[ale] External disk recommendation

[DJ-Pfulio]

+1.  Seagate lied, lied, lied for almost a year back in 2007 about
terrible HDD issues.  I avoided them until a few years ago, when my need
and their pricing tricked me - picked up 2 2TB Seagate HDDs from NewEgg
during an EggCrusher ... let the pressure of the perceived low-pricing
push my order BEFORE I'd done enough research.  30 min after my order,
they'd already shipped and I'd discovered all the complaints on
Seagate's forums for the drives I'd bought.  1 yr + 1 month later, 1 of
those drives failed.  Rather than fight for the 1yr warranty to be
covered (or use my CC to extend it), I bought 2 new HDDs - non-seagate.

There was a study published about HDD reliability 5+ yrs ago. A vaguely
recall that Seagate was significantly more likely to fail than any other
major brand.  Hitachi was shockingly less likely to fail than the
averages.  This was awhile ago, so all those numbers don't really count
today.  I try to buy Hitachi-branded drives with at least 3-yr warranties.

BTW, from 1985-2005, I always tried to buy Seagate because they had the
best reputation and were very reliable in my uses.  Still have 6 of
those pre-2005 Seagate drives spinning just fine here. Those HDDs had 5
yr warranties.

USB HDD warranties usually suck - 90 days or 1 yr. Never higher.  It is
a reflection of the engineering and HW used.  They make tens of millions
of these devices yearly and know about the expected reliability.  Best
to get a 3yr warranty disk (no consumer-level 5yr warranties are
available for a reasonable price anymore), and put that into a $9
enclosure yourself.  If this is a desktop, it doesn't need external
power. If you ever plan to use it with a laptop, get a powered
enclosure.  If you don't plan to boot off this USB, then USB2/3 doesn't
matter.

SAS drives are a completely different thing. Don't know anything about
those - those disks were always a DC choice.

Hope this helps. That's about all I know related to HDDs and USB.

On 05/19/16 16:06, dev null zero two wrote:
> that's a horrible price and Seagate isn't quite known for their reliability
> 
> http://dealnews.com/Western-Digital-3-TB-USB-3.0-Portable-HDD-for-100-free-shipping/1670903.html
> http://dealnews.com/Western-Digital-2-TB-USB-3.0-Hard-Drive-for-70-free-shipping/1661636.html
> http://dealnews.com/Toshiba-3-TB-External-USB-3.0-Hard-Drive-for-80-w-padding-free-shipping/1660976.html
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 3:57 PM, Leam Hall <leamhall at gmail.com
> <mailto:leamhall at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     This is a resend. For some reason the mailer said it would wait a
>     couple days to resend and I told my wife I'd try to order the drive
>     sooner.
> 
> 
>     My wife has an old Mac and I'm looking at a ~2 TB or so external drive
>     for her. Looking at the Seagate Expansion 2TB Desktop External Hard
>     Drive USB 3.0 (STEB2000100)
>     (http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-STEB2000100/dp/B00TKFEE9E).
> 
>     Her computer is USB 2, and older iMac. Is there a better drive in the
>     $100 range? Speed isn't as important as reliability.
>