[SOLVED] Buying 3.5" drives to use in external HHD dock ?

[Johnus_dyblonus]

,Due to both 6tb drives in my NAS developing problems I purchased 2 WD 6TB NASware 3.0 WD60EFZX both proceeded to fail though only used briefly in a HDD dock, as the model fails if not run on a raid1 array, after purchase I found it was not so easy to backup the data from the failing drives in the NAS then decided to use them in a Dock, Am off grid so after this I decided a JBOD system where disks are written to then stored and updated regularly rather than a single large drive or nas, have a 6tb drive I move from Laptop to PC to backup as data is created and now have that data backed up on a a bunch of disks ranging from 2.5" 250gb to 1TB 3.5" drives left over from my days working in IT and a database so I know what's on which drive, due to having lost so much data even though I have had 2 backups of my stuff in the past where 2 identical drives have failed so close together that I have lost everything, I'm opting for 3 sets of all my important data now, smaller drives mean if 1 failes I only loose a percentage of the total data on the secondary backup and 3 sets of everything should negate total loss for sure?! Looking at 4 x 2TB 3.5" drives as the 3rd backup, price and reliability over speed, after some searching the Toshiba P300 seems to be a good choice.

https://www.shoppingexpress.com.au/...-rpm-3.5-sata-desktop-hard-drive/HDWD220UZSVA

And after some searching I find no evidence of high failure rate, is there any where that logs failure rate over time of drives? and not just the usual buyer comments ? "It's good, had it a whole day, week or whatever" which helps no one!

 

[Lutfij]

You could look for a RAID 5 array in an enclosure, not a dock, but WD drives have always failed on me spectacularly. Toshiba drives also exhibit a click on them due to age or having the drive run close to full. I've worked with the P300's from Toshiba's on both my systems and for client builds which is how I can relate to the noise. The issue here is that for my clients, they rely on cloud storage so they aren't bothered with an HDD failing when their SSD(OS drive) is yet functioning and allows their officers to work without hindrance.

How have you faired with Seagate's drives? They've been rock solid for me. Also, I don't know about your partition structure and data housing behaviors but keeping drives with ample space does help prolong it's lifespan, (I apologize if I'm underestimating your method of dealing with HDD's).