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  1. ½ way to Rigel 7 cornemuse's Avatar
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    How is reliability between 2½" and 3½" HDD's? Between brands?
    I used to have good luck with WD Blue's & Maxtor (< a long time ago maxtors) (Did Seagate buy them out?) Always had not so good luck with Seagate & Toshiba. Fugitsu's were OK.

    Used for 'dedicated' graphics, not every day but hours on end when I use it.
    I've always used 3½" WD Blue's & occasionally WD Black's.

    I live close to Frys RIP & with their promo codes, & bought many both sized hdd's, 500 & 1 T drives, both in the $30 + - range, mostly 2½ size.

    I either clone or start from scratch to new hdd's, especially new os installs when system gets 'buggy'.

    So, do they both last as long?

    Reccomendations/suggestions welcomed

    (add Usage in Desktop Computer)

    -corne-
    Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, Can you repeat the question?
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  2. Member
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    Magic 8 Ball says...No one knows. Sorry for the long post, but buying a hard drive isn't as simple as it used to be.

    Buy on price and warranty. Backup, backup, backup.

    There are no truly good or truly bad drives on the market today. If there were, we'd see thousands or tens of thousands of overwhelmingly good or bad reviews because of the millions of identical drives in use.

    No matter what you buy, do a full stress test of the drive immediately after you buy it. Run a SMART test (I use and recommend CrystalDiskInfo) to ensue the drive is new (SMART will report number of times the drive has been powered on and hours used, <10 is fine), then do a full format and full write to the drive. Then repeat the process starting from checking SMART again.
    It will take time, days for large 8TB+ drives, but what are days compared to the years of use you're hoping to get out of it. This will stress the drive, which like all electronics is most likely to fall during the first few weeks/months of use.

    I'll post NerdGeek info when I get home from work.
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  3. ½ way to Rigel 7 cornemuse's Avatar
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    Thanks.
    I dont go over 1 T hdd's, way too much to lose in one fell swoop!
    Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, Can you repeat the question?
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    As long as you backup, backup, backup, there's (almost <GRIN>) no fear about losing data. 3-2-1 Backup. 3 copies of your data, 2 on the same or different media, 1 kept offsite physically or cloud.

    My advice is to spend 1/2 or 1/3 of your budget on the capacity you can afford to backup. So a 1TB purchase is actually 2x or 3x that for immediate backup.

    I don't like to think about it, but I've "lost" hundreds of TBs over the years, the last and biggest was 9TB immediately after I completed the transfer to a new 12TB drive. Formatted both the source and destination drive. *YAWN*, no problem, I had a third copy and two days later, back to as if nothing happened.

    Since you're limiting yourself to 1TB internal, unless you're getting a 2.5" drive, you don't have to worry yourself about the Nerdgeek text below.

    In general, manufacturer externals are cheaper than bare drives. But again, with a 1TB size limit, the price difference isn't that great. If you're planning to use them a an internal, you need to shuck (i.e. remove the drive from the case), possibly voiding the warranty. For 2.5" externals, only Seagate drives have are regular SATA drives that you can use internally. WD and Toshiba portables have the USB interface and port integrated into the mainboard, requiring a costly $$$ modification if/when the interface or port fails. In addition, the USB interface on WD My Passport and MyBook desktop externals use encryption through the USB interface, so if you try to read the data directly from the drive it won't work.


    ****Nerdgeek warning!*****

    Be aware that the HDD situation has changed over the past few years. Depending on how you plan to use the drive, writing more than you read, you may want to avoid SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) drives. These are slower to write to because as the name implies, the data tracks overlap like shingles, requiring a partial erasure of the previous data, before the new track/data is written. Read speeds are the same as non-SMR drives. Since you're limiting yourself to 1TB max, you don't have to worry about getting a 3.5" SMR drive, they're all CMR/PMR (conventional). If you go with 2.5" drives, all 500GB+ drives from all manufacturers (with the exception of the 1TB WD Red) are SMR.

    Above 1TB 3.5" drives, SMR may be used for cost savings. Note that on these charts, WD Blue drives may be SMR or CMR and all Seagate Barracuda drives above 1TB are SMR
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-lists-all-drives-slower-smr-techNOLOGY https://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/cmr-smr-list/

    Why does SMR matter? For the average home user, it doesn't unless you're constantly writing large amounts of data that's time critical to completion. This is how SMR drives came to become a major issue last year. Home users and tech reviewers with NAS setups with RAID found that certain WD Red (NAS) drives were timing out during resilvering, the process in RAID where all the files on the discs are rewritten to guard against corruption. This was because the Red drives used SMR, slowing the rewrite process and therefore seen an a disc error during the process.

    When confronted with the failures, WD admitted that had "submarined", i.e. switched some of the their Red drives as a cost savings to SMR without any notice. This lead to Seagate and Toshiba (who AFAIK hasn't specified which drives) admitting they did the same, which is why we have the listings above.
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  5. Video Restorer lordsmurf's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by lingyi View Post
    Buy on price and warranty. Backup, backup, backup.
    I buy based on drive noise. So Seagate wins...
    ...except for Exos. But it's a backup drive for me, not 24/7 plugged in.

    Backup, then backup the backup.
    Want my help? Ask here! (not via PM!)
    FAQs: Best Blank DiscsBest TBCsBest VCRs for captureRestore VHS
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  6. Member
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    +1

    And put the backup to your backup somewhere other than your primary location in the event of a catastrophic event, including theft.

    Unfortunately, the best I can do is keep my second backup set in another room and hope that it survives.
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  7. ½ way to Rigel 7 cornemuse's Avatar
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    Thanks for all the tips & info. I'm gonna start running with the little guys now.

    -c-
    Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, Can you repeat the question?
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