Recommended Hard Drive Space and Which One

[zeke_sky]

Hello!

So I have had 2 Western Digital My Books, both have crashed on me.
Both had WD Green drives in them.

I was wondering what is the recommended "max" hard drive space I should buy for my PC via SATA.
I leaning to buy another 4 TB WD Green hard drive but put it in my PC as oppose to external.

Or should I get a different type of drive? Are WD Greens garbage?
And should I get two 2TB drives instead of one 4TB?


I'm just looking for a little more liability, which I know is hard to trust these mechanical drives .
I will be using these drives only for storage! I'm a photographer and try to save my photos via storage, and I do go back and forth copying and opening files. I have the operating system on a SSD and rest of my files on a WD Blue 1TB.


Thanks so much in advance.

 

[popatim]

we would need to know which specific motehrbd or sata/raid controller card you were using to know for sure.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, zeke_sky!

I'm very sorry to hear about the failure of your WD My Book externals. This is very unfortunate! 🙁
I recommend getting in touch with our tech support and let them know about the issue, if your My Books are still under warranty you should be able to get replacement products from us! Here are the contacts: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=o8CEak
I think the best way to protect yourself is by having a dual bay external drive or NAS set up in RAID 1. It's not a backup though, so you should keep that in mind and keep your photos on several different locations to avoid data loss. The RAID 1 setup a.k.a. mirror is a storage array which basically has 2 identical drives inside. One is a mirror of the other drive and if one of them fails, your data will still be on the other one and you can simply replace it, so the RAID will rebuild itself. If you are interested, let me know and I'll explain more about this storage configuration and what kind of drives you need to build a reliable RAID array.

As for bigger capacity drives, it really depends on your motherboard. You can check the model on your mobo manufacturer's website and see for yourself.

It's true that mechanical drives are very sensitive, but it seems like you need the capacity after all. I understand how important liability is to you, that's why I'd recommend you to look at these storage devices and let me know if it comes close to what you want.
My Cloud Mirror NAS (consumer series): http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=D0VNV7
My Cloud EX2 NAS (expert series): http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=hqtSi7
My Book Duo External RAID storage: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=13IQyY

Hope I was helpful! Keep me posted if you have any questions!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[fzabkar]

Hard Drive Reliability Update – Sep 2014:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

ISTM that Hitachi HDDs are the most reliable today, if you are willing to pay the price premium.

I see a lot of bad feedback regarding WD'd Greens, but they seem to be doing all right in the BackBlaze study.