Permanently attached external HDD recommendation

[b0gd4n]

Hey all.

I am looking into buying a new 4TB external HDD to have it permanently attached to the USB 3.0 port of my AC68U, to replace my Samsung 1TB one, which is already full.

I am interested firstly in reliability and then speed, as I will have my Plex media stored there and remote map it to my server, I need it to be reliable and rather speedy (i.e. ~30GB mkv files streams).

I am considering the WD Essentials, My Book, Seagate Expansion or any other suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

 

[hggomes]

Buy the cheapest, they all spin down/up i have tested those 3 units and work great on AC6X routers

 

[RMerlin]

I would avoid Seagate's. My customers had nothing but trouble with these, even desktop PCs often had trouble detecting them, or remaining stable during a file copy. I suspect it's partly due to the very cheap USB 3.0 cable that they use (and which isn't standard, so cannot easily be replaced either).

WD's external products are usually quite good. Same with BYO based on Vantec enclosures.

 

[KGB7]

I would stick with WD.

Seagate is the only company i ever heard of, that need firmware update for their HDDs to fix issues.


I use PureX HDD enclosure, it uses proper USB3 connectors on both ends. Thus it doesnt have a weird connector on one end as other HDD enclosures. And the cable it self is thick and properly shielded. Unlike other cables that are poorly made and cause issues.

 

[b0gd4n]

Buy the cheapest, they all spin down/up i have tested those 3 units and work great on AC6X routers

I would avoid Seagate's. My customers had nothing but trouble with these, even desktop PCs often had trouble detecting them, or remaining stable during a file copy. I suspect it's partly due to the very cheap USB 3.0 cable that they use (and which isn't standard, so cannot easily be replaced either).

WD's external products are usually quite good. Same with BYO based on Vantec enclosures.

I would stick with WD.

Seagate is the only company i ever heard of, that need firmware update for their HDDs to fix issues.


I use PureX HDD enclosure, it uses proper USB3 connectors on both ends. Thus it doesnt have a weird connector on one end as other HDD enclosures. And the cable it self is thick and properly shielded. Unlike other cables that are poorly made and cause issues.

thanks all for the info.

OK then, stay away from Seagate, noted.

Looking at the WD's, I found the 4TB Elements and My Book at £5 difference. Which one is better, again for reliability and speed?

Also, are the LaCie drives worth the extra £££?

 

[RMerlin]

thanks all for the info.

OK then, stay away from Seagate, noted.

Looking at the WD's, I found the 4TB Elements and My Book at £5 difference. Which one is better, again for reliability and speed?

Also, are the LaCie drives worth the extra £££?

I would avoid LaCie. My two customers who had a LaCie NAS (two totally different models) had their power supply die within 2-3 years of purchase. And one of these two was in a datacenter, so it was connected to a stable power source, inside a well-cooled cabinet. Thankfully we only hosted backups and disk images on it.

 

[hggomes]

You should be aware that all HDDs can fail, i have duzens of WD 1,2,3TB clients faulty drives and they have Seagate's working bought at the same time so i think that says it all

You must have luck with the product, if you ask me i also prefeer WD but thats because of their external design, if they have to die they will.


You can take a look and see that WD had more RMA count here:

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic...ts-french-but-i-translated-nearly-everything/

 

[hggomes]

I would stick with WD.

Seagate is the only company i ever heard of, that need firmware update for their HDDs to fix issues.


I use PureX HDD enclosure, it uses proper USB3 connectors on both ends. Thus it doesnt have a weird connector on one end as other HDD enclosures. And the cable it self is thick and properly shielded. Unlike other cables that are poorly made and cause issues.

Thats a good think, user can do FW update and solve the problem instead of sending the unit back.

 

[RMerlin]

You should be aware that all HDDs can fail, i have duzens of WD 1,2,3TB clients faulty drives and they have Seagate's working bought at the same time so i think that says it all

You must have luck with the product, if you ask me i also prefeer WD but thats because of their external design, if they have to die they will.


You can take a look and see that WD had more RMA count here:

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic...ts-french-but-i-translated-nearly-everything/

At work I deal with a decent volume of hard drive (about 30-50 per year), and there was a huge difference in failure rates between WD and Seagate back when we still sold Seagate. In fact, Backblaze's own numbers seemed pretty close to my own at work:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

Check the annual failure rates. Those 7200.11 were absolute garbage in terms of reliability.

It's possible that Seagate resolved the issues since then, but personally I'm not willing to have my customer test it out.

This is all beside the stability/reliability issues I mentionned earlier about their external hard drives. The two I sold last winter to two different customers kept dropping from Windows while files were being copied to them. One of them I ended up moving the hard disk to a better quality enclosure. THe other one, I think the customer now uses it on a USB 2.0 port instead.

 

[RMerlin]

To add to my previous post: things can change between models and revisions (I mentionned the 7200.11 being horrible). I've had pretty bad experiences as well with WD Velociraptors. My Velociraptors had to be RMAed every 18 months on average as they started developping bad sectors. That was back to their 75 GB model.

Now, I'm all SSD + WD Caviar Black.

 

[hggomes]

It seems each of us have a story to tell

Well Seagate 7200.11 should never exist so shirtty they are, but i have 2 of them that are still working after updated the FW on a client machine, RAID0 and all problems were solved, they have now alot usage hours and they still there, is seems the FW was the problem because the discs were plagued by bad sectors and SMART errors all over and after the FW update and LLF all went OK, no errors at all and SMART cleaned.

 

[stevech]

Hey all.

I am looking into buying a new 4TB external HDD to have it permanently attached to the USB 3.0 port of my AC68U, to replace my Samsung 1TB one, which is already full.

I am interested firstly in reliability and then speed, as I will have my Plex media stored there and remote map it to my server, I need it to be reliable and rather speedy (i.e. ~30GB mkv files streams).

I am considering the WD Essentials, My Book, Seagate Expansion or any other suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

Bad idea because of risk.

3-2-1 concept.
3 copies of files
2 different media
1 off-site for anti-theft.

 

[mromero]

Hey all.

I am looking into buying a new 4TB external HDD to have it permanently attached to the USB 3.0 port of my AC68U, to replace my Samsung 1TB one, which is already full.

I take it your Samsung has served you faithfully, save for it now being full.

Why jump ship?

Why not get a bigger capacity Samsung?

 

[KGB7]

Thats a good think, user can do FW update and solve the problem instead of sending the unit back.

Its not really a good thing, since no other HDD maker provided firmware updates to resolve major issues like Seagate did. It either works out of the box or it doesnt.



I also have seen and personally experienced a lot of USB2.0 MyBook enclosures failing.
Perhaps they fixed them with new USB3 chipset, but i havent seen enough of them to make any kind of conclusion.


Samsung makes or used to make great HDD drives as well. Havent heard or read anything bad about them in a while. But Seagate bought them in 2011.


More info on drive reliability testing can be found here.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

 

[ChristineBCW]

What OS's will be accessing this External?

Only 2Tb's can be seen readily with 32-bit OS's - if you have older computers trying to copy to or from, that 4Tb (any greater-than-2Tb) partition can present difficulties.

 

[KGB7]

What OS's will be accessing this External?

Asus OS.



10charctr...

 

[F5ing]

There are only three manufacturers left: WD, Seagate and Toshiba. As previously mentioned, Samsung was taken over by Seagate. Seagate acquired LaCie as well.

I would guess the different brands within each owning company continue to have different manufacturing standards. Never experienced it myself, but I continue hearing seemingly excessive problems with LaCie drives.

Bad as the issues were with the Seagate 7200.11 series, I think you've got to realize that most, if not all, manufacturers have had their own bad manufacturing runs. There've been periods of time where I'd avoid WD, other times Seagate, etc.

Externals add to the issue, especially if they use proprietary USB/SATA adapters built into the HD's circuit board. I'd definitely avoid these.

I think I'd go with a good enclosure and BYOD as someone mentioned before. For the past 3 or 4 years I've not avoided any of the 3 major labels (WD, Seagate and Toshiba), purchasing I guess around 40 or so (bare drives) in about the last 2 years (for me and others). No issues with any of them.

 

[mromero]

There are only three manufacturers left: WD, Seagate and Toshiba. As previously mentioned, Samsung was taken over by Seagate.

Seagate took over the Samsung HD business. If you open up some Seagate USB HDs, you will find a really neat Samung HD inside.

Samsung is more focused now making really great SSDs.

 

[b0gd4n]

Bad idea because of risk.

3-2-1 concept.
3 copies of files
2 different media
1 off-site for anti-theft.

I will be using the drive just for Plex media, and use the 1TB for cloud file backups and stuff, so I think the 3-2-1 concept is a overkill.

 

[b0gd4n]

I take it your Samsung has served you faithfully, save for it now being full.

Why jump ship?

Why not get a bigger capacity Samsung?

yes it is still working fine, it is just I wanted to know the opinion of more experiences users before buying one.