I’ve used a USB hard drive attached to my home router for simple file sharing. I then upgraded to a Synology box which has been rock solid. However for ease of backup I’ve recently switched to Google Drive so everything is backed up to the cloud and syncs between my home desktop PC and my laptop. I’ve set a similar system up for my SO which syncs between her PC and laptop. She just saves files/photos/whatever into her My Documents area and Google takes care of the rest.

How does the enclosure affect drive reliability?

You should know that Cougar. Could be a lot of things.

Physical aspects like how well it cools the drives and protects them from mechanical vibration; electrical aspects like power smoothing and grounding; software aspects like caching, limiting read/write operations, wear levelling, error checking etc

No idea how the enclosure effects drive reliability, or whether it does – just recounting my experiences.

Wasn’t even going to mention it, as wasn’t sure of relevance … but someone else did!

You should know that Cougar. Could be a lot of things.

It could, but the most likely cause of drive failure is crap drives.  It’d have to be a serious design flaw to be the fault of the enclosure.

Yeah but all drives fail eventually.

Given two identical drives in two different enclosures, the difference in reliability will be the enclosure and associated software.

And luck.

Always used WD Reds.

Maybe it was all just a dream. Or a lie. **** arguing about it.

I notice there are a few WD Mycloud users here – Have you found a useful way / media player to organise the several hundred Gb of films and music stored on the WD Mycloud?

Sonos does not want to link up for the music and doing by browsing WD network directory is a pain…

I have a WD Mycould. I only want to use it as a network drive, for manual backups and storage of large files. It does this ok but the network mapping isn’t persistent and it doesn’t always connect well.

It’s also slow as hell.

I’ve got a QNAP HS-251+ NAS with 2 2TB SSDs so it is as quiet  as a dead mouse, or maybe a sleeping one.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/QNAP-HS-251-Enclosure-GDPR-Compliant/dp/B017UK57CI/ref=sr_1_27?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1543503771&sr=1-27&keywords=QNap

Given two identical drives in two different enclosures, the difference in reliability will be the enclosure and associated software.

And luck.

FTFY. (-:

I’ve got a QNAP HS-251+ NAS 

I have the older one of those (without the “+”). Running it since Oct 2015

I would steer clear of WD Mycloud. Had one for 3.5 years, perfect, loved it, then one day it just bricked. Could not get it to work, would not turn on and all data on it was inaccessible. Lost everything on it. Fortunately I had backed up some, but not all the data (I had become complacent as it seemed so good) but lost a few photos I regret.

Still searching for the ideal a year on, but would never go back to WD from my experience. However, needs to be said, a Sony Tv I had failed me 18 years ago, and I have never bought Sony since, so you see what I am like 🙂

I’ve currently got a bit of a mess of a “system” that I want to sort out so will have a proper read of this thread.

Laptop has a 500gb SSD which is pretty much full now. It backs up to a WD Mycloud NAS & to Carbonite cloud.

The WD also has my music ripped on to it & linked to Sonos.

WD backs up nightly to a USB drive permanently plugged in to the back of it.

Options are new desktop computer with extra drives in (expensive as the laptop is fine & gets used less and less).

USB drive permanently plugged in.

Or a new NAS, with remote access that works, backed up monthly (ish) to USB drive that I stash at work. And that is quick enough to use as network storage and move everything from the laptop to the new NAS.

I’m swaying toward the new NAS option, it feels the most future proof as devices become more network based and less storage based.

I would steer clear of WD Mycloud. Had one for 3.5 years, perfect, loved it, then one day it just bricked. Could not get it to work, would not turn on and all data on it was inaccessible. Lost everything on it. Fortunately I had backed up some, but not all the data (I had become complacent as it seemed so good) but lost a few photos I regret.

It’s a fact of life that hard drives fail.  They’re mechanical with moving parts, given sufficient time eventually every HDD on the planet will wear out.  I deal with enterprise-class hardware – I specced up a server a couple of weeks ago that ran to sixty grand – and I still spend half my life swapping out hard drives.

Your lack of backups is not a technical problem.

Still searching for the ideal a year on, but would never go back to WD from my experience. However, needs to be said, a Sony Tv I had failed me 18 years ago, and I have never bought Sony since, so you see what I am like

Yeah, daft.  A sample size of one is simply an anecdote, even L’Oreal use (slightly) lager pool sizes for their bold marketing claims.

Ask five professional geeks for HDD manufacturer recommendations and you’ll get five different answers, but I’d be surprised if WD didn’t feature prominently.  They’d be my second choice, and I’ve been through a LOT of hard disks.

Exactly cougar.

Having worked for an MSP with a physical data center with many, many racks of servers, replacing hard drives was pretty damn regular. It’s not a case of if a mechanical hard drive will fail, it’s WHEN.

To anyone with a single drive NAS, or one not in some sort of RAID, you’re at risk of losing everything on that drive, you need redundancy in the NAS (so minimum 2 drives) and you should really also have an off site backup of the NAS (cloud, another physical location). That should pretty much cover most possibilities to prevent data loss in the event of of either a drive failing or a flood/fire surge etc that kills the NAS.

Good idea about plugging in a flash drive into my WD mycloud.

Good idea about plugging in a flash drive into my WD mycloud.

Mine backs up nightly to a “safepoint”

But I had a quick look at the new ones and there’s no mention of safepoints in the manual, so maybe they removed the functionality?

Also I’ve had to stop updating the firmware and stick to an old version as the new version breaks the safepoint backup. The old version the remote access doesn’t work.

This was a couple of years ago and I haven’t tried again recently, maybe they’ve fixed it.