Western Digital Elements external hard drive

**Rider** · 11-Sep-2009, 06:05

This is a very inexpensive drive. I was thinking of getting one (1.5 TB) to use as backup of photo archives. Any issues with that?

**Mike1234** · 11-Sep-2009, 06:52

I bought my external HD from BB after asking the returns counter, the technicians, and the sales staff which ones are seldom returned or complained about. I opted for the rather smaller Toshiba 400MB due to its excellent reliability. But then... I really don't need a "huge" external HD. BTW, the WD 1 and 1.5 TB units were also in the mix I inquired about.

**domaz** · 11-Sep-2009, 08:17

Originally Posted by Rider

This is a very inexpensive drive. I was thinking of getting one (1.5 TB) to use as backup of photo archives. Any issues with that?

Higher density disks (read: larger size) are more likely to die than smaller ones. That seems to be the theme of hard disks lately. If it's going to just be a backup of your photos though, then who cares if the drive dies. If you start storing live, non-backed up data on there though beware. Maybe get two and set up a RAID 1 mirror if you are storing live data on them.

**Mike1234** · 11-Sep-2009, 09:04

^^^ If I was going to make a Mirrored RAID Array I would use some high quality internal drives. If there's no room in the case I would buy an external case. Two decent drives should be enough protection. Ask the folks behind the counter (if you trust them) which ones are the most reliable.

**Allen in Montreal** · 12-Sep-2009, 06:09

Rider,

The only one of my 7 backup drives that gives me grief, is a 500 gig WD.

Sometimes it just does not come on to the grid and I have to run disk utility over it to be able to see it. Maybe that is not representative of WD, but I would not buy anther. My La Cie drives have been the best to date, but I have read here on LFPF that there are few members who had real issues with their La Cie drives too.

Originally Posted by Rider

This is a very inexpensive drive. I was thinking of getting one (1.5 TB) to use as backup of photo archives. Any issues with that?

**Greg Miller** · 12-Sep-2009, 06:57

The bad news is that no data really exists to answer your question. Only the manufacturers know the true failure rates and they do not report them. Actual MTBF rates vary by model within brand. So any given brand will have good models and bad models because of design and part differences.

And there are many reasons why a hard drive may fail, and many of those have nothing to do with the hard drive itself (hard drive experienced drop/shock during transit or by owner, voltage spikes, bad RAM on computer causing write errors,...). Relying on informal feedback from other people is statitisticall a poor indicator and is likely to provide inaccurate results.

Google did the only true study of hard drive failure rates "Failure Trends in a Large Disk Drive Population" by studying high volumes of hard drives from various brands. But they did not reveal much about specific brands or models, and the implication was that all brands perform about the same.

The good news is that failure rates of hard drives, regardless of brand, are quite small and are usually age related (all hard drives fail, and that typically starts happening around year 5).

So just buy based on price, and don't rely on just one backup (buy at least 2 hard drives for backup and rotate them). If it fails in the first year you will get a free replacement. If it does no fail in the first year, in all likelihood it will not fail for another 4 years.