DIY External Hard Drive more reliable

J

Johnster480

Hey everyone, first post here so hopefully someone can help me.

I have two external hard drives...well did. Both my external drives over the last 4 months have died along with a ton of my personal videos(I'm a film major). One is a Maxtor the other is a Fantom drive I believe, but my question isn't about that.

What I am wondering, is if making your own external hard drive is more reliable then store bought ones? I've read in some places they are because you can add fans which the ones I have don't contain plus you can have more space(although with my experience they die before you can use it all).

If anyone has an answer, it would be much appreciated.

Thank you
-Bill
 
not really any difference, my friend is a film guy too lol and he tried to make his own. a fan isnt really a need in a external HD tho might make it a bit better. If you can make one for cheaper then the store go for it, but they are about the same id say.
 
No matter how top of the line and good HDD you get, it can still die within a week taking all your data with it. If you are worried about hard drives dying, then you should get a device with RAID 1. You can get NAS, USB, firewire and eSATA versions no problem.
 
There is no difference in reliability because they all use the same internal hds you can buy from a computer store (that you'd put in an enclosure if you were building your own external). There may be some difference between ones with fans and those passively cooled but I expect the difference isn't as large (if even present) as most people think.
 
all i can add to this discussion is i have had 2 maxtor drives fail on me in the past the rest of my drives are western digital i have never had any trouble with the western digital drives and they are nice and quiet i build all of my own drives i like the vantec nexstar 3 SATA enclosures they are simple compact and cheap (no fans) the oldest drive i have that i have been using for backing up photos and videos is a western digital and its been running for nine years now without one bit of trouble
 
I must have been extremely fortunate, as my system from '89 is still running with
the same HD, albeit, it is SCSI and they seem to have an edge in reliability.

Large server systems seem to also favor SCSI.

Yes SCSI cost more, but maybe you get what you pay for???
 
Thanks everyone, I guess I'll look into SCSI, devices with RAID 1, and Western Digital.
 

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