Seagate 5TB External Desktop or 4TB Portable?

[vbctv]

#1
I'm trying to decide which to buy tomorrow. I currently use 4 different Portable Hard Drives for my Movie & TV Shows and I want to combine them into 1 or 2 depending which route is better here.

I'm looking at either the Seagate 5TB External Desktop Hard Drive which is $129 or the Seagate 4TB Portable Hard Drive which is $119.

My question & worries are about life of the drive. I have had good luck with Portables and bad luck with External Desktop Drives. But that was on PC, never have used anything but Portable drives on my Mac in 2 years. Some of the questions I have are will the drive sleep if connected 24/7 to the Mac, and will it wake up randomly like on PC or will it stay sleeping until I open it? Will that keep the lifespan longer?

I'm looking to use Plex with my Apple TV which is why I want to combine drives. Just trying to figure out which is the better route & get opinions from everyone.

 

[stavrosmast]

Links for the drives?

Do you mean external and internal hard drive? If yes

The internal HDD will be faster and last longer and the external ones might decide not to be recognised at a random moment from windows.... and are more fragile,expensive, A usb external drive harms its life span if you use it in the port for 24/7 and if you dont need it connected there then you should better disconnect it whenver possible. And never move a drive while its working

 

[koningx]

@Stavrosmast How can we say external ones might not last longer ?

(sometimes problem can be in the USB casing's circuitory , while HDD might be perfectly all right if taken out from casing and put in another casing or
attached to desktop.)

since external HDD = internal HDD + enclosure.

since 2.5" HDDs are made for laptops , sure they work on 5200 rpm which is comparatively less than 7200rpm desktop internals HDDs ,

but 2.5" they are built to withstand and operate in much heated environments of laptops.


------------------------------

In Next Generation Mobile Hard Disk Drives (2006, Fujitsu), Fujitsu says this:

http://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/COMP/fcpa/hdd/sata-mobile-ext-duty_wp.pdf

2.5” HDDs have lower power and offer improved MTBF and life.

All hard disk drives are susceptible to damage by excessive heat. Mobile hard disk drives tend to be operated in a high temperature, low airflow environment and are therefore perceived to have lower reliability. If mobile hard disk drives were operated in an enterprise environment with constant temperature, then the demonstrated MTBF would prove to be an improvement over the mobile specification.

Testing has shown the largest contributor to the life of a hard disk drive is the operating temperature. Heat from the application environment and sense current exacerbates electron migration in small semiconductors. ... Through a few important design changes, hard disk drive suppliers have created 2.5” hard disk drives that operate 24x7 at a DE surface temperature of 55°C.

In the end, Fujitsu claims that the 2.5" form factor is objectively more reliable, all else being equal. Principal contributors to the claims are the lesser mass and the extra engineering that goes into making 2.5" drives survive the more harsh conditions of mobile use (specifically, temperature and shock/vibration).

Summary Small form factor hard disk drives offer the advantage of lower power, higher capacity and higher performance per cubic volume when compared to 3.5” hard disk drives as well as more than adequate reliability and life when operated in a controlled environment with temperatures below 55°C.

Since all else rarely is equal, looking at MTBF and duty cycle ratings will give you a stronger impression of a given drive's relative reliability against another. For example, looking across the 2.5 and 3.5 enterprise (24x7) drives at HGST, we see that many of the 2.5" models have an MTBF of 2M hours, while the 3.5" drives come in at 1.4 to 1.6M.

--------------------------

See, Anything that has moving parts will have the potential to fail over time.
whether internal or external (they are same thing inside)

ALL IN ALL YOUR HDDs ARE GOING TO FAIL sooner or later.
Accept it THERE WILL be GOING TO BE A HDD DOOMSDAY at some point in your life.

SO ANYTHING you Buy Make sure , You BACKUP soon.

and Take extra care with handling your drives.
DO SMART checks. use sofwtares like HDD sentinel and HDDlife Pro which can tell you about SMART attributes and predict "days used"

if possible buy HDDs in Pairs. one for storing Data and one for it's backup. so if one fails you still have all your data. and then replace failed one buying new one.

On an average for me nearly 700days - 1.5 to 2 years , is rough time HDDs should work. you can Google and read Backblaze reviews also on HDDs life time and failure rates. But they all can fail if bad luck sooner also. and that is why you must always backup no matter what.