What's the best brand of external USB hard drive? How long do they usually last?

What's the best brand of external USB hard drive? How long do they usually last?

I want one to dump all my movies on.

1. HGST server drive or SSD in an enclosure.

2. You never know. Probably a while but it could be dead tomorrow. Have a redundant drive setup and a backup if its important.

They don't have a 'lasts this long', they have an annual failure rate. There's a roughly 3% chance of losing the drive every year.

Backup your data.

PS: I know that have a multi drive enclosure where it or your OS does RAID1/5/6 and then a backup isn't the answer people *want* to hear. But that is the kind of tactic the world uses to deal with drive failure. And you can quite easily buy matching enclosures.

Infallible drives couldn't be made or cost more, IDK, but its how you just deal with it.

>Dump all my movies on an external drive
>an external drive
Well, my 24TB JBOD connected to a 3ware RAID controller is external...

OP user just some advice from somebody who has tons of data to back up (porn, movies, ebooks) always buy at least a size or two larger than you think you will ned. Having to split your data between two or more smaller HDDs and keeping those backed up and up to date is a gigantic pain in the ass.

>Backup your data.
but that's literally what I want the drive for lol

>connected to a 3ware RAID controller
Fancy, but also somewhat pointless unless you *insist* on doing Windows or OSX as your host.

mdadm RAID on Linux has better management tools and highly stable performance anyhow

See this You'll need redundant backups -full stop-

nobody gives a fuck about your anime storage facility, you attention whoring piece of shit.
If you mean 2,5" drives then that would be Seagate. Avoid WD drives, as these have USB 3.0 bridges directly on the HDD PCB. So if it dies you'll lose all your data.

You buy two more drives more than you need, if you have a *bit* of stuff.

If you have a *lot* of stuff, you want an extra server in your drive rack with a bunch of extra drives. [Today, you can actually order new drives as the rack is getting full, unless your filling rate is enormous. Drives are big enough and scale out storage doesn't have rebuild times and the other arsepain.]

Yea, just get a RAID1 or RAID5/6 storage to put the backups on IF the data is important.

See, otherwise you have that nice 10TB drive with your backup and while you restore it that (arguably pretty low, but also not lottery-win-like) chance to fail unfortunately hits you...

Can someone give me a buying guide of what to get if I want to save data for long periods of time?

How much data? there is a new kind of DVD on the market that can store stuff for 1000 years. Expensive though, and IIIRC only 4,7 GB per DVD, and I think you need a special burner for it. Google M-Disc.

Like 10-12 TB worth

How likely is a driver failure if you only use it for normie stuff like downloading porn, saving photos and videos?

Everything will fail eventually. You either invest (time and money) now to get redundant storage/additional backups, or spend even more time and money to get your data back (or deal with the consequences of losing it forever) in a few years.

Get enclosure and drive separately. The circuitry and connections on external drives fail almost as often as the drives themselves.

Make backups for your backups.

Grab enough HDD to do an array / cluster with 2 drives or more redundancy for the data you keep online and then add another set of drives for the backup.

+- the same as everyone else's.

Only extremely heavy workloads change a lot about drive life.

Granted not having the drive turned on quite as much of course reduces wear / risk of failure over time a bit, but it's really basically the same regardless.

Have a backup of the data you want to keep and think you can't easily re-download.

might cop for a 2TB or whatever HDD just to back my main SSDs
i have room in my case for 2 more HDDs, how would I set up redundancy?

So I should get HDDs for the actual storage then back it up on other HDDs? Should I buy an enclosure?

what's the best 3.5" 4-5TB external HDD for a reasonable amount of money?

> So I should get HDDs for the actual storage then back it up on other HDDs?
Yup, easiest solution.

> Should I buy an enclosure?
Or a dock, or whatever way you want to attach the drives, yes.

But docks are pretty and quite easy to use.

Any hard drives, enclosures or docks you recommend? And about how many TB in each should I get? i want 8-12TB total.

Avoid

I like Orico's enclosures and docks.

They are good and the lineup is huge so you can get multiple models -USB3 Type C or A or eSata or whatever- for drive counts between 1-9).
But if the stock enclosures you get meet your port and drive count requirements (e.g. USB3), it's probably not worth replacing them.

Seagate had really shitty HDD at like 2-4TB, I'd avoid these. And WD had some shitty greens, but in general it's quite valid to just pick the cheap drives for the storage that isn't always online.

For storage that is always online in RAID, I'd get the current helium filled drives or HGST, WD Red [Pro] / Gold, Seagate Ironwolf >8TB or such.