Read this if you have a Seagate External HDD

[mahesh]

I also observed the same thing long back and shifted everything to Western Digital. No failures since (Touch Wood).

I can also suggest to go for their enterprise class HDD (called black/gold) which has lot more endurance and reliability (cost amost 2.5 time regular one). Due to higher price, I purchase two green or blue WD HDDs and use one as backup.

Over the time, I have learned to buy two identical hard disks at a time that way recovery is more possible in case of failure of one disk. Something that could have been possible in your case. I had seen this approach very useful in my office.

Presently I am thinking to shift important backup to Blu Ray M-Disc but again that option is lot costlier but supposed to be lot more long lasting.

[Thad E Ginathom]

... ... ...  I have learned that never go with mechanical external hard drives sold by companies as mostly they are not performance driven drives. They are designed for storage not on continuous basis, work slower (data transfer speed) with 5400 RPM, cheaper to manufacture and with 1 or 2 year warranty.

That's why we use them as backup discs, and why we always have more than one

I have been buying the best possible internal laptop hard drives from Seagate with 7200 RPM and with largest cache memory and put it in a good quality enclosure [USB 2/3 etc.] (Transcend or OWC if you travel to the US) to make it external.

So far this has been proved to be the best dependable approach for me, not a single failure yet. Touch wood.

What you are saying is that one of those discs hasn't failed. Yet. But eventually, they will, and they won't give you any notice.

I use similar discs, although my preference is Western Digital (Black). But I still take backups.

[anandjoshi]

Agree. Thats my experience.

[Dr.Devesh]

Few months back my WD hdd failed .. it did fall a couple of times ...local shops who would outsource quoted me 25 k .. but better to contact directly.. would contact the company as mentioned in pune ..TFS

[Gajadi]

Is SSD failure possible? What are the chances?

[raul]

Is SSD failure possible? What are the chances?

SSD death rate is quicker than HDD and as far as HDD's are concerned, external's die quick than the internals, lost 2 externals within a span of 3 years, 4TB worth of hard work  :'(

[mahesh]

Thanks for sharing. I will add few points based on my experience.

1. WD is more reliable. That's established but I would reiterate. As mentioned their Black/Gold ones are most reliable but quite costly. Their MTTF (Mean time to failure) is quite large compared to normal (Blue/green) disks.

2. I checked about Blu Ray M-disks but could not take plunge due to higher cost and doubts about availability of reader in future. But still thinking about it. However, they make very compelling case for them. So if you can afford it, go for it.

3. If you have External drive, use it once in couple of months for at least some GB level data transfer (R/W) to avoid mechanical failure. I did that mistake and lost three disks at a time.

4. WD drives gives you access to free Acronis True Image Software. It is one of the best solutions for disk level backups. You need at least one WD drive connected.

5. SSD are not as reliable as they are thought out to be. Backup is only way. At present, SSD costs so much that we can buy extra HDD just for backup of that disk.

[DeepakS]

Thanks for sharing. Very useful information

[Thad E Ginathom]

Thank you. I have two external backup drives. One is written to every time I do any work or photo stuff. With increasing file sizes, that is often "GB level data transfer." And evry week or so, they get swapped, so the other drive has multiple GBs to catch up.

[manoj]

I guess I'm one of the fortunate ones. I can't remember when my last HDD failure was (I guess more than 15 years ago, TOUCHWOOD!!)

Thanks to the OP + others for sharing about HDD failures and (painful) recovery journey.

I'd like to add that for the last 7 years or so, I've been using an internal Seagate Archival 8TB HDD (in an external enclosure) as my master backup. Yes, it has SMR technology but I wanted large backup capacity. Sure, its a slow drive but considering its primary usage is for backup, I can start the incremental backup process and do other things. And this drive has had a fall of 2 feet from a table. So, I have 2 more exact backups on a number of smaller capacity drives (seagate + hitachi) that I've accumulated over the years. I wont go into my backup process as the OP clearly mentioned not to.