most reliable 2tb hdd for media storage
- Thread starter arnoldma
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Soldato
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There's no such thing as a more reliable drive than any other really with some isolated issues aside. Buy whatever is cheapest really.
I have a 2tb Caviar Black and never had a problem. I'd recommend one of those.
Not worth the price for storage drives.
You can buy 2 of the 5,400-5,900rpm drives for the price of one of those.
There is if you bought the first 1.5TB Seagate drives (with CC1G or lower firmware).
75% failure rate for me (3 of the 4 drives between my brother and I failed)
. Saying that, all 3 failed ones are still going strong after replacement and upgrade to CC1H
Soldato
Come back in 2 years and ask again. There's no sensible data when they're this new.
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WDC WD20EARS is the one I have and never had a single issue with it.
Stoner81.
Stoner81.
I have a 2tb Caviar Black and never had a problem. I'd recommend one of those.
Pretty expensive though. Great as a large, fast system drive, but overkill if you're just using it to store videos or photos (as I imagine many hard drives this big are used).
I'm trying to decide between the WD Green (WD20EARS) and the Samsung F4 (HD204UI). Normally impossible to judge hard drives on reliability - a small but significant proportion of all mechanical HDs will fail. The Samsung is a bit cheaper and apparently slightly faster (though I'm not too bothered about speed for a media drive). The WD is supposedly quieter, but I've heard some bad reports about it taking too long to spin up and thus crashing Windows 7 on resume from sleep. Can anyone confirm that?
(edit) Anyone have any comments on the Seagate offering (Barracuda Green)? That's quite cheap on OcUK at the minute.
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The samsung 2TB on offer for £51.98 atm seems like a steal!
Soldato
Most reliable? For a single drive I would bet on a WD Black, however with just a single drive the chance of a failure which loses all your data is still very much a possibility - even with a high quality drive. To counter this you either need to have a good backup routine or use a RAID array that maintains all the data if a single drive fails at one time (though still vulnerable to data loss if something causes more than one drive to fail at once).
Two Samsung F4 2TB drives (£52 each at the moment, £104 for two) in RAID1.
Alternatively, three Samsung F1 1TB drives in RAID5 would be a relatively quick and relaible option for 2TB @£102 (motherboard dependent of course and takes up a fair bit of physical space).
Two Samsung F4 2TB drives (£52 each at the moment, £104 for two) in RAID1.
Alternatively, three Samsung F1 1TB drives in RAID5 would be a relatively quick and relaible option for 2TB @£102 (motherboard dependent of course and takes up a fair bit of physical space).
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Tempted to buy a couple and stick one in a USB caddy or similar. Since I'd mainly be using it for video content, weekly backups would probably suffice as well as RAID1. With RAID1, I'm always a little concerned at the thought of my PSU blowing up and taking both the disks out...
I quite like Western Digital simply because you hear very few failures with them. They also make the excellent Raid Edition (enterprise) drives that gives me confidence Western Digital know what there doing.
For reliability (on a budget) I would choose 2 Western Digital 2TB greens and use in mirrored raid.
For reliability (on a budget) I would choose 2 Western Digital 2TB greens and use in mirrored raid.
I think it's practically impossible to compare the reliability of different drive makes (outside of a few isolated models which are well-known to be rubbish). For every person who swears by a particular manufacturer, there's always someone else who thinks they're the spawn of Satan because all their drives failed! I wish there was a large-scale statistical comparison of disk reliability. Google wrote an interesting piece on it, but didn't include what would have been the most interesting information - which brands are the most reliable!
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I may be getting the seagate green as I'm in desperate need of space, I'm not going for the wd just cause of the issues I've heard, my raid 0 velociraptirs are faultless and both second hand, 100% good in hdtune
Want to but this weekend myself
Want to but this weekend myself
I have a 2tb Caviar Black and never had a problem. I'd recommend one of those.
I have the same drive, solid as a rock.
+1 recommendation
+1,000,000 you need to buy from personal experience, i like samsung and hitachi and wont touch WD with a barge pole due to my recent failures - but this is MY opinion and everyones will be different
