Who makes good hard drives nowadays?

[4KRG]

Again, don't ask about hard drive reliability by brand, ask by specific model of drive (or google specific models). I have had drives of every brand fail on me at work

I don't think every drive from any one brand is crap, however, there are drive models from every brand that are turds, you just need to find those models and avoid them (or find the good models and buy them, same thing)

[kahuna]

Originally Posted by edstein

Read and write speeds are much faster with hard drives vs. optical media. That would be my main reason for not going the optical route. Plus hard hard drives are cheap these days. Even after the flooding in Thailand.

I have been buying Western Digital WD Elements external hard drives from 1-2TB. Most have cost me between $60-$85. I have not seen any that low in a while. I take that back I did see the 1TB model drop to $79 on Amazon.com last week but I still think that is to high.

[kahuna]

Originally Posted by 4KRG

Again, don't ask about hard drive reliability by brand, ask by specific model of drive (or google specific models). I have had drives of every brand fail on me at work

I don't think every drive from any one brand is crap, however, there are drive models from every brand that are turds, you just need to find those models and avoid them (or find the good models and buy them, same thing)

A few weeks ago I had a external 500GB Maxtor HD (I use to call it the green brick) fail on me. Lucky for it I did not use it to store any of my Korean stuff. I just kept it for when I ripped Korean dramas on dvd-r to it. Once the drama was over and the people who I burning dvd-r for got everything I would delete stuff off the drive.

I have a friend who also has almost the same Korean 720p/1080p dramas on hd also. Except for maybe the last 2-3TB I have downloaded. He has been busy remolding a house he purchased.

[Josh-da-man]

Originally Posted by X

I have amazingly good luck with data. I just threw in a 1.44MB VB for Windows PE floppy from 1993 and it copied perfectly. I have a friend who can't keep a floppy for more than a year.

I've generally had good luck with media as well. Not long ago I transferred over 200 CD-Rs I made on my old Windows 98 machine to a HD, most of them over ten years old, and only had a couple of files I couldn't read.

Though will say that it is a bit distressing when you consider how much of our lives are now data. Photographs, home movies, mp3 libraries, CDs, DVDs, blu-rays, documents -- all of it digital. And it can all be wiped with a hard drive crash.

And there's really no 100% fool-proof way to store it. Hard drives fail. Burnable optical media could potentially fail at any time. Pressed CDs and DVDs will occasionally crap out. I'm not sure what the prospects are for long-term storage on flash memory.

[4KRG]

Originally Posted by Josh-da-man

I've generally had good luck with media as well. Not long ago I transferred over 200 CD-Rs I made on my old Windows 98 machine to a HD, most of them over ten years old, and only had a couple of files I couldn't read.

This is my point, you had files you could not read. If that were me, those files would be the most important ones

As I said in an earlier post, I am not giving exact numbers or percentages (if I did, I am sure the number would be extremely low) for me data is all or nothing. This crap of a couple files don't read after 10 years is unacceptable to me.

Though will say that it is a bit distressing when you consider how much of our lives are now data. Photographs, home movies, mp3 libraries, CDs, DVDs, blu-rays, documents -- all of it digital. And it can all be wiped with a hard drive crash.

Yep, and as we saw, even Amazon S3 crashed and lost data, so what to do? Keep multiple copies of important stuff in different places and on different media. so 2TB of data needs 6TB of actual space, including all the back up space

And there's really no 100% fool-proof way to store it. Hard drives fail. Burnable optical media could potentially fail at any time. Pressed CDs and DVDs will occasionally crap out. I'm not sure what the prospects are for long-term storage on flash memory.

You lower odds of loss with multiple copies on multiple formats.

I am fine with optical backups of my hard drive backups of my cloud backups

Flash memory is getting better, but yeah, I am not sure I trust all flavors the same. SD cards seem to be pretty reliable over the long haul, but the typical USB flash drive (thumb drive, memory stick, whatever you want to call them) fail pretty easily and regularly (if your ONE drive is fine, you are not working with same sample size I am)

[zyzzle]

Heh, I have 5.25" floppies from 1978 / 79 that still read OK. Granted, the bits per inch are very low, those 5.25" floppies are incredibly robust.

[printerati]

Maybe they were bad batches, but I had four WD 500 GB drives (two internal Green, two external Blue) fail on me within 18 months of purchase. My Seagate and Hitachi 1 TB external drives are both almost two years old now, and I haven't had a single issue with either.

That said, my experience with the WD Green 1.5 TB internal drives mirrors X's. I put four of them in a client's Mac Pro a while back, and all of them have been rock solid.

[Ranger]

Though will say that it is a bit distressing when you consider how much of our lives are now data. Photographs, home movies, mp3 libraries, CDs, DVDs, blu-rays, documents -- all of it digital. And it can all be wiped with a hard drive crash.

Fight Club quote... the things you own end up owning you.

I'm fine with burning data to discs, however, there does seem to be a point where it's not really practical. How long would it take to burn 40 BD-Rs? How do you divide up all that data for burning?

Before I had a dvd burner, I'd set up about ten 695 MB folders for cd burning.