Most reliable large drive for storage...

[BoaConstrictor]

Hello guys,

Basically, I want to buy a large drive to use strictly for storage (video/music/data), and just store the data on it, probably not even have it plugged into the PC. I have been looking at some large 1TB hard drives, including external drives, but it seems everywhere I look there's at least a few reviews where the drive stops working after a few weeks.

obviously since I want to use it for storage, I want as reliable as possible. Dont care about speed.

Any recommendations? I dont want to spend more than $200-250 and want something in the 1TB range. SSDs in that range are too expensive and it wont make sense to use a SSD simply for storage anyway.

I already back my things to DVD-Rs, so the disk would be an "extra".

Thanks in advance!

[James]

Enterprise grade SAS/SATA drives are much more reliable than their consumer grade counterparts.

However, with the hdd shortage, They aren't even close to affordable anymore

[Timman_24]

I was looking at getting some small ones for secure storage for documents, but the price is absurd right now. I will definitely be setting up a RAID1 with enterprise level HDDs when I can find them for the right prie. 80-160GB is probably all I will need.

Unless the music/video are masters of your work, then I wouldn't worry too much about storing it safely. A simple RAID1 will be fine if you must, or if it is just going to sit unpowered and unaccessed then there is no reason at all to get an Enterprise level HDD setup. Use an external drive with good padding/case. You may want to look into shelf life. I do believe HDDs have a shelf life of several decades, but they will degrade just sitting.

On last thing, you could back them up online. Get an Amazon S3 account and upload to them. If you are uploading pirated stuff (not saying you are, just in case) then I wouldn't do that, but if not it is a great way to store data for practically no cost to you.

[BoaConstrictor]

Thanks for the advice. I was considering an external too, since I dont want to have it running all the time...I thought that would be better since youre not using it so it would last longer? Guess not.

Any good external models/brands to recommend?

[PriMaTe]

IF you're worried about the drive being on all of the time, Win7 power settings can power off drives when they haven't been used for x minutes, so if you're not using the data drive it will be shut down until you access it again

[kpxgq]

jesus, the prices right now are ridiculous

i was in the same shoes a year ago (wanted a cheap and reliable external storage solution) and went with this:

- dlink dns-320 NAS for $60
- hitachi 2tb 5400rpm drives ($50 each x 2)

ended up spending less than $200 for a 4TB (2TB in RAID-1) external storage solution with some redundancy... i wouldnt trust ANY single drive to hold over 1TB of data reliably without some sort of backup or RAID in place.

[James]

jesus, the prices right now are ridiculous

i was in the same shoes a year ago (wanted a cheap and reliable external storage solution) and went with this:

- dlink dns-320 NAS for $60
- hitachi 2tb 5400rpm drives ($50 each x 2)

ended up spending less than $200 for a 4TB (2TB in RAID-1) external storage solution with some redundancy... i wouldnt trust ANY single drive to hold over 1TB of data reliably without some sort of backup or RAID in place.

Now just a single 2TB 5400rpm drive is almost $200. >.>

[videobruce]

Not when you compare them to my 1st HDD: 6GB for $125 in 1999.