External HDD Buying Advice (4/5/6 TB)

john1911 said:

1. Where should I buy the HDD from, in the past Amazon shipped me an Ext. HDD in just the plastic white bag, no bubble wrap, no kind of protection, nothing. So I'm a little skeptical of buying from them. Any suggestions are most welcome

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Retail external drives are already well protected. There is shock absorbing damping for the enclosure inside the box, and even the drive has a bit of anti vibration damping inside the enclosure. Plus they have a non operating shock rating of 350gs or likewise. So any extra 'protection' is just psychological. All that's necessary is protection from rain water intrusion. This is the truth but there are people who whine otherwise...

john1911 said:

2. I'm more inclined towards WD since a few members here had their Seagate failed recently. Is the incidence of failure more in Seagate Drives?

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100% of ALL drives WILL fail, whether after 10 minutes or 10 years is hard to predict. Typically if a drive works for the first 3 months of it's life, you can pretty much rule out premature failure due to manufacturing defects. So do your research, there are usually specific models in all brands with exceptionally high failure rates, so avoid those. But the whole wd vs Seagate argument is moot. Personally i prefer WD, but my 3 year old 8tb my book had an awesome helium drive inside, but the new one i got last year had an air drive which runs MUCH hotter. I would rather get the exos which comes only in 16tb though.

More important than all these topics is to realise that a drive is only storage, backup is the strategy you implement to protect important data. Multiple copies on different media/locations is backup.

john1911 said:

3. This will be used like a master backup drive (backup of backups) and will be plugged in once like every fortnight or month to create backup. Rest of the times it'll be kept in some drawer. So size doesn't matter to me. Should I look towards WD MyBook (7299) or Seagate Backup Plus HUB (7499), both of them need an external power adapter and house 3.5" drives? Are their any benefits of using 3.5" in my use case scenario? Transfer speeds don't matter much to me once it is around 100MB/s. Are 2.5" more prone to failure than 3.5" ? WD MyBook and Seagate Backup Plus HUB has an external power supply, what if the adapter fails?

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For your use case even SMR drives may be ok, though i would personally never use one if i had a (even more expensive) choice.

3.5" drives like the ones you've linked above are the most cost effective option if portability is not a requirement. 2.5" can fail sooner because of poorer cooling in the smaller un-ventilated enclosures.

In fact, for typically Indian weather, even the ventilated 3.5" externals can overheat in a sustained copy session for example (personal experience with heat related damage in Bombay). I now use all my external drives (2.5 or 3.5) with the case opened, exposing the drive to the outside, but that is not doable or feasible for everyone. What people do is point a small table or pedestal fan at the drive while is running. I also strongly suggest running a drive monitoring software like hdtune etc while using it, and if you see the temps increasing too much just give it a break till it's cooler.

If the adapter fails you will have to get another one, these days depending on the drive format, you may not be able to connect the bare drive, after shucking it, to a computer and access the data because of the translation done by the enclosure's PCB. Only certain combinations can work both externally and internally. I'll post more details later, on mobile now.

Personally, I would go for smaller size multiple disks, so I don't loose all data in a day if stored it on one big size HDD. I have 8 Seagate 4TB HDDs which I use to store my 4K movies collection and no issues so far. Just use your external HDDs to copy data on it and preserver it, do not go copying/deleting data everyday on a drive which has important data, which will shorten its life. For such a dynamic purpose, use single HDD only without keeping any important on it which you will regret if lost.