I'm looking for a *reliable* 6-8TB disk to back up my internal RAID mirror and another standalone drive offsite (current backup disks are full). Originally I was looking for an internal disk and an enclosure, but I've just worked out that external disks are cheaper than internal! Why is this? Do they use cheaper drives? Are they lower quality drives? I don't much care if the enclosure fails.
For example:
- Seagate External 4TB is $119, cheapest internal Seagate disk is $185.
- Western Digital 4TB is $119, cheapest internal WD drive is $185.
- WD 6TB external is $249, WD Green internal is $330.
As an aside, which brand of external would y'all recommend as reliable? I was going to go with HGST drives, which are rated as very reliable, but they're over the GST threshold so they get to be quite expensive. BackBlaze rates Seagate 4TB+ as reliable, the smaller/older ones not so much - if they hadn't said that I'd have not used them, I find Seagate internally but external and rarely used I've found they can fail. The problem I have with external disks in an enclosure is you never know what kind of drive is inside them.