Suggestions For Reliable Hard Drives ( 3tb+)

So i had poor experience with the western digital drives that are the black and blue series.

Almost all of the ones i owned died within 1-1.5 years, these were ranging from 2-4 TB models.
The past western digital drives prior to 2012 orso that i have are still kicking but the larger ones released after 2014 orso seem to have a hefty failure rate from my own personal experience.

At this point i do not want to gamble anymore with this brand as it has caused me too many headaches.

My needs are just basic as i am only storing files on the hard drive and not running games or applications from it. The speed of the hard drive is not of major deal breaker for me as its just for storage.

What matters to me is the most is how reliable the hard drive is, how quoted it is, and how much heat it creates.
The Blue line from western digital actually had decent temperatures and was very quiet but very crappy in terms of reliability ( every single blue drive i purchased 2014 or after failed) .

Any recommend brand/model would be greatly appreciated.
I prefer a 4+TB hard drive and my budget is around $150

 

I have no real evidence of anything, but it "seems" to me hard drives in general don't seem to last as long as those from yesteryear. Back in the day, it was common to see drives easily last 5, 6, 7 years or longer. In fact, they typically were replaced because they ran out of space, not because they failed.

But in recent years, I see more and more complaints of drives failing. That said, in recent years I have seen more and more "budget" drives on the market too. You used to never see a drive with less than a 3 year warranty. Now drives with only 1 year are common. So perhaps "you get what you pay for" plays a factor too.

The best study I have seen is that by Backblaze. Many claim it is not a fair test because it only looks at drives that were in operation at their data centers. But I think because it looks at so many drives, the information is useful.

You mention heat and as seen by the last line in signature, I take heat seriously too. But it really is more about getting rid of generated heat rather than how much heat the drive generates. That, IMO, is a major problem with external drives stuck in external drive enclosures. They just cannot get rid of the heat very well.

Considering you have had several drives fail prematurely, ensure your case is providing an adequate supply of cool air for the drives too. If possible (if you don't have one already) add a fan by the drive cage(s) to push or pull cool air across them.

Note too that one reason many drives designed for notebook run at slower speeds (5400RPM or even slower) is not just because they consume less power for longer battery life - but because slower speed motors tend to run cooler. Something to keep in mind.

Lastly, while definitely harder on budgets, SSDs should (in theory and so far in my experience too) last longer - not to mention consume less power and generate less heat.

 

I cannot consider the cost of purchasing an SSD for storage as 4TB or more would definitely run me over $400

Besides to an extent it would sort of ruin the purpose of using a SSD as it mentioned i am only using it for storage.

Some of the western digital hard drives ( 3.5'' internal) i bought were definitely spinning at 5,400 rpm speeds. However i own an older model ( WD10EZEX) that runs at 7,200 rpm and it just as quiet as the ones that spin 5400 rpm.

I occasionally monitor my internal hard drives temperatures and year round they probably average about 35C if not less. They only go into the upper 30's during summer because of the temperature in the room.

Has anyone tried the seagate barracuda models ST4000DM004?
The only drives i have ever used that have failed have them Hitachi and western digital.
I kind of disregard the Hitachi one due to luck but the recent western digital are not failing just from my personal experience.

As a side note Firefox seems to auto fix my spelling and use different words after recent updates
Itdoesn't seem i can edit my original post after a certain amount of time?

 

I had poor experience with WD, too, with a drive. It's part of the MyPassport line (external USB drives). The company offers no support, even though there are complaints across the internet, including their forum, that the drives aren't working with Windows and OS X built in "file history" backups. People have been complaining about the issue for at least 1.5 years and the company has not given guidance.

I also have another SSD made by them that is running at low temps. Google did a study and a low temp is an indicator that the drive has trouble written on it. Perhaps there is a good explanation, haven't delved too far into it.

I was also on their website a few months ago and I felt as though the support documents are disorganized (they seem to have multiple nicknames for the same drive and it was confusing to determine what documentation goes with what). I thought that I had to do more digging on their website than really should have been necessary.

 

You can check reviews on Amazon, and that doesn't mean you have to buy there.
I think this is a reasonable approach to shopping for something (skip some steps if the purchase is not big enough).
1) read about general information, the technologies.
2) read reviews on Amazon for models that are of technologies that you are interested in
3) Keep the parameters more broad and go to deal sites and see if anything is on sale (forums where people talk about deals)
4) Search the deal sites for models that you like, old posts. This will give you an idea of how long you have to wait for the deal to return.
5) decide
6) find shopping portal that has best % back for the site where you will buy

 

Noise was not the point of my comment. There is nothing to suggest the noise from a drive running at faster spin rates "will" produce more noise. But the frequency of the noise will be higher and thus seem louder than slower spinning drives.

I would suggest you look for "enterprise" class drives. These are typically designed for heavily used servers and other "industrial" uses. Most come with 5 year warranties too. But they do cost more too (though much less than SSDs).

 

what hard drives are you guys using ( internal) for storage?

I wouldn't mind paying more for an enterprise hard drive as long as its not noisy

I never had this problem before multiple times in a row from same manufacturer and same darn series...
Logically i understand any hard drive is destined to fail eventually or may fail pre maturely but for me to experience this in every single hard drive i bought from western digital ( blue series) just tells me that there is no quality in these drives anymore.

I am not sure if sandisk and HGST are suffering this too since they are both owned by WD

 

I have never noticed them to be noisier than other drives. Of course, how well your case suppresses noises plays a big role in that.

 

Well as an internal storage drive [boot is Samsung SSD], I use a Seagate ST2000NM0008 which is an enterprise drive. This is only a 2Tb drive and I know that you were asking for a recommendation on a 3-4Tb drive.

All I can say about my 2Tb Seagate is that it is quiet, despite having the SN02 fw which some users regard as being noisy. Runs cool with HD Sentinel showing 27C currently. This is also a 512n physical/logical sector drive as I dual boot XP and Win7. Not sure what o/s you are using but take care if you dual boot with XP (and / or Win7 possibly) as internal 4kn drives will have issues.

Only had this drive for about 3 months or so, so too early to say how long it will last for. As Digerati stated, drives today do not last as long as they used to.

One thing I would say is that when a HDD is going bad, there is most of the time the opportunity to save the data if needed. When an SSD goes bad, it just bricks and that's it with no warning of any kind. Perhaps something to consider, if you do not back up your data to an external drive regularly.

Good Luck

 

Yeah, that's a copy of BackBlaze report linked to above. Sadly, I know of no other study or data compilation that is so extensive.