[Discuss] Tired of unreliable external drives... recommendations?

[dbarrett at blazemonger.com (Daniel Barrett)]

I'm seeking advice on external hard drives for Linux system backup....

For 10 years, I've been backing up my home systems to an external hard
drive using rsync, and rotating it in & out of a safety deposit box each
month. This setup has worked great, and some of these disks operated
without error for 4-5 years.

In the past year or two, however, all of the large external HD's I've tried
(3TB) develop errors or die within the first year.  Every couple months, I
view a backup log in the morning and see stuff like:

 EXT4-fs error (device sdd1): ext4_find_entry: reading directory #2 offset 0
 EXT4-fs error (device sdd1): __ext4_get_inode_loc: unable to read inode
   block - inode=2, block=1057
 ...etc...

At that point, I either "fsck -f" successfully, or discard the drive.

At the same time, I read reviews on NewEgg of large external drives and
they are filled with negatives.

My questions are:

1. Are there ANY reliable, quiet, external drives of size >= 3TB today,
that fit into a safety deposit box (i.e., no RAID appliances) and work with
Linux?

2. If I go with an external enclosure and buy my own internal drive for
it, any recommendations? (Quiet is important.)

3. Any other helpful suggestions? (Note: Cloud backups are not an option,
as I don't want my private data sitting on some company server.)

Thank you,
Dan

--
Dan Barrett
dbarrett at blazemonger.com