for storage/internal backup

speed isn’t an issue but reliability and longevity is

Any of you folk that manage networks have favourite (or to be avoided) types ?

sata (2) 1-2TB or so is all I need

Ta

Much of a muchness as far as I’m concerned. Our RAID arrays don’t have significant failures for any manufacturer.

I’ve always used Seagates at home, never had a problem.

WD Red seems to be the reasonably priced drive always recommended

Western Digital
Seagate

All big players in the Harddisk world, but you can’t put any as reliable or have longevity, they all have the possibility to fail at any time. They have high speed moving parts which increases the likelihood of problems. Some harddisks will work for 15 years, some for 3 months.

If its for backup, replicate on multiple devices if possible.

funny you should say that as the HDD in this netbook has just started wigging out. But found bit of a bargin on eBay ATM – currys outlet selling Seagate 40Gb SATA 2.5″ drives for a tenner with a 3 month guarantee. Just what I need to keep this old thing ticking over with dual boot XP & Lubuntu. I find seagate no more or less reliable than others. The failing on e in here is a Samsung BTW.

One day I’ll treat myself to a new ultrabook.

BTW since this thread will attract the likes of cougar et al, if you get a new laptop is it possible to repartition the drive without reinstalling the original OS? If not, do they send out OS DVD’s so you can reinstall?

When I managed systems containing several hundred disks, Western Digital had the lowest failure rate, but Seagate wasn’t far behind. You can be unlucky with any brand though – all are prone to early failure, and all will ultimately die.

My advice is don’t buy bigger than you need, and always back it up!

The headline deals you see everywhere are always for the ‘consumer’ disks
There are almost always higher reliability versions of the same disks available.
Often called Enterprise. Some are the kind of disks Set-top-box manufacturers put in Sky/Humax/etc PVRs.

For example, here are the seagate models:
http://www.seagate.com/gb/en/internal-hard-drives/enterprise-hard-drives/

Stoner – it’s fairly easy to “clone” your current drive to the new one (unless you’re upgrading to an SSD, which makes life harder)

Quite simply, plug in the new drive via USB (cheap adapter will be £5 on eBay), and use a boot CD called “Clonezilla”

Fairly straight forward menus, which results in a 100% cloned disk (with the option of extending the partition too, if the new drive is larger).

I used such a method to upgrade the capacity of our work laptops – around 30 laptops in total…

xiphon – sorry didnt mean Id be cloning.

Just if I buy an ultrabook with W7 on it, and then wanted to create a second partition on the original drive can I do it without reinstalling the original OS and software?

@Stoner You can resize and rejig the partitions with something like Parted Magic:

http://partedmagic.com/doku.php?id=downloads#.Ua7p8UB4Kuo

thankyou dahlings !
kiss:kiss

off to the shops*

*www

Western Digital
Seagate

Only ever bought these (+ 1 IBM), never had a failure. (Oh, what have I said!)

Ah yes, partitioning.

Again, some clever bods have written some free software called “gParted”, which is a bootable CD which logs you straight into a graphical environment.

It’s a very good copy/clone of Partion Magic

cheers xiphon/w1zard.

Just if I buy an ultrabook with W7 on it, and then wanted to create a second partition on the original drive can I do it without reinstalling the original OS and software?

Win8 comes with partition resizing and creation tools out-of-the-box, and I believe that was also there in Win7 – see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg309170.aspx. I’ve recently used it to squash my boot partition down from 1TB to 200GB before cloning it to an SSD, it works fine give or take a bit of work to move the unmovable files.

excellent – cheers Rio.

Id love to get something like a W8 tablet with removable keyboard that I can dual boot into Android or Linux for kitchen/sofa use.

Aha – I see Asus are out in front already
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/351462

There was an article on Toms Hardware looking at HDD failure rates with data from Google and a Russian date recovery firm (IITC).