My slide digitizing project is now producing data by the gigabyte. As expected I am filling up the drives on my desktop computer. Not that there was a lot of space available in the first place, less than 50Gb was clear on the primary data drive. Time to buy a new hard drive! At least when I built the computer I bought a gaming cabinet with plenty of drive bays.
The reviews on Amazon and other retailers are nearly useless on hard drives. There will always be failures of devices like this, and angry buyers are very likely to leave negative reviews. Thus the data looks very skewed and it is hard to evaluate the reliability in any sort on meaningful way. Much less compare one drive to another.
There is real data! The cloud storage provider BackBlaze runs thousands upon thousands of hard drives. Obviously hard drive failure rates are of paramount importance to them and they closely track each type of drive they buy. Fortunately for the rest of us they publish this data and allow us to see what does, and does not work.
There are several obvious lessons in the data… Stay away from the 3Tb drive from Seagate and to a lesser extent the 3Tb drives from Western Digital. Several 4Tb models appear to be far more reliable. The failure rates on the worst drives can be upwards of 20% to 30% per year, while the better drives well under 5%. Those rates may seem high, you need to consider the hard use these drives get in a data center.
Based on this I have a new HGST 4Tb drive installed in my computer. All looks good so far, a trouble free installation and my photo collection copied over without issue. Now to see how long the drive lasts when I put some hours on it.
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