Hard Drive recommendations

I'm looking for some 2TB drives to put into my QNap unit. I've so far been looking at the WD Black and also the WD RE4-GP enterprise drives.

Two questions
- is it worth paying the extra for enterprise grade drives?
- could people recommend me some good 2TB drives that they have personal experience of?

Thanks!

Buy only Name brands.
Avoid anything from Seagate and i-o maga.
You loose a lot if HD fails... Try to back up important data on optic discs.
No mater what you get, Don't leave it on day and night. Instead turn it on only when needed, You will increase the life significantly.

Thanks Samsen, which drives are you currently using?

My external drives are from 1 to 3 TB from Western Digital and Toshiba and Hitachi.
For older Desktops internal, I prefer Samsung though WD has always been good to me too.
For Laptops I recently replace whichever I can with SD drives for OS and a large 2nd drive for usual storage. Most of my SD HDs are OCZ or Corsair Force.

Stay with WD I have had one of their 1TB drives for about 3 years and have yet to have a problem with it. I have a 500 GB portable Seagate and Iomega drive. I only have them to take movies and pictures with me while I am out of town. About to buy another WD drive since the first one is about full lol

futura wrote in post #14036834
Two questions
- is it worth paying the extra for enterprise grade drives?
- could people recommend me some good 2TB drives that they have personal experience of?

Two answers
- yes
- Hitachi Ultrastar

If you want very high MTBF specs the Hitachi Ultrastars with a 5 year warranty are the best for mission-critical applications. The Hitachi Deskstars are no slouches either but they are designed for desktop use.

Thanks for your help guys, plumped for the WD RE4 drives which arrived today so starting the arduous task of backing up to raid.

Make sure you have multiple drives to back up to and only buy enterprise level drives. Cheap is really just...well cheap.

futura wrote in post #14036834
I'm looking for some 2TB drives to put into my QNap unit. I've so far been looking at the WD Black and also the WD RE4-GP enterprise drives.

Two questions
- is it worth paying the extra for enterprise grade drives?
- could people recommend me some good 2TB drives that they have personal experience of?

Thanks!

Love my 2 TB caviar blacks. I wouldnt spend extra on the enterprise drives.

I have a 2TB Caviar black that is on 24/7 but spun down when not in use. It has been my main iTunes drive for 2 years. No problems at all.

I also have a FW iOmega 1TB all in one that has had no issues for over a year as well. All of my WD drives in the past have lasted way longer than I had expected.

For SSD drives, stay away from the Intel ones. They tend to go booboo.

I also have WD 2TB Caviar Blacks (x2), on all the time.

J.Litton wrote in post #14049562
Love my 2 TB caviar blacks. I wouldnt spend extra on the enterprise drives.

I really did think about getting the WD black drives but they were out of stock at my local dealer so stumped up the extra for 2 re4s. Been thinking about getting a raid for weeks and the paranoia of having all my work in a single external backup drive got the better of me.

I have a 5-bay NAS, and I buy only 5400 RPM drives. I simply don't need the performance of a 7200 RPM drive in my NAS. 5400 RPM drives are cheaper than 7200 RPM drives, and I believe they are more reliable.

The most important thing is that every hard drive will eventually fail. So I buy hard drives with long warranties. These days, that means Samsung and Hitachi.

I guess it depends on how valuable you data is. Mine is irreplaceable.

J.Litton wrote in post #14049562
Love my 2 TB caviar blacks. I wouldnt spend extra on the enterprise drives.

I think enterprise is really based upon your back-up scheme. Do you go to optical media? What kind? How many copies? What is the workload of the drive?