 My employer (a university institute) tasked me with selecting good external hard drives for the scientists and lab workers. I honestly don’t know where to start: there are so many of them! Do you have a brand that you like the most, and if so, why? The drives should be about 512G/1T in size and reasonably priced :) 8 comments
 @kytta Check out the posts by Backblaze. They have some good recommendations based on drive failure rates they see in their data centers. @kytta I'd go with SSDs for external disks if they are supposed to be taken on the go. @kytta Step 1 should be working out what you want/need them for? The main question being "is this for temporary storage of lots of data" or "long term storage of stuff" (which might be better stored elsewhere?) @kytta I'm assuming they are going to save important files, so: @PCOWandre yeah that would maybe work for a large number of employees in some big corpo 😂 I work at a small institute in a German town that no one has heard about. We need, like, 10 drives, and all of them may have USB-A as this is what we mostly have here. But still, thank you for your reply! |
Gregory's Server
@kytta I have worked on linux clusters, meaning a lot of hard drives were required. Every hard drive manufacturer has had bad batches of drives. But look for drives that have the fewest platters -- fewer moving parts to break. Also, it may be helpful to look at the hard drive reliability stats published by backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/hard-drive-test-data.html