[Dark Age Iron Savior]

Assuming I'm aiming for something in the lower 100-300gb range as opposed to....there up to bazooglebytes or something, right?

I know, or at least I vaguely remember from posts here, that a hard drive of any nature is basically a ticking time bomb, but surely there's some obective differences in quality?
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[psiga]

I seem to recall Google conducting a live study of all sorts of different manufacturers, and the results were that they all basically had the same rate of failure.
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[Broco]

There are objective differences in quality but they aren't correlated so much to brands as to particular lines from particular manufacturing plants. Sometimes there will be a batch of lemons. But for the most part there is no information available about this kind of thing, so yes they should all be considered equally unreliable.

Regardless of quality, hard drives randomly blow like incandescent light bulbs. The only solution is to perform regular backups to other media if you are concerned.

[dark steve]

Seagates come with a five-year warranty, I think, which doesn't really help if it goes down with important stuff on it, but that's probably the best you're going to do.

[Kappuru]

It's a crapshoot, man. As long as it's by a major manufac and has a good price, buy it. If we're talking externals, then yeah, there's a difference in build quality of the enclosure, but for internal HDDs, go with Seagate or Western Digital.

WD, in my experience, has better support than Seagate. And backups should be a habit, at any rate.
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[Greng]

A Samsung drive died horribly on me once, smoke and everything. Regardless I do believe it's very much down to manufacturing batches as long as you go for a recognisable brand name. I've stuck with Western Digital ever since but again; general consensus is this kind of brand recommendation is moot. Just don't be too cheap.

[rabite gets whacked!]

DAIS computer thread!

Whatever you do, you of all people should get two of them and back that shit up daily. You seem to have the worst computer failure rates of anyone on the internet.

I've always used Seagates and they don't give me trouble. 5 year warranty if they do.
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[manmachine plays jazz]

western digital.

i used to be a seagate man but i've had a bad run of luck with drives that were way below the standard 4-5 yr lifespan of a drive.

[Panoptic]

Only brand of hard drive I've owned that has given me zero issues is Fujitsu, but they're not really the kind of hardware you're looking for. Currently have a pair of two year old WD Raptors that haven't hiccuped yet. I've had one Seagate, one WD and two Maxtor drives die on me, and one Hitachi that was acting kind of flaky by the time I replaced it. So basically like Psiga said it's kind of a crapshoot.

Though, Seagate has an "SV" line of hard drives specifically built for Surveillance that apparently have less moving parts than standard hard drives. They're designed for huge, continuous writes. Might be worth looking into, I guess? Just note that something with a big cache will be doing less actual work and stressing the motors less.

[Touran]

Buy a Solid State Drive if you have the cash to blow.

They last longer, have no moving parts, and generally are faster than hard drives.

SSD's aren't cheap though, and you (probably) don't need that level of hardware.
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Man, I'm sorry.

[Talbain]

Get a solid state if you're really worried about your data. Otherwise they're all pretty much the same. Solid States are dropping in price, but they're still considerably more expensive than ATA or SATA (can you even find ATA anymore?)
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[Dark Age Iron Savior]

Solid states have a limit on how many read/writes they can do before crapping out, right?
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[Talbain]

Yes and no.

http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_drive

Basically, DRAM SSDs do not have a write limit. Flash however does, and flash is the most common type of SSD (if we're talking Newegg you can probably get the type of memory being used in the specs).

Also, it does not "kill the data." The data can just no longer be re-arranged, essentially freezing the SSD. So you could always transfer the data from one SSD to another, assuming you got up to the write capacity (which seems very possible if you're using a SSD as a HDD)
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[Broco]

[BenoitRen]

DRAM SSDs? Won't this mean that they lose your data as soon as they get no power anymore?
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Get Xenoblade Chronicles!

[Talbain]

[falsedan]

DRAM SSD is basically a stack of vanilla memory modules plugged into a board that is smart enough to fake looking like a normal hard disk drive to whatever it's plugged into

DRAM is volatile memory, so as soon as power is removed, all data is lost (bar faint electromagnetic radiation residue). DRAM SSDs usually have internal batteries to cover momentary cuts in power & UPS to handle longer outages/buy enough time to write the contents out to non-volatile storage.

costs about $50/GB, and is really only useful as a super-high-speed swap drive/page file/cache with access speeds between main RAM and flash/plain old platters (the disk IO bus is slower than the memory bus), which is only necessary when you've hit the RAM limit for your architecture (4GB on x86-32, say) and you still need more high-speed temporary storage
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