Best value hard drive for storage, 4-6TB.

[gunner52]

I would greatly appreciate any recommendations.
I have seen a few sales on hard drives but need help in choosing best type/brand, (NAS-Enterprise-desktop-internal-external). I will be storing mainly videos,movies and music. My pc, (my 1st build, with forum help) has: i7-4790k-Asus Z97-A Motherboard-16gb G-skill ram-Samsung 850 evo 500gb and WD Black 1TB at present.
In researching I have become totally confused. Would a NAS or Enterprise even work? I have read external drives are equal in speed to internal(?). I checked cpubenchmark.net to try and compare drives but they do not rate external drives. External would be handy as I could connect directly to my TV but price and performance are my priorities. If I add another internal drive will I need a RAID setup?
I can wait and watch for one of your recommended drives to come on sale.
Thanks in advance.

 

[weberdarren97]

I recommend the Western Digital Black (faster) and Blue (up to larger capacities) drives, as well as the Seagate Barracuda drives. I would use them as in internal drive. You see, there can be plenty of interference outside the case, but the metal of the case blocks most of that out, therefore I usually recommend internal drives.

 

[kanewolf]

You do need a backup plan. For both your existing storage and any data you plan to put on the new disk. If you don't care about losing the data on the new disk then use it to backup your other two. BUT, the more data you have, the more catastrophic the loss when a disk goes bad. It might not be for 5+ years, but it will eventually happen to all of them.

 

[weberdarren97]

That's a good point, you need extra media to back up to, whether that be an astonishingly huge flash drive, a HDD, or tapes. Personally, I keep copies of small personal things on flash drives, and large things like my video projects on extra hard drives. I use WD Black drives for my primary storage drives and WD Blue for my backup drives since they go up to 8TB.

I back up every Friday at 10pm. The only reason I back up so often is because I have about $25,000 worth of client data on my computer and about $300-500 worth of said data gets added every month.

For someone who just uses their drives to store videos, movies and music, I would recommend a monthly differential backup plan. That's where, every month, you back up only the data that has changed.

I do a weekly full backup, I make a full backup in a folder with the week's date on one of my storage drives. Once a drive ages to the point where the newest backup on it is three years old or older, I have it magnetically wiped then I take the platters out of it and throw them at the concrete wall in the basement until they shatter completely. That way I know nobody else can get my data off of it, ensuring that the personal data of my clients remains confidential.

 

[geofelt]

Here is a good article on the WD rainbow and the suitability of different drives for your purpose.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Understanding-the-WD-Rainbow-674/

Raid of any type is not a substitute for external backup of the data you value.
The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years. SSD's are similar.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, raid controller failure fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1

 

[weberdarren97]

Geofelt makes a good point. For someone who uses a computer for personal purposes and does not need it to be running 24/7/365 (like hosting a website), you do not need RAID. I don't have much experience with external drives, I usually get 3.5" internal drives and put them in eSATA enclosures. However, I'll let someone else answer as to whether to get an external drive, since I don't have much experience with them (other than putting internal drives in external enclosures).