Finding a Durable Hard Drive

[Bernd Strauss]

Hello,

I am planning to buy a new hard drive which can store information for a long time without the deterioration of data. What suggestions can you give on how to identify such drives when shopping in a store?

Are there any companies which are known for producing hard drives which store data safely for a long time without deterioration?

 

[superninja12]

data storage the western digital red series are reliable.

 

[RolandJS]

Elsewhere I read that HDs used for surveillance computers are very rugged and long-lasting.

 

[ArtPog]

After you receive 1,001 responses to your query, each one recommending a different make/model of HDD and you finally decide which one to purchase...

Just remember this one crucial thing...

It's a crapshoot. Nothing more; nothing less.

WHATEVER HDD you work with...it may retain data without so much of a hiccup for even 10 years or so. Or for one reason or another the drive becomes defective within a few weeks, a few months, a year or two. etc., etc. with the consequent loss of data.

Your only guard against the loss of data is from time-to-time to clone the contents of the drive to another drive so that you have multiple drives containing your precious data. How often you do this is up to you. No one can advise you with any degree of certainty frequency of these backups.

 

[RolandJS]

+1 on backups; I've been doing full images of my OS and Data partitions for some time now,.

 

[Bernd Strauss]

Thank you for the suggestions. I have now bought a WD Red drive, because it seems to be designed to be more durable than the drives of the other colors in terms of data storage. The WD customer support also gave such recommendation.

 

[JaredDM]

I know others have already answered (both here and on hddguru) but I figure this might help someone else considering this.

Among WD drives, Black are definitely more reliable than Blue or Green drives. Red are essentially the same as Black but with the addition of some NAS specific functions that you don't need in a desktop computer. The purple drives are intended for surveillance, and in my opinion are no better than the Blue drives. Black/Red drives have clearly sturdier construction than Blue or Green, but Purple is just as flimsy inside.

That having been said, HGST drives are the reliability winners among desktop drives. They are owned by WD but are built around Hitachi technology. Working in professional data recovery we abuse our house drives daily and HGST are the only ones that don't constantly die on us.