Mark Twain wrote:
I have a Dell XPS 8500, with Windows 7
Professional, SP1, with Spywareblaster,
Malwarebytes, Avast, Windows Defender,
and Windows Firewall.

(1) TB HD
Intel (R) Core (tm) I7-33-3770 CPU @ 3.40 GHz
RAM 12.0 GB
System type: 64-bit operating system

I also have

a Dell Opiplex 780 tower with Windows 7
professional, SP1, with Spywareblaster,
Malwarebytes, Avast, Windows Defender
and Windows Firewall.

(1) TB HD
Intel (R) Core 2 Duo 2.93 GHz
4 GB RAM, 750 GB HD
System type: 64-bit operating system


external hard drives:

Seagate backup pls (1) TB 2.5 USB portable HD

WD Black series WD2003FZEX 2 TB 7200
RPM 64 MB Cache SATA 6.0- Gb/s 3.5"
Internal hard drive.


I posted this on another thread:

Recently I went through a power outage
and the repair electrician wired my mobile
home for 220 instead of 110 and fried allot
of electronics.

Luckily the computers were not effected
directly. However, it got me to thinking;
what would happen if my 780 HD crashed?

This isn't something that is critical or
has to be taken care of immediately but I
do want to resolve it after I take care of
more pressing matters.

I've prepared for that with the 8500 with
two spare HD's, each which has been already
set up to boot.

However I don't have anything set up for the
780

https://www.staples.com/DELL-780-Tow...roduct_1498887

Would this work?

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16822148834


Thoughts/Suggestions?
Robert

It's really really hard to pick hard drives now.

There don't seem to be a lot of reviews on Newegg.

You can look at the latest BackBlaze results.
Some of the drives are too old to find comparable models
for sale now. The DM000 for example, I think I have a couple 4TB
of those, and for Seagate I was impressed with their
"lack of the usual flaky Seagate behavior". You can see
in the BackBlaze results, that not all Seagate models
are created equal.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-...rates-q3-2017/

Now that both of your computers run Windows 7, there is no
longer a need to limit yourself to 2TB drives. If you want
to look for, say, drives with good results in the 3TB category,
you can look in there too, and when they show up, in
Disk Management you can set those to "GPT" instead of "MBR".
I won't suggest anything larger, due to the pricing. Selecting
a $500 drive, means all your eggs are in one basket in terms
of a "failure model", and I'm still not all that comfortable
with gigantic hard drives. If I could afford to buy two or
three or four of the big drives, then I could have multiple
copies, and if one drive died it wouldn't be the end of the
world. But $500 drives cause indigestion of the financial kind,
so that's just not going to happen. The 4TB may be the
sweet spot, but they're also kinda heavy. Anywhere between
2TB and 4TB is probably good - the customer reviews will
tell you a lot (i.e. "noisy drive").

If you go large enough, some of the large drives are Helium
filled, and no longer have an air breather hole. The only
problem with this, is the intended life cycle is 5 years
for Helium containment. They should hold their Helium for
5 years, but it's not clear (on average) how they perform
over longer lifespans. Both Seagate and WDC have Helium drives
and those have slightly lower power consumption. The frictional
losses in Helium are lower. And the sealed HDA means there
is no possibility of foreign contaminants getting in.
(I like this idea a lot, because it means the room humidity
can go over 60%, and you don't have to worry about that drive.)

If your house flooded for example, you have every right
to expect a "washed and dried" Helium drive to continue
working. Whereas the air breathing kind (all that you and
I own), they're not safe to immerse in water, because
the breather hole could admit water into the HDA
depending on the barometric pressure that day. The old
drives needed to run at atmospheric, and the breather hole
ensured the inside and outside of the HDA were at the
same pressure. The breather has a hepafilter on it, to remove
dust and smoke, and only the tiniest molecules can make
it through the filter.

While I'd like to, the Newegg comments are too short and
full of rubbish, for me to say anything that would
add value to your disk selection exercise. When the review
column has too few comments, it's called "not statistically
significant" and we cannot draw a conclusion.

Good luck,
Paul