WD Gold line HDDs

[KrisZ]

Hey,
Just wanted to share that WD Store has their Gold drives a little cheaper than Amazon and Newegg. I got a 4TB drive $159.99, free shipping and a free 32GB flash drive. There is also a $5 off coupon that works WDSAVES5. So I paid $154.99. I think you get a free flash drive with a 2TB or above
Amazon Lists it at $179.99 and Newegg at $174. .

Also, many Amazon reviews report these drives being sold as OEM so no 5 year warranty. Buying them straight from WD you get full 5 year warranty.

 

[KrisZ]

The drive came in today. I installed it with no problems. Shows to be good and and brand new. This may not be the case with third party online stores.

 

[Saabist]

I went cheap-cheap and bought one of those 4TB "white box" surveillance drives from eBay for $60. (It's branded "MaxDigitalData".) I've had the drive about a month and it works fine, SMART data is all good, has 2-year warranty.

 

[KrisZ]

That's good to hear. The reason I didn't go the cheap route for this is because this drive will be used as a secondary backup for some important files as well as family pictures and videos. I want to minimize my chances if HDD failure.

 

[Pew]

The WD Black versions will be a great buy too. Similar in performance/features as the Gold line but without any special RAID-related stuff.

 

[Dave9]

There is a middle ground, buy major brand externals and leave them offline, unpowered till you need to make a backup. Have at least a redundant pair of drives, or at least rotate them so every other time your backup is to the other one.

Paying a premium for a gold or black won't have much advantage over that, as their strengths are total running hours and performance, neither of which is needed much in an offline backup scenario. Of course that doesn't mean run them till they die of old age. You still should replace them on your n-year schedule, that # of years depending on the value of the data vs budget. I usually get at least 6 years in an offline use, then demote them to less important old data, that seldom changes, needs backed up far less often, prolonging their remaining lifespan.

 

[KrisZ]

External enclosures are definitely an option and I've had two, one of which still works. Incidentally it is the oldest of the two. The other one did suffer an HD failure.
However I have a computer case that will fit six 3.5 inch drives. It makes little sense for me to leave all of that space empty, get the external drives and worry where to store them away from my kids.
For now I made the backup drive hot swappable so that I can disconnect the SATA cable when I'm not using it. They're essentially offline. But I can easily pull the power cable off if I wanted to totally isolate them from my system.