Help choosing 2TB hard drive

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I am looking to buy most reliable 2 TB hard drive, everything else is secondary. Can’t afford it to fail. I am considering Western Digital Caviar Black WD2002FAEX 2 TB Internal Hard Drive
7200 rpm and use it with an external encloser (for better cooling).

Alternately, going for an external hard drive.

Which model would you recommend? I like to have both usb and esata option if I go with external drive. I f I go internal as mentioned above, then no problem. All I need is reliability.

2

In an external enclosure, the data transfer rate will be bottlenecked by the interface, usually USB. Therefore there is no point in selecting a fast drive. Use a 5400 RPM green model inside. Alternatively, since external drives are prone to bumps and shocks, you may like to choose a model that autoparks its heads on a loading/unloading ramp whenever its G-force sensor detects an excessive shock.

3

Any particular model you would suggest for internal drive for use with/without enclosure

4

Sorry, I don’t have any WD drives, nor do I have any reasonably current models from any manufacturer. Tom’s Hardware has a reliability report. You may like to read that.

5

There is no such thing as a reliable spinning disk, if you need that kind of security you should look at SSD, which they don’t make in the size you want. Okay square one, you need to buy two of the size drive you need then.

6

I second this statement!  I am in the process of a RMA for a Caviar Black  WD1002FAEX 1TB drive.  Eventhough it is supposed to “top of the line,”  it is still a “mechanical” device with “sensitive” magnetic media, it can fail.

7

Well heres my story:

My laptop has only 320gb of storage and it was running out. So i bought a 1.5tb seagate external drive and hooked it up via esata. It was fast enough to install steam and play mw2, l4d and other games off it. All the time while i had the drive it had been clicking quite a bit but i chose to ignore it. Come the end of 2010 and i tried to get some data off it it wouldnt work. :expressionless:

So i was going to America anyway in december so i bought a hornetek viper external enclosure (as esata enclosures were scarce here) to put the seagate drive into as apparently the enclosre is the one thats faulty. Came back to Australia and the seagate started working again! So i bought and installed a 2TB WD2001FASS yesterday. 

It runs pretty hot but about the same as the plastic enclosed seagate. It does make more noise than the seagate though. Running some HDTune tests the Cavair black is considerably faster which i wasnt expecting at all as i’d seen some reviews which placed it below the barracuda.

HDTune result from external enclosure via esata: http://flic.kr/p/99v8Z8

If you did learn anything: Dont buy seagate for reliablitly…or speed…or anything for that matter.

Hope it helped! (Or just assisted in increasing the average amount of boredom worldwide)

8

Seagate was always “unreliable” but “cheap” drives