Main data drive? Internal VS Ext. powered VS Ext. portable?

[deadmuse]

My internal data drive just died and I need a replacement about 4TB in capacity. I use it only in one location for work and personal data. It will be written to a lot--about 30GBs per day with files being constantly deleted and replaced, and will stay on with the desktop for 15 hours a day.

I care only about life span, not speed.

What type of drive would be most reliable to handle this type of load? I am debating between:

WD Blue Internal HDD
WD External powered HDD (do larger self-powered cases have better cooling?)
WD External portable HDD (do portable drives handle heavy use as well?)

My setup is: Win 7 64, i5-3570, 128GB SSD (almost full, no storage space).

Thanks for your time!

 

[USAFRet]

My internal data drive just died and I need a replacement about 4TB in capacity. I use it only in one location for work and personal data. It will be written to a lot--about 30GBs per day with files being constantly deleted and replaced, and will stay on with the desktop for 15 hours a day.

I care only about life span, not speed.

What type of drive would be most reliable to handle this type of load? I am debating between:

WD Blue Internal HDD
WD External powered HDD (do larger self-powered cases have better cooling?)
WD External portable HDD (do portable drives handle heavy use as well?)

My setup is: Win 7 64, i5-3570, 128GB SSD (almost full, no storage space).

Thanks for your time!

An internal drive is probably what you want.
WD Blue, Seagate Barracuda or similar.

 

[SkyNetRising]

It will be written to a lot--about 30GBs per day with files being constantly deleted and replaced, and will stay on with the desktop for 15 hours a day.

With such usage scenario I'd probably go for internal NAS drive (WD red for example) and for reliability you can put 2 of those drives in RAID 1 array. So even if one drive dies again, you still have the data.

 

[deadmuse]

With such usage scenario I'd probably go for internal NAS drive (WD red for example) and for reliability you can put 2 of those drives in RAID 1 array. So even if one drive dies again, you still have the data.

Is the advantage of an NAS that it automates the backup of one drive to two? If that's how it works, I presume you need twice the capacity of the data to accommodate a backup?

So far I have been doing that manually, being on a teacher's budget ($125 for whatever disk I get), I manually copy projects I want to save to another external drive, then delete stuff that has been graded. It sounds like the NAS would cost me two drives plus the cost of the unit, which seems to be $200+, so a minimum of an extra $325 for automated backups.

Please let me know if the NAS does anything else as my understanding is limited. Two to three times the cost of a single disk would be a big sacrifice for me, but I'll consider it if there's another payoff. So far, I have spent my own time doing manual backups rather than shelling out for an NAS unit.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I'm not talking about separate NAS device, but about internal drive that is designed for nas usage
(lot of reads/writes in 24/7 mode).
RAID 1 is what does data synchronization between the drives. You can either use built in raid functionality from motherboard or you can use software raid also.
And yes - that means 2 drives instead of one.

I simply have a similar drive use scenario. Have been using a regular drive for lots of daily writes 24/7 mode. And regular desktop drives just can't handle that. They die in 1 to 3 years with such usage. And it's quite frustrating, when you loose your data, have to re-download, recover from backups. Even worse, when you don't have backup for some things.
So I got 2 NAS drives and configured them in RAID 1. Btw - initially I had desktop drive paired with NAS drive in RAID 1. Desktop drive died already, so I replaced it with second NAS drive. Didn't loose any data in the process.

 

[seagate_surfer]

Standard desktop drives like the Seagate BarraCuda and similar competitor drives are rated for 8 hours a day x 5 days a week use. They're also usually rated for up to 55TB of data per year. where your use case mentioned is above this time requirement and may likely end up being over the data usage mark as well, you would be better off with a NAS-rated drive to ensure performance and longevity. These drives connect in the same way, so while a NAS enclosure device can be nice, it's not a requirement. NAS-rated drives like the Seagate IronWolf, for example, are rated for 24x7 use, up to 180TB of data per year with the IronWolf Pro version rated for 300TB per year.

If you'd like more info on different drive types and choosing the right one for the right application, here is a video to check out.