Posted August 21, 2017 Hi, At the end of 2014 I bought a couple of 3TB external Seagate hard drives to act as redundant backups for my most important data. To put a long story short, one died after 14 months and the other throwing up errors now and I really don't trust it. FYI, I think the particular drives I bought are notoriously fail-happy. Unfortunately I bought 2 of the exact same model at the same time. I know now that I would never buy two of the same drives again to use as backups. Anyway, I am in the market for buying some more drives but I am unsure what route to go down. I was just going to buy 2 external drives from 2 different manufacturers, but then I thought about using NAS drives in a double bay enclosure. My thinking was that even though they would be just used for backing up data and not constant accessing, they might actually last longer than just using a couple of desktop grade drives. I am unsure whether my logic is sound though? I know NAS drives are optimised for use in RAID, which I wouldn't be doing, but I do not know whether this would be an issue? I think any performance issues using them just as single drives might a trade off for the extra reliability that supposedly comes with a NAS drive? Does anyone know of issues using NAS drives in something like an Icy Box enclosure? If you think my plan is sound, what manufacturers do you guys suggest? There seems to be only 4 major players (Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi (HGST) and Toshiba). As I said above, Seagate have left a bitter taste in my mouth but I see the guys at Linus Tech Tips seem to love them. I do have 4 3TB WD Reds in my NAS and on the whole have had pretty good luck with WD over the years. I have never used Hitachi's or Toshiba's drives before. What about enclosures? I don't want anything too expensive. I was thinking a simple £30 enclosure would do the job. Thoughts and opinions welcomed. Thank you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Posted August 21, 2017 You could have a look at enterprise drives which usually have 5+ years of warranty and some even offer data recovery. You could setup crashplan to backup to certain hard drive every week. I have external 3.5inch dock which every-week i plug in to backup to that drive and unplug it and store it at my workplace or you could place it at trusted friends place or just somewhere safe in your house. Personally i pick a few enterprise drive that were in services and running for well over 7 years with over 200tb writes and still functional with decent write/read speeds. I wouldn't say i would trust my data on it but enterprise drives can really take a beating. Magical Pineapples
