Funny thing is WD isnt the most reliable, its Hitatchi (or HGST) who are the most reliable according to backblaze:

>Seagate

For free delivery all you need is 20 forum posts, easily obtainable in an hour making this only cost £173

>Seagate

"Seagate brings over 30 years of trusted storage reliability..."
Yeah tell that to Amstrad, whose PC business folded over reliability issues with Seagate HDDs. :stuck_out_tongue:
Although a very good price, personally after my own experiences I wouldn't trust Seagate, never mind with that amount of data.

Same as WD anyway.
I have a few Seagate external HDDs, never disappoint me ...
But indeed they use to have a bad batch sold in the market a few years ago.

Funny thing is WD isnt the most reliable, its Hitatchi (or HGST) who are the most reliable according to backblaze:

Free delivery all you need is 20 forum posts.

Dont think its that easy, had my free delivery years but if i remember rightly they cant just be random rubbish posts they have to be of some use, so going on a thread and saying thanks wont do it. Also before you couldn't make all 20 posts the same day so unless its changed you wont be getting free delivery today.

I think I paid this much for a 300gb Maxtor about 10 years ago, had 16mb cache and everything!

Funny thing is Hitachi took over IBM's HDD business which were notorious for the Deathstar scandal of failing drives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#IBM_Deskstar_75GXP_failures

Keep in mind 3 years manufacturer warranty (not 1 or 2 years) to give you a piece of mind.

WD for me, although I'd always RAID any drive I have nowadays

evry seagate hard disk i had had noisy heads

Other than a 5tb external Toshiba drive I'm not aware of a better £/TB deal at the moment which is really unusual to see at the top end of storage capacity. The sweet spot is usualy floating around the middle of the pack.

Any good for installing in a Synology ?

Think of all the porn this would hold

I'm still waiting for the SSD's to be hitting this kind of capacity. Fast with no noise and less risk of losing data if knocked. Shame when it happens it'll cost in the region of £1,000+

This is not a general drive its for cold storage dont even think about it for home use

If you are serious about data backups then I wouldn't consider backing up that much data on one drive - unless you have a backup of the backup - dangerous.

You're better off with 3, 4, 5 smaller drives in Raid 5 so even if one drive fails you still have all your data. Alternatively use the Parity option in Windows 8/10 Storage Spaces:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/storage-spaces-pools

http://www.howtogeek.com/109380/how-to-use-windows-8s-storage-spaces-to-mirror-combine-drives/

RAID is not a backup.

Exactly, there is nothing wrong with having large amounts of data on one drive as long as it's used as part of a proper backup procedure.

John

To be honest, for everyday home use you are unlikely to encounter any major problems with any modern hard drive out there. However, once you start getting into more specialized use cases, the peculiarities/features of different drives become more important.

In particular, the way these drives achieve their high capacity - using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) - is a big problem for RAID arrays. Hard drives can read thinner strips on the platters than they can write, and SMR takes advantage of this by writing overlapping strips, like roof shingles (hence the name). However if you want to change some data, you have to rewrite a whole area, as both the strips before and after the one you want to change get overwritten by the wider write pattern.

If you put these in a standard RAID array and one of them fails, the bad write performance of these drives will make the rebuild take much much longer (the review here shows 57h 13m vs 19h 46m of normal style recording drives). Rebuilding is the most dangerous state a RAID can be in - further failures can mean the complete loss of your data - so you want it to be as quick as possible for the drive.

Basically, if you are just using these for straight backup or storage, not RAID, then you'll be fine. They are also very unsuited to write heavy applications, or lots of random reads (even more so than normal hard drives). For accessing a movie or audio file they'll be absolutely ok.

Be cause they are tuned for backup use .. I.e straight sequential writes .. everything else takes a backseat. Your usage is probably ok using it as a worm drive. But as a general computer drive they have drawbacks especially writing speed. They are possibly the worst NAS raid drives you could get (unless they were made by Seagate jk ) as sharrken99 points out

Thanks for the response. I just looked up WORM (write once, read many) drive, and yes, that describes by usage. I'm generally copying large amounts of sequential data - after that it's mostly reading. It seemed like an ideal solution for my needs: £ per TB it's the cheapest drive around as far as I can tell and at the moment it's the most efficient use of the limited space inside my servers.