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

[Jack Coats]

Daniel, I agree.  All things mechanical fail.  When is the only issue.

I have experienced 'quality' drives failing after years of similar
drives with long solid performance.  Normally because some 'small
manufacturing change' that is 'to small to tell the customers about',
that change a solid drive to a 'junk drive'.  Seagate at one time had
a rock solid server oriented large Barracuda drive.  They made some
'upgrade', then they normally failed hard withing 3 or 4 months.

Once the 'bad batch' was determined, we pulled all drives in that
serial number range, and the system integrity was restored.

Also similar things happened with a BIG drive manufacturer when they
first came out with 8G 5.25" full height drives.

The problem is this is not ONE manufacturer, or ONE drive, it happens
to all manufacturers at different points in time.

The best I can suggest is to buy current 'high quality drives',
monitor them (SMART or similar software) and before they fail hard,
replace them.

Yes, it is expensive, but it is the only thing I have found that works
fairly consistently over long periods of time.

Also, if you don't have SMART or similar for the drives, run RAID 1 or
5, and set up scripts to automatically warn you of failure or even
'soft failures', so you can analyze the data and pre-emotively retire
drives.rr