Choosing the HDD

[Pavel_9072]

Hello, dear forum members.

Could you please help with a solution. I would like to buy a hard drive for long term storage.
Is it better to take Seagate Exos 7e8 or Western Digital Gold?

Thank you very much for your recommendations.
Regards, Pavel

[lingyi]

Whichever is cheaper.

[jagabo]

I don't now which of those drives is best but generally WD has a better track record than Seagate.

But for long term storage you need to have at least one backup, preferably two. At least one of the drives should be stored off-site. And you need to monitor them periodically. First make sure they are still working. Run a full file compare of two drives. If one of them has a problem immediately copy (with verify) the contents of the good drive to a new drive to replace the drive with the problem. Because a drive with minor problems (say, one file is corrupt) is likely to get worse with time.

BackBlaze is about the only publicly available source of drive reliability statistics. They use consumer drives in a commercial cloud storage environment. That's of course that's very different than typical consumer usage, and not reflective of long term storage, but there aren't any better statistics available to the public.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2022/
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q1-2023/

[Subtitles]

I had bad experience with Seagate so I can't recommend them even if they offer it to me for free.
I never had any problems with WD.