PCA Forums

I'm looking to buy some mechanical hard drives. I have a 2 TB drive that is getting full. I bought it years ago, but not sure what is out there now that is reliable. Needs to be 7200rpm. Not sure which manufacturer is best. In the past, they used to sell drives with a 5 year warranty. Is that still available?

https://www.lifewire.com/best-sata-hard-drives-833475

5 year warranties for consumer drives is pretty much unheard of now. I think 3 years is the max without going to enterprise drives.

I like looking at he HDD Failure Rate charts from BackBlaze. Looking at the 4TB drives in this chart (below) for 2017 shows that there are some models that stick out as particularly good and bad.

HGST drives seem to have the lowest failure rate overall in the 4TB range. When you get up to 6 and 8TB the Seagates do a lot better than their 4TB brethren.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-dri ... -for-2017/

HGST, I have about 10 of them. Solid drives, and I also follow Backblaze stats.

So there is nothing wrong with using a NAS drive in a desktop environment? The drive will not be on 24/7.

I'm looking at this one: https://www.amazon.com/HGST-DeskStar-Hi ... dpSrc=srch

But I rather not pay for packaging and just get the bare drive.

No I wouldn't, unless you plan to use it in a RAID array. NAS drives are optimized to operate in a RAID. As such they generally have slower seek times, and disable or reduce some desktop HDD features. For instance, NAS drives have a much lower timeout period for retries than desktop HDDs.

I had a bad rash of Seagates in the 2-6TB range a few years ago, but I have invested in their 8TB drives (the external ones) and have "only" had 1 of 4 fail.