What are the most reliable Hard Drives?

Needing to buy an extra hard drive to keep your backups safe? But there are so many... which hard drive should you buy? Well, the guy at the store will try to sell you the one he has on stock; your "computer geek" friends will give you their own opinion (valuable nonetheless) based on the dozens - or even hundreds - of drives they've used along the years; and then... you have companies like Backblaze, using over 25 thousand drives, and sharing their findings with us.


A while back they've shared statistics about how long hard drives kept working in their storage pods - and now they share with us which of the major three brands: Seagate, WD, and Hitachi fares better than the rest. All in all it all boils down to which hard drive should you buy to keep you data safe?

And the answer is Hitachi, closely followed by WD (keep in mind WD has acquired Hitachi's hard drive divison, so, we'll need to see how things evolve) and last - and with much scarier failure rates - Seagate.

While Hitachi hard drives hover around a 1% annual failure rate, WD drives stay at around 3%. Seagate 1.5 and 3TB hard drives on the other hand, have have much higher failure rates (14 and 9%!), Only the 4TB Seagate drive stays relatively competitive with WD drives, but even so it still had double the failure rate of a similar Hitachi 4TB drive.

So... next time you're choosing which hard drive you should buy to keep your digital data safe... who're you going to trust? (Although keep in mind that the usage patterns in a Blackblaze storage pod will not be the same as a domestic scenario - but in any case, if they fare well under such extreme conditions, they're bound to do equally well in a less strenuous environment. And last but not least, you should be be using a SSD as your main hard drive by now, using these magnetic disks as secondary storage for large files and backups only.)

WD Black2 conbines SSD and HDD in a single unit

We all know by now just how great SSDs are, with lightning speeds that make us want to forget the old HDDs. But until we can get a 1TB SSD at the same price as an HDD, traditional hard drives still have its place in our computers. In a desktop computer, we usually have enough physical space to place one (or more) of each, but when it comes to all-in-one PCs and laptops and ultrabooks... things get a bit more complicated. And that's exactly why WD has brought us the WD Black2 Dual Drive, that combines an SSD and HDD in a single unit.

Unlike hybrid drives (SSHD) that use a few gigabytes of flash memory to improve access speeds to frequently used data and show up as a single drive to your operating system, this dual drive has two independent drives inside: a 120GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. So... there's no caching system going on automatically, and it's up to you to use both as you see fit.

The advantages is that you can now have both a speedy SSD and a spacious HDD in your ultrabook using a single drive bay, as this dual drive uses up just the regular 2.5" 9.5mm space as any common laptop drive.

This dual drive WD Black2 has a 5y warranty and can be yours for €299.

WD external HD tells you what you can(t) to with your own Files

This is nice.
You buy a brand new Western Digital 1TB external hard drive to store all your media files. You go home and trannfer all your songs and movies to the new storage device.

You head to your living room, fire up your media center and try to play a movie from your new WD disc and...

Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the most common audio and video file types cannot be shared with different users using WD Anywhere Access.

From Wired:

It doesn't matter what the files are: If you try to share these formats over a network, Western Digital assumes not just that you're a criminal, but that it is its job to police users. You see, MP3, DivX, AVI, WMV and Quicktime files are copy-protected formats.

The list of banned filetypes includes more than thirty extensions. Some of them are bizarre: .IT files are banned — these are Amiga-style music modules composed with Impulse Tracker, a particularly well-loved tracking sequencer that hasn't been updated in almost a decade. I composed with IT myself, back in the day, and still have all my shitty compositions, none of which Western Digital would have me share. (Try MOD vs. Speak&Spell masterpiece Eddie Dreams of Women, if you dare: IT, MP3)

via [Wired]