Yeah WD own Hitachi, no idea how much they've merged since. Whether it will mean WD drives get better or Hitachi drivers get worse....or both.

Never bothered with Green or Low Power drives and not sure why I would. Is HDD power consumption really that high to worry about?

From the link that you posted, I don't really think that there's a huge difference between WD and Hitachi in terms of reliability, they both seem good enough. As one poster noted, all companies have one disaster model every now and then (I've been the 'proud' owner of four 75GXP deathstars), so what really matters is consistency, and both seem to be pretty consistent (bear in mind that Backblaze have about five times as much experience with Seagate or Hitachi as WD).

As for the Greens, I can see why they'd be more prone to failure under conditions of intermittent loading. In the big scheme of things, I can't help but think that the energy savings are fairly trivial for the sorts of uses we'd have.

Of course, the "5s" referred to by your correspondent is in fact the Se.

And he has now purchased four of them, and a nice little NAS to put them in. It's only taken him a couple of years to make this decision, bless the little cunt's little cotton socks.

Aaaaand another one bites the dust by the looks of it. One of the 500 GB drives looks to be fucked.

2TB drive looks to be complaining now.

Anyone used Toshiba drives?

Western Digital :Y

 8-O £10 more, and slower

But don't die so often. :-{)

I only use Toshiba nowadays, though I'd be happy with WD Red too but as you say, they're more expensive. Haven't had any issues with them yet.

I wonder if the drives are being run on the edge of their temperature limits.  Attics temperatures can vary quite a bit, depending on the arrangement.

In the past I had a dedicated HD control board go intermittent and it made it look like the HDs were failing, but that was back in the DOS days.

Toshiba made some really amazing TVs in their time, but my experience with their computers and parts was disappointing.

"drives are being run on the edge of their temperature limits"

I run my hdds outside of the case in a hdd cage from an old server case. Stopped a lot of errors right there.

How much noise does that generate?

Considerably less than all the case fans I used to futility (apparently 'futily' is not a word) run. The hdds are actually pretty quiet.

Quantum Fireball. Or if you need extra capacity then a Quantum Bigfoot.

Well I should have bought the new drive earlier. It arrived today but the original drive looks to have pretty much fully died about 2 days ago.

Thankfully I still use CrashPlan. The restore will no doubt take forever

I thought you have superfast internet. How many TB to restore?

Currently restoring 260 GB (leaving some data on their servers for the time being)

Whilst my connection is 200 mbps down, Crashplan can't transfer that quickly it seems. It's quoting between 6 and 12 hours.

Apparently I've got 6.5TB of data backed up, quite a bit is deleted files which remain on the Crashplan servers.