How can I Avoid a Common Mode Drive Failure?

My father recently suffered a common mode failure using hard disks from another manufacturer – he lost all his data for the last three years and I’ve been unable to recover it so far – total nightmare!

I’m trying to make sure that this never happens again and need some help…

I’ve purchased 4 x WD Red 3TB drives for him so that he can have 2 drives (each with one partition) in his computer for normal use (no RAID), and two in an attached external WD enclosure for a daily backup (again no RAID but just JBOD). The backup will be via a file replication utility so each external disk as an exact copy of the one in the computer and accessible without any other software.

I want to add another 2 drives for a weekly backup but am concerned about purchasing two more WD Red 3TB drives as this would open him up to the possibility of another common mode failure in future.

If I purchased 2 x WD Red Pro drives would this be sufficiently different to prevent a common mode failure or do I have no choice but to go for a different manufacturer?

Thanks for any advice.

Hello,

The WD Red Pro should be good.