External HDD/SSD Recommendations

If interested, some new 1TB Sandisk Extreme Portable drives are available on eBay for $119. See https://www.ebay.com/p​/13035703464

I use 3 G-Tech drives - 1 as main drive, 1 as a duplicate and 1 for prior years work. They hold my working images, exported jpegs, LR Catalog and some other smaller things. Original files are initially loaded onto a 1GB T5 SSD. Time Machine backups go to a 4GB WD My Passport. LR Catalog is also backed on the computer's HD.

I haven't had any issues with the Samsung or the G-Techs. WD was my go to for several years, but I wanted something in a smaller form factor and horizontal VS. vertical standing - hence the G-Techs. They external build is a lot more solid than the WD as they metal enclosures versus plastic. I'm only about 6 months into using them, where as my WD were several years old (5-7 years old and pretty close to maxed out of space).

I hate to jinx myself but I've never had a hard drive failure. For external hard drives I've always purchased Western Digital as I trust their quality. About once a month I run a full virus scan and full check of bad sectors. I have noticed speed falloff of older drives and that's when I typically will upgrade to a new computer (about every 6-7 years). Currently I'm running an SSD drive in my computer and two SSD external backup drives. Noticeably faster than the old style mechanical drives.

Wilt wrote in post #18996350
In my own history of 3 harddrive failures in 30 years of always-on harddrives, that is a failure about every 7-8 years (statistically, I should have another harddrive fail in the next few years!). The way you can improve upon statistics, it would seem, is to power-on the harddrive and plug it in to add/read data but otherwise turn it off...after all, MTBF assumes operation 24/7... the less power-on operational time, the more calendar time passes without incident, right?!

You are not necessarily right in your assumption. It depends how much damage is done in each startup / shutdown cycle. In many types of equipment starting and stopping can be the weak link in the chain. Also, MTBF is a poor measure of reliability, as it gives no indication of the failure distribution. Is there Infant Mortality, where a significant proportion die early, but those that get past this last a long time, do they fail after a random time period, or do they all tend to die after the same operating time?

I agree with you that redundancy is required, ideally using different equipment/ technology to provide the redundancy.

I've been looking at the statistical information published by Backblaze on their drive failures by brand. If a well-known brand has a problem, it's usually model-specific, not brand specific. Any of them may have a problematic model from time to time that draws a lot of media stink.

Currently, Backblaze's statistics show Seagate a bit less reliable for the particular model they have bought. But Backblaze buys thousands of drives--and they also still buy Seagates.

More important is to have a drive management scheme with enough redundancy to overcome failure of any single drive. I don't retire a perfectly running drive just because of the purchase date. I'd rather have a system that can stand a drive failure and replacement without data loss (read: NAS with proper RAID configuration).

I bought 2 WD RED 10TB drives late last yr. They have been sitting there for a while. I wanted a 2-bay enclosure which I could connect directly to my PC and use these drives in a simple raid-1 format. I finally ended up getting QNAP TR-002 ($155) which is a simple enclosure with raid (jbod, 0, 1) with USB 3.2 interface. I am planning to use this as my main drive for pictures. My PC is a few years old and I see that I can access the drives in this enclosure as fast if not faster than if they were inside the PC. So now it means less need of opening the PC and I can move between the PC and the MAC if needed.

https://www.amazon.com …=8-1&tag=wwwcanoniccom-20

huntersdad wrote in post #18997828
I haven't had any issues with the Samsung or the G-Techs.

Updating an earlier post of mine, in which I commented about three actual harddrive failures...I just ran into NUMBER FOUR!
My HP Presario PC came with Samsung 500GB HD, and some months after putting it into use, the HD failed and HP sent me a replacement under warranty. Lo and behold, that second Samsung HD has now started to fail its SMART test! The second HD has lasted about 8.5 years, in a 9 year old PC.

So I just got a 500GB SSD and will install it this weekend, in place of the failing Samsung drive. As this PC is now a secondary one primarily for web surfing if the other one is being used, there really is no data on it that we need to worry about backing up. But I do have a System Image so the new SSD is configured to look just like the failed HD