Best External Hard Drive for music storage.

[ElviaCaprice]

I have numerous Seagates old as 12 years. Never had one inadvertently fail. But a swift kick or hard knock, especially when on, can surely do it. I suspect this the case for most failures.

Just get the cheapest drives available for the money per space. I like to buy my drives as internal and the enclosure separate. This way I can slide the drives into the PC case or into the needed technologic enclosure. Storing/travel with the drives without enclosure takes up less space.

[Audio_ELF]

The enclosures seem to be of similar quality to the others I had but I wonder what drives are inside Seagate or Lacie.

I don't think LaCie is a drive manufacturer so I would guess they are Seagate drives.

Tom is correct... these days there are only 3 actual manufacturers of drives...

• Seagate Technology, including its subsidiary brands Maxtor and Samsung
  
• Toshiba
  
• Western Digital, including its subsidiary brand HGST (HGST is formerly Hitachi)
  

(copied from Wikipedia)

 

Eloise

[One and a half]

Reading the reviews for reliability, Seagate usually comes out near the bottom. I have some experience with the 3TB internal drives which I bought before I read the reviews. I bought a completely populated Synology NAS 12 bay unit with Seagate drives. Within 2-3 years all 12 had failed. I started buying WD Red drives (4TB) and now have about 30 of them (in 3 different Synology NAS units (2 12 unit and 1 8 unit). Only one has failed in about 2.5 years. I usually keep about 4 spare WD 4TB drives, around, just in case. I configure the Synology NAS units for their SHR RAID configuration with 2 hot spares, again, just in case.

 

I haven't gone to enterprise drives, although with prices dropping, I may do that. After I populated my 12 bay units with the WD Reds, I found out they recommend them for up to 8 bays. I haven't had problems except for the one drive, so they seem to be find.

 

Larry

 

I can mirror the NAS failures for Seagate drives. Two of the four 1.5TB Seagate 5400rpm drives failed in 2011, RAID6. Plus at least 4, 3-4TB portable drives, although the drives are OK, the controllers have kicked the bucket. Two were replaced under warranty, which subsequently failed again. This was after experiencing failures with WD portable drives.

 

Now use 3TB Enterprise HGST (nee Hitachi) drives since 2012. Not one failure since and are operating continuously.

[speeddeacon]

I've had Seagate and Western Digital drives fail. I've had Seagate and Western Digital drives work well. I still use both, WD Red in my NAS and WD firewire and Tbolt external drives and Seagate in my eSata OWC raid. All sound the same to my ears.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[MHzTweaker]

I can mirror the NAS failures for Seagate drives. Two of the four 1.5TB Seagate 5400rpm drives failed in 2011, RAID6. Plus at least 4, 3-4TB portable drives, although the drives are OK, the controllers have kicked the bucket. Two were replaced under warranty, which subsequently failed again. This was after experiencing failures with WD portable drives.

 

Now use 3TB Enterprise HGST (nee Hitachi) drives since 2012. Not one failure since and are operating continuously.

 

 

 

my reposted reply from another thread:

 

 

My experience EXACTLY!!!

I would not use a Seagate drive if I were PAID real cash money to use them.

I have been burned so many times by Seagate. I threw 10 of their drives in the trash at once from my primary and backup media file servers. It turns out they all had bad sectors on them as revealed by HDSentinel software. Just look up "Seagate 3TB class action lawsuit". This is the type of company Seagate is. To be fair I still have a few of their 4TB drives in service.

 

I only buy HGST drives and have 4,5 and 6TB HGST drives in service on my 2 file servers and main workstation. All together about 34 large 4,5 and 6TB drives. I have not had a HGST drive fail or arrive DOA either. To me that is impressive.

 

I had so many server issues with those Seagate drives installed, random freezes and crashes etc. The last pair of Seagates I purchased was a pair of those 5TB Seagate archive drives. They were just awful!!! They brought my servers to their knees with what I can best describe as performance LAG. All I/O from both file servers had major LAG until they were removed. Even now they sit on a shelf new and unused. I think the tech is called shingled magnetic recording or something. Since removing all Seagate 1.5, 2 and 3 TB drives I have not had a single issue with either server. They now run for months without a restart.

 

I replace-cycle out smaller drives as they become full with a new pair of HGST 6TB NAS drives every few months now. I have almost accumulated enough 4TB drives to form a Windows 2012r2 storage pool on a 3rd server that I will keep outside my house in case of fire. I cannot imagine losing 50TB of music, TV shows and movies. So yes, a 3rd off site backup is in order.

 

Your mileage may vary.

 

I operate a small computer service company and have been involved in I.T. for over 30 years. I have seen a lot of tech come and go. I see a LOT of Seagate drive failures, I mean a LOT. Seagate drives can often be found at bargain prices on most store shelves. Ever wonder why? I will gladly pay $30-$40 a drive more per drive if it means the drive doesn't fail in 13 months. My motto is "Buy if right One time".

 

Sorry for the rant but I really really REALLY despise Seagate as a company.

[JoseNelson]

I am using 1Tb Toshiba and it's been a year now and still works great.

[icevic]

Don't forget you want something quiet. SSD has the advantage there. Lots of enclosures have fans and some drives are fairly noisy. Well, noisy enough that if you are in a quiet room listening to music with quiet passages, you would hear it.

[AudioDoctor]

Drobo Mini with 4 1TB SSDs installed...

[rrwwss52]

Western Digital, HGST top the list of most reliable hard drives | InfoWorld

 

HGST or WD for me. I concur with the article to avoid Seagate. Just took one out of service the other day. No experience with SSDs so I can't opine there.

[lissnr]

Hello All, I'm a long term audiophile but a novice computer user... especially computer audio; but that has recently changed.

I pretty much jumped in with both feet and joined this site looking for some music storage advice.

I just purchased a Lampizator DSD Komputer which is now substituting for my cd transport and feeding into my Lampizator Big7 Dac... My "computer audio buddies" have been pushing me to take the plunge for a long time and have all tempted me with the promise of giving me lots of music for the computer...

So I did

And they did

And I really want to reliably back up all this new music. All I did was purchase 3 WD MyBooks ... One is a 3TB, one is a 4TB and the other I can't recall is either a 3 or a 4TB... I also have a small Seagate "Back up plus slim" 2TB.... Each unit has a serious percentage of its capacity filled with music...I think it's all a mix of higher rez 24/96 or more, as well as quite a bit of DSD and it all feeds into the Dac via a nice USB cable one of my trusted cable makers swears by.

To my ears, and I mean no insult to anyone or their medium preferences, it's the first computer based delivery system that didn't obviously remind me where it was stored. And that's saying a lot.

OTOH the obvious advantage of such libraries of music access is astounding and "designer - drug- addictive" but until now I refused to let that very convenience sway my decision [until I was convinced the actual auditory quality was up to snuff]. Well, it took me a looong time but I'm convinced that this combination IS working for me now.

So, who can recommend how to replicate all this music in one big consolidated "box" where it will always be safe and 'sound'

( pun ?)...

A friend has a Raid 5 which I read about on this thread... So...What is it? How does it work, cost? A good choice,?...or is there something even more reliable without breaking the bank? I could still use the individual Mybooks knowing they are backed up elsewhere or I could use the main consolidated unit for listening and keep the individual books as backup? Whatever makes the most sense....fwiw I use a remote android based tablet via a wireless "transducer?" plugged into an extra usb port on the back of the Komputer which connects via something called Amanerro 384... An App that I paid for and now seems to link up reliably. There is no other computer or laptop used or connected in the system...

That's about it and pretty much all I know about it... Help...comments...? Thanks in advance!

[icevic]

Lssnr;

 

There are two levels of backup you should consider.

 

The first is an onsite backup, basically a copy of your hard drive to protect from a hard drive failure. Hard drives tend to fail and then all your music is gone. You may still have all your CDs, which is a form of backup, but all your downloads are gone and then there is the work of re-importing CDs.

 

The second is an offsite backup. This is basically another copy of your hard drive that you store somewhere else and update occasionally. It can be as simple as a drive copy that you leave at someone else's house, or as sophisticated as a cloud backup service. This is an optional level of backup, once you have the onsite backup. It protects you against fire, theft, accidents, or water damage: accidents that could potentially wipe our your primary hard drive and the onsite backup. This gives you more protection that you had with CDs.

 

You have a ton of storage, almost 10TB. Maybe you have that much music, or maybe you have a lot of duplicates: you should check. Because if you actually have 10TB of music (that's almost 20,000 CDs, which is possible but definitely on the high end) then you will need some serious storage to back it up. If it is mostly duplicates and open space, consider buying a pair of 5TB drives. Consolidate on one, and use the other as a backup. Just copy and paste once a month or so, that's the simplest way. To be really sure buy a third and rotate it out of your office or somewhere else, and you have both offsite and onsite backups.

 

If you do need 10GB then you will have to with a multi-disk enclosure with some sort of RAID. There are lots of ways to do this - Google will sell you any number of them at any price you want to pay. Some of then are Airplay or DLNA enabled network devices, some just connect to your computer. Your choice - and wallet. I could explain RAID 5 to you but Google does it quicker.

 

Creating an offsite backup will be a problem with that much data. A multi-disk enclosure might be your best bet, but it will be awkward.

 

You can also use Crashplan, a subscription service. Crashplan does both onsite and offsite, and does it all automatically. It creates a copy to the cloud, and also lets you use a local disk to store backups there as well. It's slow to upload and if you have upload limits on your internet connection you will incur some costs, and also in case of data loss restoring 10TB of data will take weeks, but at least it is safe. You can restore it anywhere, any time, so even if you are on vacation you could access your music (to download).

 

So bottom line, whatever storage your music takes, plan on buying at least that much storage again for backup, and possibly a third for offsite or use Crashplan.

[lissnr]

Hello Icevic and thank you for your prompt and thorough advice. Today I took my first step towards backup by purchasing an 8TB WD My Book which I will fill with as much of my music as I can... Of course when/ if it is truly full I will assess how much more space I need [if I do...] and buy another My Book of adequate ( or somewhat bigger) size to store the rest. I will store it off premises and occasionally update it with my newest additions. This seems to me to be the most straight-forward version of [ hopefully] safe and reliable insurance. In fact, if one 8TB fits it all then maybe I'll consider another one to make it a double secure scenario. Thanks again for your help.

[plissken]

A really good resource is BackBlazes quarterly releases of how their arrays with consumer hard drives are doing.

 

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q3-2015/

 

A Weibull distribution reliability curve use over time:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxBp8Vkho2pIejNTM2JWU0hpdEk/view?pref=2&pli=1

[YashN]

There are some odd things with WD drives: sometimes the interfaces on them are encrypted. Sometimes the 'relo list' becomes full and the drive can't be recognised on any OS.

 

That means many people think their drive is damaged. The drives can be re-initialised and re-formatted and re-used, but it can be hard to retrieve the data.

[sphinxsix]

After lots of Google search I came to the conclusion that WD is much more reliable than Seagate. I have been using 6 of them (2 and 3 TB Elements and MyBooks - identical HD mechanisms inside as far as I know) for a couple of years now without any problems. One just should be careful with the fragile USB and power cables - I've heard they can be damaged quite easily.

[lissnr]

Hello and thank you both for the additional information...This is a bit of a scary new world in as much as such volumes of music are available yet the intangibility / vulnerability factors of the medium are quite unsettling... Especially compared to a vinyl or silver disc...

[rchunter]

I like WD red nas drives. Got a ton of them in various 4u servers. They've all been flawless. knock knock... Just started buying wd red 8TB helium drives.

[plissken]

If anyone takes a look at the information I posted: Go with Hitachi (HGST). By far the reliability champ.

[Iain]

I am sure this has been discussed but I struggled to find a definitive answer. I was just about to purchase a WD My cloud 2TB to store my music. But then started to do some research and started to read that internal HDD units with an external enclosure may the best route to go.

I am quite a newbie so am looking for advice/suggestions. My apologies if this is old news and has been replayed many times.

Thank you for any help.

 

Currently, I run a SATA III 750 Gb WD Black, enclosed in:

https://www.startech.com/uk/HDD/Enclosures/esatap-usb-3-sata-6gbps-hdd-enclosure~S251SMU33EP

 

... and connected to my eSATA III port.

 

Only caveat is, I may have to rethink the enclosure as my musik collection increases in size. The WD Black is the largest size in the laptop form-factor.

 

BTW, all WD Black drives have a 5-year warranty.

[Iain]

...

 

Only caveat is, I may have to rethink the enclosure as my musik collection increases in size. The WD Black is the largest size in the laptop form-factor.

 

BTW, all WD Black drives have a 5-year warranty.

 

1 Tb WD Black drives are now available.

[MHzTweaker]

Currently, I run a SATA III 750 Gb WD Black, enclosed in:

https://www.startech.com/uk/HDD/Enclosures/esatap-usb-3-sata-6gbps-hdd-enclosure~S251SMU33EP

 

... and connected to my eSATA III port.

 

Only caveat is, I may have to rethink the enclosure as my musik collection increases in size. The WD Black is the largest size in the laptop form-factor.

 

BTW, all WD Black drives have a 5-year warranty.

 

 

 

The Blacks are decent drives. Keep in mind these are 7200RPM drives and will run HOT in a small enclosure with no active cooling.

 

Fan noise can be an issue with active cooling on the flip side.

 

eSATA vs USB 3.0 ? Meh..... I prefer an actively cooled NAS or a proper Server away from the listening area.

I personally would rather not hang storage directly off the machine I use to play audio. Honestly I do not think FLAC or DSD files overtax either USB or eSATA interface but there may be electrical noise AND processing overhead added to your mix if you directly connect drives to the Player computer. The exception would be HQPlayer and a separate N.A.A.

 

I am somewhat a digital pack-rat and cannot imagine using 2.5 form factor laptop drives singly. For the long term I would be looking at 4,6 and 8tb in the 3.5 form factor desktop drives by W.D. or HGST in some type of dedicated storage device. (NAS or Server)

[Iain]

I am using 1Tb Toshiba and it's been a year now and still works great.

My laptop (Toshiba Tecra W50-A) was delivered with this 500 Gb system disk:

MQ01ACF*** Series | TOSHIBA Storage & Electronic Devices Solutions Company | Europe(EMEA)

 

... in late 2014, and still works just as it did upon delivery.

[plissken]

According to BackBlaze the Hitachi are the reliability champs. Their hard data trumps any opinions here.

[Jud]

According to BackBlaze the Hitachi are the reliability champs. Their hard data trumps any opinions here.

 

They occasionally go on sale at Newegg. If they're not on sale and price is a consideration, I believe WD Red usually do reasonably well in the BackBlaze stats. I would avoid Seagate.

[hornytoad]

I prefer solid state drives with no moving parts .

Oyen Digital ssd's are small and portable too .