Hey, running out of space on my laptop and want to get an External HDD for it. Saw a Seagate 4tb but the reviews for it were shocking, saying it stops working / breaks after just a few months more or less. Are there any more reliable options out there to go for??
WD Elements, good value. Check out at Amazon
You can run into bad batches with most HDD vendors.
Seagate tends to have a worse reputation ā that being said Iāve met users who solely rely on Seagate and never had an issue.
As SE56 stated aboveā¦ WD Elements is a solid choice. Personally Iāve also been using Seagate Expansion drives with no significant issues for the last years (big failure of 2 new Seagate drives in 2011 but since then I had a lucky hand) 
I recommend āWD Easystoreā HDD(If you can buy things from the Best Buy store) The 8TB model is very cheap.
bit ā ā ā ā to be rolling the dice on that kind of thing really though? i dont have money to launch around for backups incase it fails (i know its a risk whatever but Iād at least wanna be secure that the reliability is high)
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iām in the UK, not sure whether i can but iāll check it out!
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thanks. hopefully they do 4tb sizes. i see some of the better brands seems to go 2tb for a lot of money.
All the way to 14Gb, to make it clear desktop version and not the portable.
nice complementary read
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html
looks like Seagate really had a bad year in 2019 (in particular with that 4TB model)
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lol damn thats bad. iāll try WD I think. good priceā¦
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to be fairā¦ that picture is from a blog post from January 2014 and they are super extreme 
if you look for facts to make an informed decision, you might want to stick with newer data (e.g. the latest statistics they share from Q3/2019)
Edit: probably needs some digging why they seem to have no WD drives in their DC at all (howeverā¦ from what I remember, WD had bought HGST, havenāt they?)
Over the last 10 years or so I have purchased about 35 external hard drives in size ranges from 2tb to 10tb. Right now there are 33 of those still in service and one of the failures was of a drive I dropped.
The brands are a mixture of Seagate and Western Digital and one Toshiba. I have noticed no real difference in reliability among the drives.
One thing is that the first thing I do with a new drive is turn off all power management, sleep function or anything else that might cause the drives to have to spin up/spin down other than when they lose power. This serves to reduce some of the wear and tear on the drives.
I have never seen any advantage to any brand. When I need/want a new drive I decide on the size I need and then shop for price (Note: It is not uncommon for a larger drive to actually cost less) and assure that the newest reviews are reasonable. Then I buy the cheapest I can find.
It should also be noted that hosting video/audio files is not a very intensive operation. You can use lower performance drives with no degradation of system performance.
The last thing is that my server runs in a back room and I cool all the drives and the server by having a box fan blowing air across the whole setup. Keeping everything cool is, I am quite sure, largely responsible for keeping my drives running along nicely.
Also servers should not have other regular tasks and should never sleep. They should NOT be the computer that is used for daily activities and they should not be used for gaming.
There are many people that use their servers for multiple tasks and have few problems but a large percentage of problems that show up are on systems that are used for multiple tasks.
Interesting statistics but:
āMost people use statistics the way a drunkard uses a lamp post, more for support than illumination.ā Mark Twain
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Stay away from drives who explicitly mention how āgreenā/āpower savingā they are. They are useless for a server, because they tend to take too long to spring into action when the server is requesting a file.
I have some āGreenā WD 3TB jobs that are very snappy, but they are scheduled for replacements with a pair of 6TB Reds, at some point.
I also have a pair of 8TB WD My Book Externals that are solid performers.
Iāve had Seagate failures - to the point Iāll never buy another one.
Iāve had 2 WD failures over the years, both chugged along bravely while I rescued most of what was on them.
I have no illusions anything in any kind of storage is safe, but I do tend to stick with whatās exploded less here at the ranch - and thatās WD.
thanks, this was really helpful 
I know it costs, but I lost a drive full of movies and tv shows due to a failed software raid. It was painful re-ripping all those movies. Now I use two 12 Tb WD drives I got on sale from bestbuy for about $150 (have used WD for 15 years and rarely a failure as opposed to seagate). I now back up one drive to the other using carbon copy cloner, which is bulletproof. I guess what I am saying is that whatever drive you get, as soon as possible get a second and run a reliable backup program on a regular basis.
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Iām trying to get 40TB of storage to do that with, but the hole in the desktop to pour money into is way bigger than the back-fill I can provideā¦lol
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I know what you mean! What is equally painful was that I have a box full of 2 and 4 Tb drives that I donāt use anymore, which were replaced by the 12 Tb drives. More money than I care to think aboutā¦
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