reliable drive for home storage?

[dieselnutjob]

I came back from holiday and my file server has died.
I think it must have cooked the 2TB Seagate drive with all the data on it.
Initially it wouldn't even appear as a valid SATA device.
After 1/2 in the freezer it appears as a SATA device but I can't actually read anything from it. Doing fdisk /dev/sdc just results in lots of errors in dmesg that it can't read from the device.

Fortunately I had only recently upgraded it from a 1TB drive which I found sitting on the workbench with nearly all of the data on it.
I think that the only extra files saved between the upgrade and now are backups from my laptop, which is still working fine.
So basically I lost nothing.

So what is the toughest most reliable drive that I can buy? 2TB should do it. My desktop computer has a 4TB drive and my idea is to set up a script to rsync the data from the server to a backup partition in the desktop every time I use it.

It doesn't need to be particularly high performance, it is attached to a miniITX motherboard with a fanless processor so quite low power, which boots off a small SSD running debian of course.

[Segfault]

Any hard drive can die any time. Only foolproof backup policy can keep your data intact. Speaking of storage I use WD Red drives, they run cool and are power efficient.

[sunrat]

Any hard drive can die any time.

Exactly. They are most likely to die when they are new in which case you may claim warranty, or from old age.
A good backup strategy involves at least two copies of data. A single copy is only good for data you don't care if you lose. Personally I have 2 computers at home with the same data on both mirrored between them with Syncthing. These both have WD Black drives which are fast but noisy so the Reds may be better. I also regularly use rsync to make a third copy to external drives, the main one being a WD Blue 4TB in an eSATA case.

[golinux]

+1 WD Black drives

[eor2004]

According to this Backblaze report, Hitachi (HGST), Western Digital and some Toshiba's are the most reliable, Seagate being the worst, in my personal experience this is true!
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/what-hard-drive-should-i-buy/

[golinux]

Seagate being the worst, in my personal experience this is true!

I wasn't going to go there but since you said it . . . my experience also.

[NFT5]

Seagate being the worst, in my personal experience this is true!

I wasn't going to go there but since you said it . . . my experience also.

Agree.

I've had very good runs with WD Blue and Toshiba

[p.H]

it is attached to a miniITX motherboard with a fanless processor

Is the server case fanless too ? Could the drive have died from over-heating due to insufficient cooling ?

Any hard drive can die any time.

Agreed. And if it does not die completely, it can have bad blocks.

Only foolproof backup policy can keep your data intact.

Or redundancy, aka RAID.

[dieselnutjob]

Thanks all. I have ordered a 3Tb WD red on Amazon.

As the Seagate is only a few months old is it worth pursuing a warranty claim?

[p.H]

It depends if the price is worth the time you spend.
The manufacturer will probably require that you run their diagnostic utility first.

[dieselnutjob]

The case has a fan and also the power supply. Also I did make sure that one was pulling air in and the other pushing it out so they complement each other rather than fighting each other.

The fans are still working fine.

[pendrachken]

Thanks all. I have ordered a 3Tb WD red on Amazon.

As the Seagate is only a few months old is it worth pursuing a warranty claim?

Yes.

Good luck for the warranty when the Western Dumpsterfire just up and dies with no SMART warnings though. WD customer service is utter shit compared to Seagate. At least they used to be, I doubt they've improved. They tried to deny the warranty claim on one of my drives installed on a customers PC because their software didn't say the drive was bad..... when it was a failed boot drive not even recognized by the BIOS, and thus couldn't even RUN the software

Customer Service with WD was always like pulling teeth. Screw em and their drives the literally drop out and die during mid transfer with zero pre-fail warning signs. At least seagates will warn you weeks to months that they are failing 95% of the time, and Customer Service is easy peasy.

[Segfault]

RAID won't guarantee your data is safe. It can still be destroyed in case of PEBCAK or in case some virus infected Windows computer has write access to it, or whatnot. Even the RAID itself can die, it is quite usual when one drive dies then the rebuild process is too much load for other drives and another one goes tits up.

[dieselnutjob]

or the server overheats and destroys all of the discs in the RAID array....

[p.H]

I know that RAID is not a backup, and the room can burn, and so on... But if I read correctly the OP is looking for a reliable storage, not for a complete backup solution. RAID provides just that. It seems that the file server using this storage is already part of a backup solution.