Windows 10: What is the Best Hard Drive?

Single drives take up less space and weigh less than multiple drives (weighing less is huge at my age). You also need to have room for the backup drives for each drive you have (I have a total of 12 HDDs for backing up the three HDDs in my desktop machine).

Full recovery from a large drive isn't all that difficult as long as you have a good backup scheme in place; it just takes longer. I keep two backup HDDs at home per HDD installed in my computer (and two more in my safe deposit box at my credit union; I also use Carbonite to backup data online). I could recover data from a full 8GB drive in roughly 24 hours. If I became impatient waiting for a data recovery from one of my backup drives (I have a built in hot swap bay for that), I could just plug the second backup drive into an external dock and work from that while the restoration takes place.

Once the initial backup has been made, it doesn't take any longer (and very well may take less time) to backup a large data drive than several smaller ones as long as one uses the correct backup scheme. Example: a folder/file syncing program (I like FreeFileSync but there are others available) is much faster and far more efficient than using imaging for backing up data only. It wouldn't be necessary to backup individual folders separately since the folder/file syncing program is capable of restoring partially missing data. Imaging is more suitable for backing up the OS and programs.

Intel has predicted 10TB SSDs within two years. While I'm not holding breath waiting for that, I find the prospect of much larger SSDs than what we have now to be extremely exciting for a data junkie like me. Imagine a single 2.5" 8TB SSD being able to replace the two 2TB and one 4 TB 3.5" spinners I have in my case now. Not only would the SSD be way lighter than the spinners, I could move into a smaller and lighter case.

 

This isn't anything new, Seagates have been a problematic hard drive for me personally and for several others I know. I ALWAYS hate seeing Newegg ads for hard drives and they're ALWAYS Seagates.... *Mad

Hitachis and Western Digital drives are pretty good.

 

The Newegg ads are not always for Seagates, just usually. Late last year, the hen fruit company put the WD 4TB Blacks on sale for $200 several times (I snagged one then) and again just this past week. They also put the 4TB Greens on sale late last year and I snatched up five of them.

 

I've found that both Seagate and WD are very good HDD's. Each company will build a bad drive but that's to be expected in any mfg process. I just avoid any other drive maker.

Jeff

 

Uh, there really aren't any others to speak of anymore.

 

Uh, there really aren't any others to speak of anymore. True but there are still members who use Hitachi. Bleck!!

 

But you will find it far faster and (possibly) cheaper to use multiple smaller drives if you are using HDD. and.... and... and..
have you ever tried to recover 10TB of data? Drive failures happen. Not 10TB, no. Not even a 5% of that - neither for work or pleasure.

EDIT: though I can tell you (I just checked it) to restore 370GB from tape last time took just over 18 minutes. To back it up (every day) takes slightly under 5 minutes.

Restoring 10TB would take a while I guess.