Reliable Disks

[GuyThomas]

For 10 years I had no problems with hard disks. Bun in the last 5 years I have had 3 disks fail on different machines. I am about to order a new machine from PC Specialist:

Question: Which disks are the most reliable?
Question: Should I consider disk mirroring? Even if possible, will this slow down my machine?

 

[Phoenix]

The caviar green drives are reliable and I wouldn't bother with mirroring because it will slow down your machine slightly when saving files or whatever. Also, if one of the drives saves an error or deletes data the second drive will copy the first one so it's a much better idea to simply backup your data onto an external HDD every week or so.

 

[PCS]

Personally, I use and strongly recommend RAID 1 (RAID Mirror) - I use it at home and at work, and RAID will protect you against single hard drive failure.

As Pheonix states, it will not protect you if you accidentally delete some data, and you still need to consider backing up externally, but I find the performance doesn't cause me any issues.

Hard drives are fussy - you can have 1 that lasts forever and then 3 that fail after a few weeks use. It's the luck of the draw. Generally though we have very few issues with the drives we sell, especially the WD drives.