Seagate 1TB Expansion, cheap and well, it's up to your luck.
My company uses it for daily backup purpose, about 2~3 times a week plugged overnight (they have others as incremental backup).
So far the usage is being moderate I must say, no issue so far.
If you're using for critical data, buy 2 copy or maybe 3 as you can afford to make several copies for mirror backup, in case 1 down, you have another copy.

Most importantly is when you do operation (read or write) on the hard disk, make sure it has as least shock or vibration as possible to prevent physical bad sectors, this will permanently destroy any data, hard disk can be laid on any surface as long as it's stable along the operations.

If you're going to use it in rugged environment, best is to save up for external SSD, or couples of USB3 flash drive (big in size?) but due to wear and tear, flash drive chips will wear out in 2~3 years if you use it daily. I believe SSD will have much better durability in this case.

Can someone recommend best bang for buck external 2.5" hdd? Speed, size, price.

RM210 ~ 250

I have around 5 hdd at home ( all 2tb, using toaster and 2 more in pc) various brands - samsung, hitachi, wd.

I have had to RMA/replaced 2 Western Digital hard disk in the last 2 years and yesterday, another one went kaput ( warranty expired) due to bad sectors that cannot be regenerated. So all in all, 3 wd hard disk died on me and another 2.5 external wd rma also few months back.

Now im beginning to think WD have a QC isssue here ? my other hard disks at home ( samsung, hitachi 3.5 and buffalo 2.5) still going strong with daily use.

I'm also beginning to think the same.

Anyway, surprise nobody mentioned the new launch of the 5TB / 6TB WD Red and the WD Red Pro line.

Anyways, no more WD disk for me . This is especially fishy when WD offers FREE 1 year data recovery services now with their hard disk

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com.sg/dr-wd-my/


Here is my blog post on this matter. now how do i share this with WD malaysia

Nah, just some marketing gimmick, I believe there's a statistic posted sometimes ago study the hard disk failure rate over the spent of within a year up to several years, 1-year being the least, 1%? Just some gimmick to lure ppl into buying WD, mine locally only have choice of WD, so I have no choice.

I am now tend to buy the CCTV line (Purple currently) for its 1-year longer warranty and for its slightly better durability? Well, we shall see when I got mine.

Ontrack gets all the free publicity with a major brand plus free ride to customer details when an interested end-user signs up. What more can a company ask for? They will be able to reach more potential customer this way faster then on their own. I doubt people will buy a harddisk just for the free limited time data recovery service. You already have plenty of free tools available that can readily do a quick recovery without taking the problem HDD apart.

I have got 2 dead Seagate HDDs (completely undetected at BIOS) and 2 WD greens with bad sectors. Running about 20 WDs (mostly Red) at anytime. Comparing between SG and WD, I'd rather go with WD for its FW stability. Both brands have their fair share of issues. Just need to make sure you cut out the vibrations, keep drives cool and keep a stable power to the HDDs.

This post has been edited by mrbob: Aug 13 2014, 10:18 AM

Agree that wd is better than seagate but I still don't want wd. Looking at buffalo as alternative. I recalled Hitachi and Samsung is out of the business right?

Neither is better than the other, it's "luck", some can use over decade, some broke within few days
Hitachi is still active but only on 2.5"? Correct me on this.
Samsung's HDD is bought by Seagate.

Hitachi is very much alive under HGST.

Very tempted to get Toshiba drives since they are HGST drives. They still produce 3.5". But the new WD Red 5TB and 6TB drives are tempting though.

6TB is already on the street but local still selling 4TB with much higher price, I'm stick with 3TB, much worth per GB.
Can't wait for the 6TB arrival but doubt the price will drop soon, new tech always high at first few batches.

ur wd is which model ar? green or blue? me and sis , also neighbor are all using wd re4

Green power for the 3.5 and the my passport for 2.5

I had a Green 1TB, died just after warranty so I gave up on that, right now I have a normal Green, a CCTV Green and newly bought just broke the shield Purple (all 3x 3TB).
So far they have not much issue since I don't use them when not needed, plan to move the Purple to replace one of my Samsung 2TB in the 24/7 tiny server.
I do have 1 1TB Blue and 1 1TB Black for my OS and Games, Black had already been through RMA once, so if you going to ask me about durability, I would say... that's all depends on luck. The Black also been through 3 years before it start causing issue (bad sectors) and luckily enough I manage to backup all the data inside.
So far I only did 3 RMA myself, 2 Samsung and 1 WD Black. All were painless, but Seagate service is way better in both speed and its packaging, 4 days compare to a week, also Seagate packaging is bigger (more foam).

Try taking the Buffalo apart and you will find *surprise*surprise* ...Seagate. Good thing you're on 2.5", a friend had his 3.5" buffalo ext killed twice - dead HDD. First time he RMAd and the replacement died just outside the 2 year warranty. Took it apart but the Seagate HDD inside couldn't be detected by the BIOS. He since bought 2 x WD MyBook and have been boasting about their stability. Don't ask me, I'd rather just use internal HDDs and NAS. And even so, I still encountered a DOA WD Green CCTV. Managed to get it exchanged.

Actually Hitachi is still pretty much alive even after being bought over by WD 2 years ago. Head over to storagereview for all their recent consumer HDDs releases. Its just that the distributor in Malaysia sucks big time. Seagate has been selling 6TB desktop HDDs in the US. It will be awhile before they are available here. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822178520. Give it until Q2 next year for the 6TB consumer HDDs to come down in price.

This post has been edited by mrbob: Aug 15 2014, 04:40 PM

Wrote this a couple weeks ago during some free time with a thought of helping others understand the 3 main focus - heat, shock/vibration and power. Taking care of these can help determine the useful lifespan of your hard drives.

Now in case you are wondering why I have left out water as an obvious hard drive killer, I am making the assumption that you KNOW that operating ANY electrical equipment in the presence water will fry the equipment and possibly you along with it too. So let's get on with the first part.

A) HEAT

If you have started with a healthy hard drive free from manufacturing defect etc, high temperature is the No 1 killer for your hard drive.

Google's "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf is a good study on general trends of hard disks in data centers. Although other studies such as Backblaze does not find any co-relations between failure rates and temperatures (Backblaze's study covers up to 30°C), Google's study tracked temperatures from 15°C to 50°C.



Google's findings showed higher failure rates for:

- Hard disk temperatures above 45°C

- Temperatures below 25°C

- Aging hard disk drives (3 years and older) with average temperatures 40°C and above

According to a similar study "Datacenter Scale Evaluation of the Impact of Temperature on Hard Disk Drive Failures" http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gurumurthi/papers/acmtos13.pdf released by Microsoft and the University of Virginia, when temperatures reached 50°C, average failure rate increased 79% when compared to hard disks operating in 40°C environment.



From the studies above, we can conclude that temperature above 50°C can kill your hard drive and create a lot of bad sectors in the process. Also the ideal target temperature for hard drive operation seems to be around 30°C - 45°C.

So what you can do to keep your hard disks running in the target temperature?

1) Ensure good airflow in chassis. A cramped up chassis that impedes airflow will only trap heat. If you have dust-filters installed on your PC, remember to clean them regularly.

2) Make sure that you have good airflow in the room that you are running the PC. The airflow in your PC can only run as cool as the room that it is operating in so it is a great idea to turn on the air-conditioning.

3) Monitor your PC's temperature especially the harddisks more so if you tend to overclock your PC. There are plenty of software available in Windows platform - Hard Disk Sentinel, HD Tune, Speedfan, HWmonitor, CrystalDiskInfo etc. For Linux - hddtemp, lm-sensors, smartctl or the basic smartd etc. Ubuntu and Mint comes with built-in sensors app that you can turn on.

4) Hard disks spinning at 7200rpm tend to run hotter than 5k drives, so you may want to increase the rate of airflow if you have upgraded from a 5k drive to higher spin rate.

5) Use "Green" hard drives. They generally have power saving features that allows them to sip power compares to the always-on enterprise HDDs. The idea is less power being used = less heat being dissipated into the chassis.

6) Idle your hard disks when not in use. Idle drives will dissipate less heat.

7) Lastly, run an energy efficient PSU. An Inefficient PSUs will introduce heat to your chassis through dissipation as it converts electrical power. More about this later.

Now for the second part.

B) Shock/Vibration

We will look at the next cause of hard drive failure - shock (cause by external factors) and vibration (cause by internal factors).

Hard drive is a delicate piece of equipment and are particularly sensitive to external physical impacts, even if the impact is on the PC. This include any 2D or 3D-type of movement such as knocking, bumping, jarring, dropping etc can shock the read/write heads while it hovers just microns (millionths of an inch) above the spinning platter causing the head to crash on the surface of the platter destroying any data that is stored on the damaged area.



This initial crash could often create countless numbers of fine particles from the crashed area that can land onto other areas causing even more head crashes as the heads move over these particles. As the effects of these head crashes snowballs you will start experiencing significant damage and data loss, and very possibly ending up with a useless drive down the road.

Nowadays most notebooks comes with built-in active hard drive protection which can be useful to some extend. However it is strongly advisable to avoid moving your notebook around while it is in operation.

While external impacts can be easily controlled, the harder one to control are vibrations caused by the hard drive's internal spindle motor and platters, rotational movement of the actuator (read/write head arm) etc and when they are installed in the same drive cage with other drives in close proximity, the resulting rotational momentum (Rotational Vibration or RV) can sometimes creating harmonics that create sharply higher vibration forces that can easily knock a read/write head off track.

"Performance Impact of External Vibration on Consumer-grade and Enterprise-class Disk Drives" https://www.dtc.umn.edu/publications/reports/2005_08.pdf published by Thomas Ruwart and Lu Yingping concludes that



Hard drive manufacturers have built-in RV sensors and active protection system to minimize the impact of the vibration in their enterprise range hard drives. Some higher end consumer hard drives features their own built-in vibration reduction system.

Some IT enthusiasts have come up with creative ways to mitigate vibrations. Here are some examples:


http://img703.imageshack.us/img703/4194/hddsusp1.jpg
http://www2.picturepush.com/photo/a/115534...mg/11553400.jpg
http://img128.imageshack.us/img128/9121/img12504tn.jpg

So what can you do about this?

1) Make sure that you don't move, bump, kick, tilt, jar, drop or even press the top-shell of the hard drive especially while it is in operation. Always treat it with love and respect.

2) It is worth buying hard drive that have built-in vibration control mechanism. If you are running an array, you will still benefit from getting an enterprise range hard drive as it will have build-in RV sensors plus more advanced anti-vibration mechanism.

3) Invest in a chassis that comes with hard drive rubber/silicon dampeners. You can also search Amazon or Newegg to get off-the-shelf anti-vibration kit.

4) Or if you're a builder, you can make yourself an anti-vibration system and post a picture back on this thread for all to admire.

5) Get external drives that have active/passive protection eg Transcend external hard drives. http://www.transcend-info.com/Products/No-284

This post has been edited by mrbob: Aug 16 2014, 04:30 PM

Guys. Got one question here.

I got some old HDD like year 2008-2010. Which like around 40GB or 80GB.. What can do with them?

Errr... use them in your test machines ie Linux, FreeBSD etc