Looking for input / experience here as I am going to be purchasing another portable HDD as a backup to my current external HDD. Currently have the Seagate backup Slim model and was considering another one. However, after looking at reviews, on Amazon, it seems these drives have around a 10 to 14% failure rate and only a 2 year warranty. There are HDD's made by Silicon Power (A60 and A62) that seem to be in the 8 - 9% range of failure as posted by Amazon reviews. I don't need anything over 1 - 2 TB at the moment, and wondered what the general experience has been and what would you buy today? I have also considered the WD Passport, as an option, but that seems to fall in line with Seagate on reliability. I often take the drive along with me on trips and store photography items primarily. Appreciate any comments.
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Ext HDD Recommendation
- Thread starter High Desert
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There's only 3 HDD manufacturers left - Seagate, WD and Toshiba and Toshiba had a 12% market share according to an article I read. You can find drives labeled "Samsung", "Hitachi", etc. but their HDD division was bought out by either Seagate or WD. So the Silicon Power uses a HD from one of these 3 companies. It doesn't seem to be to be a big difference between 10-14% and 8-9% considering you're looking at customer reviews. I've bought many Seagate's over the years (including 2 in the past month) and I haven't had any of them fail prematurely. I've seen what looks to be good study which says that Seagate isn't as good as the other 2 brands in a data center setting. If you're looking to minimize the chances of data loss, you're better served carrying around a backup drive on your trips (or backing up to the cloud) than spending hours trying to find the optimal drive.
In my personal uneducated opinion...
If you are taking the drive with you on a frequent basis, IMO the drive for you is a Samsung T5. HDDs all lack substantial shock resistance, where as SSDs can withstand tremendous impacts. Silicon Power offered (and still may offer) several 2.5-inch HDD enclosures that have reasonable impact resistance, but even these has their limits (especially in regards to impacts occurring when the drive is running, which is pretty common and happens to even the most careful of users.) For very mobile users, I find it increasingly difficult to justify HDDs, personally, because of the track record of reliability, speed, and impact resistance that mobile SSDs have generated.
I mainly use HGST 3.5-inch enterprise drives with relatively well-known and low failure rates. Like any and all HDDs, they sometimes fail early, and without warning. IMO, more important than brand is to keep multiple copies of important files you do not wish to lose. Two is good, three+ is better, preferably in two different physical locations, to provide optimal protection against data loss.
With 2.5-inch HDDs, there is arguably less data regarding failure rates available than what is already a limited amount of data on 3.5-inch drives (a huge portion of which comes from two sources, only one of which names brands, and both of which use the drives in a different way than most consumers.) With 2.5-inch drives, I try to avoid most pre-configured externals because, A) I have concerns regarding the quality of the drive being used in pre-configured externals being of lower quality/tier than the internal 2.5-inch drives the same company offers (I feel this way especially in regards to WD and Seagate externals), B) I dislike how many of these drives use a soldered SATA bridge, which adds a completely unnecessary layer of complexity to recovering files and using the drive in the event that the bridge fails or the enclosure-side port becomes damaged (something quite common with some pre-USB-C enclosure-side connectors), and C) purchasing the enclosure + drive separately often does not cost much (or anything) additional than a prebuilt, and the drive may have two or more times the warranty of a pre-built model.
If you are taking the drive with you on a frequent basis, IMO the drive for you is a Samsung T5. HDDs all lack substantial shock resistance, where as SSDs can withstand tremendous impacts. Silicon Power offered (and still may offer) several 2.5-inch HDD enclosures that have reasonable impact resistance, but even these has their limits (especially in regards to impacts occurring when the drive is running, which is pretty common and happens to even the most careful of users.) For very mobile users, I find it increasingly difficult to justify HDDs, personally, because of the track record of reliability, speed, and impact resistance that mobile SSDs have generated.
I mainly use HGST 3.5-inch enterprise drives with relatively well-known and low failure rates. Like any and all HDDs, they sometimes fail early, and without warning. IMO, more important than brand is to keep multiple copies of important files you do not wish to lose. Two is good, three+ is better, preferably in two different physical locations, to provide optimal protection against data loss.
With 2.5-inch HDDs, there is arguably less data regarding failure rates available than what is already a limited amount of data on 3.5-inch drives (a huge portion of which comes from two sources, only one of which names brands, and both of which use the drives in a different way than most consumers.) With 2.5-inch drives, I try to avoid most pre-configured externals because, A) I have concerns regarding the quality of the drive being used in pre-configured externals being of lower quality/tier than the internal 2.5-inch drives the same company offers (I feel this way especially in regards to WD and Seagate externals), B) I dislike how many of these drives use a soldered SATA bridge, which adds a completely unnecessary layer of complexity to recovering files and using the drive in the event that the bridge fails or the enclosure-side port becomes damaged (something quite common with some pre-USB-C enclosure-side connectors), and C) purchasing the enclosure + drive separately often does not cost much (or anything) additional than a prebuilt, and the drive may have two or more times the warranty of a pre-built model.
I'll back up ZapNS here if you are travelling a lot and reliability and speed are important to you then SSD is the way to go, no moving parts and much faster. I'd also second the T5 its the size of a credit card and pretty thin as well.
Thanks all - appreciate the time and response back. I think I will take another look at SSD drives as they appear to be the most portable and resistance to impact, albeit at a cost.
If resistance to impact is a concern than SSD is the way to go. And I like Samsung T5's. But if this is a backup drive to an existing external drive, why is subject to impact? Do you plan on carrying it around?
FWIW, I keep my backup of backup in a vault or lately in the cloud in case my home or office burn down.
For your described usage of being highly mobile and using it for image files (which can get large, depending on usage), I think you will be delighted with an external SSD.