



What you get by sticking with the brand names is good customer service. I had a big brand-name drive fail on me recently, and it was only four months old. That said, I suggest sticking with known names like Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi. Unfortunately, what really jumps out of that data is that longevity varies more by model than by manufacturer. Backblaze, a backup company that currently stores more than 1 exabyte of data, and therefore has considerable experience with hard drives, periodically publishes its drive statistics, which have some helpful numbers to consider. If you want something small, see our guide to portable hard drives (which don’t require external power). The hardest thing about this step is figuring out which hard drive to buy.
