, plan for drive failures and back everything up.

[Ben]

Just because you can get always get a lemon does not mean that you can't avoid some risk by looking at the experiences of people who are in a position to have something worthwhile to tell you. We are talking the difference of cumulative failure rates between less than 1% and more than 28% in the case of 3TB drives.

Certainly do your research and for instance, don't buy a Seegate drive instead of a Seagate. In the early 2000's, I was using Maxtors because they were getting the better user and tester reviews, and Seagates and others were not. I've certainly switched brands based on the current reviews when I was shopping. However, I still believe that at least as of now, the useful life of a drive (i.e., size) will generally end before the physical life of the drive (given ordinary care)*, so as long as it's a brand name and you do at least minimal research to ensure it's not a lemon model, you'll likely be okay. Backups are a given though.

* While I've never had a personal drive failure, I had a few at the old job based on drives running 24/7 in a high heat and dust environment where I didn't really have any good cooling options, so in that case physical life was much less than useful life.