Recommend reliable external drive (4tb) please

Rikki · 17 Jul 2018 at 21:56

Would love to get more HGST ones but can only see Seagate and WD out there and have not had great reliability with either brands over the past decade.

Can I have some real world recommendations from owners on what they have thats worked out fine?

Thank you

doyll · 20 Jul 2018 at 15:36

I've been using WD Elements and Seagate Expansion USB3 external for years with no problems. They are media storage and are only on / accessed every couple of days. They are always connected but only power up when used so not a lot of hours but have had no issues with 4 I'm using. Size is from 2TB to 5TB with oldest 7-8 years old now .. can't remember exactly how old it's been so long.

Ree · 20 Jul 2018 at 15:42

i have a couple of wd elements and still going strong after 5+ years of use.

Sasahara · 20 Jul 2018 at 21:20

Try to avoid drives that offer encryption if you don't need this feature.

If the USB logic board fails, even if you've not set a password. The drive is still encrypted, so once you have lost the logic board with the encryption key you won't be able to decrypt it.
The internal drive will still work, but it will unreadable if you plug it directly into SATA. You'll have to reformat before the drive will become usable, so not good if you want the data.

(But you should have backups anyway?)