Most reliable PT Hard Drive? (PC) ?

[awritersparadise]

I've always used the 4TB OWC Mercury Pro because of Avid recommending them from day 1.. I've had 3 of them and all 3 have crashed and wiped me out in the past. What hard drives do you swear by as reliable for every day use? ESATA speeds on the Mercury Pro were always very impressive and gave me no trouble.

[Darryl Ramm]

Hard disk dive? Folks still using them for stuff? I would only use an SSD for session drives, if you have a huge number of samples well.. maybe HDD.
In a PC nowadays I'd be adding Samsung 970 Evo cards in M.2 slots and/or PCIe to M.2 adapter cards. Dear God they are fast.

SATA is a serious bottleneck for modern SSDs.

SATA: Samsung 860 Evo or Pro.

M.2 (PCIe/NVMe==fast): Samsung 970 Evo or Pro.

USB3: Samsung T5.

Thunderbolt (PCIe/NVMe==fast) SSD: Samsung X5, Sonnet Fusion.

Crucial and SanDisk and some others all make some decent SSDs (and some not great models as well)... but Samsung dominates the market for a reason.

SATA HDD: 'ol Pro Tools standard WD Black.

Prefer to stay away from OWC for anything storage related. Use lots of other of their stuff.

[albee1952]

To properly back any files up, they need to exist in at least 3 places(or drives) and 1 of those places should be off-site. Cloud storage can be a good option, but you will pay for it to have enough space. Carrying a large external drive is another(bring it to the studio once a week, copy sessions to it, then take it home or to some other location). I try to keep everything copied to at least 2 external drives, while its also available on one of my internal recording drives. I also keep 2 large USB drives that hold drive images of every system drive(multiple computers) and my samples drives. I also have a recent clone of my audio machine's system drive. WD Black are pretty dependable, but in truth, no spinning drive is "bulletproof", and age seems less of a factor(the failed spinners I have had, have been anywhere from 2-3 years old, all the way up to 2 weeks old). Then I dropped a large external drive about 6" and that killed it.