Best of The Best, Really?

[magnogreato]

I am looking for data, knowledge, know how, on ext. HD's such that I can pick between the top three best of the best (if that's even possible nowadays)for home backup use. I read an article at Tech Republic about SSD's and I have a Seagate Slim 500GB connected to my HP envy desktop but the long term data doesn't look to promising. I also read an article about Seagate is not using MTBF data and is or has created its own which is called AFR or Annualized Failure Rate. So I have to go to outside sites such as Tom's et. al. to try and find out which appears to be the best ext. HD available. Then I found BackBlaze site for 2013-15 has been and what's to be for this year but I can't find a link there so I can ask some questions about the figures they are using. If someone has read the data, then explain the per centages on what would be the top three so I can "maybe" figure out the Best of The Best. thanks ahead of time...

 

[mcnumpty23]

if you have some old drives lying about and a version of windows with storage spaces you can use those old drives for back up with redundancy

i have been messing about with storage spaces with 6 old drives i had as they arent worth the bother of ebaying as prices are so low now

 

[Eximo]

More important to know which drive is inside the external enclosure and then look up those statistics.

Otherwise, buy a NAS box and get your own drives.

Cloud backup is also a relatively cheap option these days. Not a huge fan of it myself, but it is certainly an option. You then no longer have to bother with knowing anything about the drives.

 

[jsmithepa]

Define BEST (to you). Otherwise we are going round-and-round-and-round. Better say "these are my REQUIREMENT" in concrete terms, years, speed etc. Turn your left brain on.

A couple of items: Interface type really is a non-issue. Next, there seems to be a list of HD brands out there, but did you know in the whole World, currently there are 3, yes three manufacturers of HD, anybody else buy from them and slap their own labels.

There are no best, there are not perfects, you hedge your bet by having multiple copies if the data is important enough.

However, you can ask for ease of operation. For folks needing archive data, have your grandchildren able to look at your 1989 jpg, check out M-DISC.

 

[Saberus]

More important to know which drive is inside the external enclosure and then look up those statistics.

Otherwise, buy a NAS box and get your own drives.

Cloud backup is also a relatively cheap option these days. Not a huge fan of it myself, but it is certainly an option. You then no longer have to bother with knowing anything about the drives.

This.

Also, if you consider cloud storage, research the company, and find out what their redundancy and backup plans are. Wife and I got stung bad when our cloud storage company lost all our data due to drive failure, ignored our calls, then had botched backups, ignored us some more, then closed shop while 'investigating' how to recover our data, all within the space of 60 days.

 

[Eximo]

Presumably if you stick the big companies like OneDrive (Microsoft), Amazon, DropBox, CarbonCopy, Mozy (EMC), and GoogleCloud then you wouldn't have to worry much.

Personally I just stuck a pair of 3TB WD in my HTPC for general storage, and have a hard drive bay for loose drives to take system images and important backups. Keep my small files on both disk and USB flash drive.

(I've always wanted to get an M-Disc capable drive, I find the artificial stone they made fascinating)