Resolved Disadvantage of booting to external hdd?

Strange. Just got off the phone with Seagate. The guy told me that yes, the 2400 hours is just that--the expected life of the Barracuda. However, he stressed that this was not the length of time that it was powered on, but the amount of time spent editing files--opening, saving, and editing them. I was suprised, and didn't ask if browsing the web counted.

He did affirm that the AFR rate was less than 1 percent for those models, which is pretty darn good (although of course this is Seagate's own figures).

Well, those 12,000 WD drives in teh backblaze study are looking pretty darn good. As a general statistic, one of the last graphs was simply a percentage of all the drives from one company that were still kicking after three years. WD was almost as high has Hitachi/HTSG; Seagate was a pathetic 75% or so. Granted, this would be a very tough environment, with teh hard drives constantly being used (as opposed to a home desktop on sleep mode most of the day), but still.

As I said, I'm much more willing to get a WD drive now. 12,000 is a much larger sample than the two that I've had that went bad.

On the other hand, probably a major factor in those two drives was that $100 of the purchase price a (the cost of the hard drives I'm looking at now) of the computer was probably NOT allocated for the hard drive. So perhaps my bad experience with WD was simply the result of a company making a cheap product for a low cost. That doesn't mean that their more expensive drives are just as bad.

 

The final nail in Seagate's coffin for me was when we lost 3 out of 4 of their 1TB Barracuda hard drives in a NAS within a 6 month period. RPITA. <grrrrrr> Never again.

 

WD 20EZRX 2 Tb arrived and is now happily running as the C drive in the desktop computer. One thing that was very nice was that WD allows its customers to download a free Acronis True Image WD edition software. It is not full featured, but it was enough to allow me to clone the drive (a very nice 2-3 click process). I don't know what Seagate provides; when I last bought a seagate drive all I recall was software that would let me copy files (as opposed to actually cloning the drive itself).

I had a heart attack when I saw that the ports for the cables on the new SATA drives are not the old 40 pin ones that I was used to (my old hard drive enclosure is obsolete), but I used the cables for the DVD drive and plugged them into my new WD drive and they are working now. EVentually I'll swap out the old hard drive and then get my DVD drive back.

 

FYI: SATA arrived almost 13 years ago.

 

Not trying to flog a dead thread, but BackBlaze just updated their data:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/

Still the same. HGST (the old Hitachi) drives are clearly the best, with WD a close second.... and Seagate brings up the rear.