Suggestions for a dependable storage drive

Meisha · 2026-07-05T15:06:40-0400

For years, I've been buying WD MyBooks because of their low cost, but I recently found out that when the enclosure fails, your data is gone. I have eight of them, and many are currently not mounting and aren't showing up at all in Disk Manager.

Could anyone please suggest a dependable storage drive with a large capacity? I work in video, so I need a lot of backup space.

I'm running Windows 11 Pro, version 25H2 (Build 26200.8655) on an Intel i9-14900K with 192 GB of RAM.

Thanks!

neemobeer · 2026-07-05T15:10:00-0400

Honestly if you want reliability I would suggest looking at a NAS and configuring it in a RAID 5,6 or 10 (1+0) for a more durable storage system. I do a fair amount of photography and keep everything on a 20TB NAS in a 1+0 config.

Meisha · 2026-07-05T15:17:03-0400

Thank you for your reply! I purchased a WD NAS MyCloudMirror many years ago and it became inaccessible within a month. What brand have you found to be dependable? The thing that bothers me most about RAID is that even with redundancy, if your controller fails, all is lost, so for redundancy, I just buy drives two at a time and back up the data to both. But if the brand you use is dependable, they maybe their non-RAID drives are also, so I'd be interested in knowing the brand you trust. Thanks!

neemobeer · 2026-07-05T15:22:22-0400

QNAP or Synology are the brands I would recommend.

Meisha · 2026-07-05T15:35:07-0400

Thank you, but these look more like business server solutions. I'm just a freelance video artist, not a large business.

neemobeer · 2026-07-05T15:46:51-0400

They have NAS geared for home users up to larger business geared arrays. You certainly will pay a premium for the "easy-to-setup" systems but you get the reliability.

These are very easy to setup options geared toward home users
Synology DS225+ for a 2 bay (You could do a RAID 1) or
Synology DS1525+ for a 4 bay (RAID 5 or 6 or a 1+0)

Meisha · 2026-07-05T15:58:40-0400

That's a very good suggestion, but a little steep in price for me unfortunately. I agree you, though, it's a good way to go.
What if the controller fails, can you put the drives in another housing and read them up?

neemobeer · 2026-07-05T16:34:28-0400

In most cases yes the drives will still function with data in-tack.

bobkn · 2026-07-05T16:45:53-0400

Disclaimer: I don't use any external drives for online storage.

I wonder whether you'd prefer a DAS (direct attached storage)?

If you only need to access it from a single PC, it may be a simpler choice.

As to whether you could transfer RAID disks to another NAS or DAS, I don't know. A little Web searching suggests that it should work, although it could be a little fussy: same exact enclosure, same firmware version, disks in the same physical order.

I trust you're aware that RAID reduces capacity as the price of error correction. RAID 10 has half the total capacity of the disks. (I assume they're all the same size. You'd need an even number.) With N disks in RAID 5, the capacity is N-1.

Disks have gone up in price a lot recently. In late 2022, I bought an 18TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro drive for $300. In 2023, I bought a 16TB version for $250.

Meisha · 2026-07-05T17:29:02-0400

Yes, I do prefer to keep it simple with DAS. I see online that you need the external bay setup to use them, but if you're not using them exteral, does that mean you have them directly in your computer like a DAS drive? Sorry if that's a dumb question.

AdvancedSetup · 2026-07-05T18:50:48-0400

Was this a RAID setup or single drive unit? If it's a single drive unit you can open up the unit and it's simply a single SATA hard drive in most cases and will work if plugged into a computer or even a USB external adapter. Though if it is multiple drives setup as RAID then their controller is proprietary I'm sure, but if you have a working unit you could take that one apart and write down and take pictures of how it's setup. Then put the old drives from the other unit into it and hopefully you should be able to access the drives.

If one or more drives failed then check if the WD has tools to rebuild the RAID by replacing a drive.

bobkn · 2026-07-05T19:20:15-0400

Meisha said:
Yes, I do prefer to keep it simple with DAS. I see online that you need the external bay setup to use them, but if you're not using them exteral, does that mean you have them directly in your computer like a DAS drive? Sorry if that's a dumb question.

Stupid? No.

I believe that a typical DAS is external. It may use a faster interface to the PC than would typically be available via Ethernet. (It assumes that your PC supports such an interface, like USB 3.2 Gen2X2 or Thunderbolt.)

Years ago, I used a RAID 10 setup that was mounted inside the case. It used the Intel CPU/chipset software RAID. Every time I crashed Windows, which I did fairly often in those days, the RAID 10 verified itself gain. The drives were usable during that, but at greatly reduced performance. It didn't take too long for me to give up on that.

Rather than DAS or NAS, I use a single 18TB SATA spinner. I back it up externally at intervals. The transfer speed seems to be roughly 250MBps, or (ideally) about 1.1 hours per terabyte.

(The RAID formats that use striping should be much faster, if the interface can keep up.)

cheaterslick · 2026-07-05T19:45:25-0400

bobkn said:
I wonder whether you'd prefer a DAS (direct attached storage)?

Any links?

bobkn said:
Rather than DAS or NAS, I use a single 18TB SATA spinner.

Which one do you use?

bobkn · 2026-07-05T19:50:04-0400

cheaterslick said:
Any links?

Not really.

But, for starters: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=50011165 50011245&d=DAS&Order=1

cheaterslick said:
Which one do you use?

As I said in post 9, Seagate Ironwolf Pro. It's a NAS drive, which I use as a regular desktop drive.

Meisha · 2026-07-05T19:57:31-0400

When you said "spinner", I thought you meant a non-RAID, non-NAS drive.

Meisha · 2026-07-05T20:01:23-0400

AdvancedSetup said:
Was this a RAID setup or single drive unit? If it's a single drive unit you can open up the unit and it's simply a single SATA hard drive in most cases and will work if plugged into a computer or even a USB external adapter. Though if it is multiple drives setup as RAID then their controller is proprietary I'm sure, but if you have a working unit you could take that one apart and write down and take pictures of how it's setup. Then put the old drives from the other unit into it and hopefully you should be able to access the drives.

If one or more drives failed then check if the WD has tools to rebuild the RAID by replacing a drive.

The drives I have that won't read up are WD Elements and WD MyBook. The deal-breaker for me with WD, now that I know, is that you can only read the drive in the enclosure that it came in. No, they aren't RAID drives.

Ghot · 2026-07-05T20:04:30-0400

I use internal WD Blacks for storage. They've never let me down...

cheaterslick · 2026-07-05T20:06:47-0400

bobkn said:
As I said in post 9, Seagate Ironwolf Pro. It's a NAS drive, which I use as a regular desktop drive.

I'm a little confused. What kind of an enclosure are you using for it?

Meisha · 2026-07-05T20:27:20-0400

Ghot said:
I use internal WD Blacks for storage. They've never let me down...

View attachment 176053

View attachment 176054

Thank you, this is a good suggestion. I don't really went to give WD more business, but if it's dependable, it might the way to go for me.

Ghot · 2026-07-05T20:35:50-0400

Meisha said:
Thank you, this is a good suggestion. I don't really went to give WD more business, but if it's dependable, it might the way to go for me.

I've owned/own about twenty of them.
They all still work flawlessly.

What size are you looking for? WD and Seagate are decent 3.5" drives.
Stay away from WD Blue or Green. I'm not 100% sure but the WD Ultrastars, used to be Hitachi DeskStars (DeathStars).
Western Digital acquired Hitachi's hard disk drive (HDD) business in 2012.

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/#f=2&t=7200&A=2000000000000,36000000000000&sort=-a_capacity&m=34,38

I'm using these at the moment...

WD 4TB Black
M/N: WD4005FZBX

WD 8TB Black
M/N: WD8001FZBX

On these big drives, make sure they have a 256MB cache or larger.

Suggestions for a dependable storage drive

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