Comments

farss wrote on 9/23/2014, 4:13 PM
Avoid Seagate like the plague seems the obvious conclusion.
I've never been happy with Seagate drives myself backed up by me having one that I hadn't touched for ages having the dreaded clicky clicky problem when I did try to get data off it a couple of weeks ago.
Based on the data presented by Backblaze Hitachi is worth considering.

Bob.
riredale wrote on 9/23/2014, 4:38 PM
Ha! Just posted the same thing an hour later. Oops.
PeterDuke wrote on 9/23/2014, 7:35 PM
I have many Seagate 2TB drives (as USB types) which unfortunately are not covered.

I did have two 1.5TB Seagate internal drives, both of which started reallocating sectors (advised by Hard Disk Sentinel), so I replaced them before I lost any data.

One thing I do notice is that my USB drives run significantly hotter than my internal drives. The USB drive case only feels warm to the touch, however, so unless you have monitoring software you might never know. If I carelessly stack two USB drives on top of one another, the heating is made much worse. Heating is known to shorten the lives of hard disks.

johnmeyer wrote on 9/23/2014, 7:49 PM
I gave up buying stock USB drives because it was so hard to find ones that had a fan, or if they did have a fan, it was pathetically small. Most of the drives I purchase now I use in my removable drive bays. However, when I need a USB portable drive, I buy the enclosure separate from the drive, and make my own. This is the case I use:

SABRENT EC-UEIS7 Aluminum 3.5" IDE / SATA USB & eSATA External Enclosure

Check out the size of the fan: it is big, and it moves a LOT of air.