You look up the new 4TB or whatever external drives and they have thousands of reviews, and almost all of them there appears to be a 10-12% failure rate within 3 months.

That seems like a high failure rate! The pattern keeps repeating as you look across different brands, etc.

That does seem to be high. It would be interesting to extend that even further, say 48-60 months, to see if there are drives that actually won't hold up for the life of the computer. Of course, if failure rates are in the 50 percentile, they wouldn't be published.

When I was designing software/hardware systems, one of the key measurements was mean time between failures. Our products had some of the lowest industry figures, but the cost of the equipment reflected that reliability!

That's around my experience, yes. I wonder why externals are so much less reliable than internals.

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:
That's around my experience, yes. I wonder why externals are so much less reliable than internals.

Maybe because they get moved around a lot? Probably get power disconnected before heads can park? The life of a portable device is much more dangerous I'd imagine.

The drives themselves are the same ones that you can buy off the shelf (of which there are various levels of reliability). The most common failure is the cheap-ass interface electronics that connect between the HDD & USB-or whatever.

These aren't anywhere close to enterprise-level, so they are built cheap & don't get trickle down 'upgrades'.

quote:

Originally posted by barndg00:

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:
That's around my experience, yes. I wonder why externals are so much less reliable than internals.

Maybe because they get moved around a lot? Probably get power disconnected before heads can park? The life of a portable device is much more dangerous I'd imagine.

Mine don't travel, only sit on the desk and used for backup. Until they die.

I never buy the molten plastic encased drives for clients.
I sell these as back up devices for the most part.
I buy an enclosure, pick a decent drive (not the cheapest one) and install it in the enclosure.
Many times when I will use an enclosure with built in fan especially for servers.
This eliminates heat issue failures which is most likely why the other externals fail.
These are 3.5" drives not the 2.5" laptop variety.
Never had any issues with the drives, sometimes after many years a power supply may go out but not often.
The separate drive/enclosure also allows for easy maintenance as well.
YMMV

quote:

This eliminates heat issue failures which is most likely why the other externals fail.

There's a major difference right there.

SSD, but I admit 4TB of SSD is still $$$$$.

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:
SSD, but I admit 4TB of SSD is still $$$$$.

Also, don't solid states have a physical shelf life? Although I think it's decades.

And just remember, when an SSD fails, it is utter, complete and with no chance of ever recovering anything. I learned that the hard way with an internal drive after 18 months.

My mom was a librarian at the University of Texas and specialized in preservation. She always shook her head that the more advanced we get in our data storage systems, the less time they actually physically last, on average.

This is why you have a backup for your external backup. It only has to save your bacon one time to be worth its weight in gold. I’m lucky enough to have a recycling center nearby that allows you to poke through the computer bin and scavenge parts. Right now, I’m sitting on several 3 and 4 tb hard drives that work fine, have been wiped, and are stored for later use. I hit the jackpot one day and found several HP mini-desktop PC’s that use 2.5” laptop HD’s; I have about 10 750gb 2.5” drives that are enclosure ready. One 1tb drive I recovered is being used as movie and audio book storage; it is nearly full and has its own 3.5” backup drive.

Also, you can use Western Digital internal hard drives; you can quickly and easily clone on an external device and shelve the cloned drive somewhere safe. Update as needed, and re-shelve it. If your internal drive shits the bed, you can drop the clone in and pick up at your last recopy. Acronis is your friend.

More people report problems than success? Skews the ratio

I'll add we bough WD Passports because they were offered in colors. We got a red and a blue and we alternate our backups using a complete bootable copy kind of a software that does deltas so it goes quickly. And we set a reminder for my wife and a little process and she just does it weekly.

quote:

Originally posted by Otto Pilot:
And just remember, when an SSD fails, it is utter, complete and with no chance of ever recovering anything. I learned that the hard way with an internal drive after 18 months.

This is not true.
There can be recovery but as in a spinning drive it is expensive.

https://www.ontrack.com/services/data-recovery/ssd/

 
Over the years I have had very good luck with HGST Ultrastar drives. They claim a MTBF of 2 million hours. I have not had one fail yet. I have 5 currently, in 3TB and 4TB sizes, that I use for general backup and rotating backups that go offsite.

WD drives I have (internal & external) have lasted much longer than Seagate. I had a Seagate external for daily backup that died in 14 months.

Maybe I look at this the wrong way, but every desktop machine I've owned has at least one drive bay open and a free SATA connection on the MB for an additional drive. I have a 4TB WD drive installed inside my desktop case I point my 480gb SSD boot and application drive, and my 1TB spinning HDD to for backup. No headaches or hassles so far with that configuration, and I don't have additional pieces cluttering my desk.

Now if you're looking for a backup solution for a laptop, what I offered above obviously isn't an answer.

Onboard backup is fine (there's even such a thing as backup partitions on the same hard drive), but it prevents the ability for periodic swapping of BU drives for storage non-locally (for example taking a drive home with you). You're vulnerable to fire, damage, and theft otherwise.

quote:

Originally posted by kkina:
Onboard backup is fine (there's even such a thing as backup partitions on the same hard drive), but it prevents the ability for periodic swapping of BU drives for storage non-locally (for example taking a drive home with you). You're vulnerable to fire, damage, and theft otherwise.

Agreed, but how many people (not employees) actually move a drive offsite on any regular basis? They should, but I would contend the overwhelming majority do not, me included. And should a hurricane threaten Central Florida (my main disaster concern) I can simply unplug my desktop machine and load the case into my truck when I leave. All my data and backups go with me given that approach without me having to deal with any ancillary drives.