Given your experience/topical knowledge and/or pure conjecture -- and given today's "best" avg non-enterprise HDDs, e.g., WD Red NAS series -- is it better (more reliable option) to get two 1TB drives or one 2TB drive?
Again, pick your fave non-enterprise model.

Western Digital Caviar Black is a reliable series, for example WD1001FALS or WD1002FAEX.
If you are thinking to get 2x1TB or 1x2TB so definitely 1x2TB drive. Don't forget to backup your data

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The most reliable brand is two of anything.

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Black series is more "enterprisey" given its price.

????
I meant 2TB worth of data. (and not RAID).
Example of possible 1TB HDD superiority: less mass means longer motor/bearing life, etc.

They all will fail. Even the "good ones." Just buy 2 of whatever model you like and back up to both. That way, when one does fail, it's no big deal.

IMHO, there is no current drive model / family that leads the pack on reliability.

Jon

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We use Samsung Sata Hdds in aprox. 50 machines.
Hadn´t a single hdd failure in our machines.

But I understand that in some countries they are not that common.
Too bad that Seagate now own Sansung hdd´s business

-BR-

<rant on>
The best hdd is the one from which you are keeping regular backups.

The rule says critical data should be stored in THREE different media, one of which should be in a different place (ie. two copies at work and one at home), in order to avoid uncheerful events such as burglary, fire, flood etc.
</rant off>

I use WD RE*. I find them to be more stable and enjoy the 5 year warranty.

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The Google 2007 study -- the only marginally credible, statistically "significant" study AFAIK -- din't come up with much WRT HDD reliability. One thing Google noted: New HDDs tend to fail more in the first couple of mos use ... if they are good after that, they'll usually last for a few years.
Also, gently "breaking in" electronics gear -- like breaking in shoes, cars, etc -- is controversial. But some swear by it.

Dunno about Samsung HDDs. Toshiba 3.5" are some of cheapest around. And Toshiba 1.8" iPod HDDs are very good.
My best HDD strategy is to use 1.8" and 2.5" drives in stable (non-portable) devices -- use the laptop like a desktop (never portably). Keep em' cool and supply them with clean, gentle pwr.

Buy WD RED edition, spin motor can vary from 4000 to 7000 rpm.

i agree the best hdd is 2x anything.

It is gettng a bit hard to actually do these backups and keep good backups.

I have 4 home PCs, each with multiple Hards Disks, 3 Laptops in constant use, 2 have 2 hard disks, 1 has 1 SSD. I have 3 iPhones, 1 iPad, 1 Nexus 7, 3 iPods.
I have 7 x 1Tb portable USB3 Drives that I carry everywhere, 1 for drivers, 1 trucrypt encrypted for customer data I need mobile, and each of the others for different reasons...
we have 1 "good" camera where each pic is 7mb - 15mb, and it is used by partner that does wedding floristry.. sometime 3 - 4 weddings a weekend.
I have less than 0 hours left in the day, I drive between 1500 and 2500Km every week.

seriously quite an effort to keep this lot, PLUS try and rope the lot in from wherever the data is.

Now with the friggin cloud, the data is getting more spread out. bandwidth would be insane to try an chuck the lot in the cloud, and I wouldnt trust the cloud anyways.

Oh, did I forget the many (around 20) USB flash drives I use.. between 2 and 64Gb..

throw me a frikken bone

Conventional hard drive will fail at some point, that's the reason we are here. I'm people here know more about faulty drive than working drive
Agree with 2 of whatever drive, one set of data is simply risky unless the data is replaceable. For backup we do it better. Have you guy heard of Ceph? It's a lot more flexible and scalable than RAID. We are also running backup on bacula.


Everyone know how important the data is until they lose them. So back up. try bacula.

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Thanks for the idea to checkout Ceph and Bakula, I hadnt heard of them. At at the School I manage IT at I, need to implement a different backup solution. The 2x 200Gb USB 2.0 HDD's arent viable anymore

Had to chuckle at bakulas site: "Bacula is relatively easy to use"

Ceph looks interesting but not sure how overkill and learning curve intensive for a small system. Also their many 404's all over their wiki is frustrating and looks like it isnt a real mature project.

Bakulas site is equally a bit neglected. The current version at http://www.bacula.org/en/is reported to be 11 September 2012: Bacula 5.2.11 so you click Current Files under downloads and it takes you to 21 feb 2012 5.2.6 download. Go up to parent folder and there is 20 feb 2013 5.2.13. Niggly I know, but still looks like a pretty nice backup solution.

Where do people find the time to play with all this stuff