Finding a Durable Hard Drive

[Vlad]

Hello,

I am planning to buy a new hard drive which can store information for a long time without the deterioration of data.

Do you know whether WD Blue, Green, Red, Purple, and Black drives use magnetic platters of the same quality? If platters from a WD Black drive were to be put in a WD Blue drive, would there be no difference in how long data can be stored without deterioration?

[data-medics]

Of the WD's you mention, Black drives are of higher quality overall. Red is pretty much the same as Black but has some NAS specific functions added.

However, HGST and Toshiba drives are of even better quality and likely to last even longer.

As to data "deterioration" that's unlikely to occur for many years with any hard drive, and even if it did drives all use ECC (error correction) to fix degraded bits. It's far more likely that the drive's other components such as PCB, read/write heads, etc. will fail long before you have to worry about the platters in that sense.

Your best bet, if you're looking for long term storage, will always be to store two or more copies of the data. That way no matter what happens years later (hardware failure, "degradation") you'll have two copies to pull from.

[RolandJS]

To a DR specialist, is the earlier "error-correction" operations helpful in later DR attempts?

[Vlad]

Thank you for the explanations. Blackblaze statistics for 2016 seems to show that HGST drives have a smaller failure rate.