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I've had yet another USB hard drive fail on me. It is still working but HDSentinel gives it 8% health and 9 days to live. (It will occasionally around every 48hrs just switch off and on again on its own)

I decide this time I want internal only and will hope it lasts me longer (I only got about 10-12 months from the other some how).

The two I have seen are pretty similar and almost the same price. They are both Seagate 2TB.

ST2000DM001 - 6 heads - £58.14 // ST2000DM006 = 4 heads - £58.74

Now the one that is 50p more, has 4 heads. The other has 6 heads. (Also its the higher model number (ie. the 006) that only has 4 heads)

I also did notice that the original RRP for the 6 heads version was actually £30 higher to begin with.

I want to get this bought immediately, but thought i would ask here rather than phoning the company selling it, I'd rather an independent, expert opinion.

Thanks for the help

(Note: This might be related. Its about platter size and count VS reliability/lifespan -- not sure if this is even the same as heads, Im assuming those drives have one head per platter)Does a greater number of hard drive platter increase the risk of failure?

Big T Larrity
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It doesn't make enough practical difference to worry about for consumer drives.

But do go for the M006 version.
Any M001's still being sold are old stock, they are not longer in production. Who knows how long it has been on the store-shelve already? Could very well be that the 2 or 3 year factory warranty is already expired.

Tonny
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If the drive size (physical and data) stays the same but the number of heads goes down, then the areal density of the data has gone up. That would be due to process and technology improvements - you would expect that reliability would be improved too with those improvements.

So, as Tonny says, go for the later model.

As to reliability, I would look at reviews on somewhere like Newegg and anywhere else that has a lot of reviews (to get a reasonable spread of opinions), and bear in mind that people might be more likely to leave a bad review if they have encountered a problem than if there was no problem and they aren't thinking about the disk drive.

I expect an internal HDD to last longer than an external one which gets moved around, and also there is no intermediary USB interface to fail.

No answer about HDD reliability would be complete without saying that you have to keep backups of all data that you don't want to lose.

Andrew Morton
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