WD Red 3TB HDD WD30EFRX Internal harddrive $158 shipped @ Amazon

Too expensive. $130 is my breaking point for 3TB, otherwise might as well buy 2TB for under $100.

you have to consider reliability as well

I bought one of those seagate 3 TB usb 3.0 externals for $120 and it lasted about a month before the drive started getting errors

THIS drive does have an ok track record so far however, not that it has been in the market for very long

to each their own though, if don't value your data, go get a cheaper drive, this for $120-130 would be a really good deal considering what hard drive goes for these days and taking the reliability of the drive into account

$120 is mine.



Simply because you had a seagate failure, doesn't mean it's not reliable.
There is no reason to believe that any drive on the market right now is any more reliable than another one.

Be very careful about the most prominent Amazon review, concerned with how every home user's RAID is a time bomb. It contains real facts, and real problem (bit rot). It contains a great suggestion in the first paragraph; to regularly scour your drives if for no other reason than to force errors to come out. But then it goes on to compare apples to oranges and advocates a feature as being key that has traditionally been something users want to disable.

Better solution still is to abandon RAID in favor of erasure code based systems. Drobo and its ilk are a hardware one. Unraid is a software based one that I use (also allows drives to sleep when not in use.)

read reviews and decide for yourself

compare the reviews for say the WD green and black which both have been in the market for some time

Considering WD drives do not always work because of the firmware, they are the lowest quality drive that has ever existed. I mean this literally; I have used three WD drives that had no problem of any kind, except they don't work on all controllers. One of those three didn't even work on a WD brand controller.

Reviews of anything common are only moderately reliable. Hard drives are very common..

WD have several drives on the market, there are few reports of blue/black drives failing while the green series has always been bad

you can't just say that WD drives have bad FW, because it's not true

yes, you need to take reviews with a grain of salt, but if a drive has 2/5 stars while another has 5/5 and equal amount of reviews, which do you think is the more reliable drive?

What you "think" is irrelevant as far as reliability is concerned.
There is no way to judge accuracy and precision of the reviews.

yeah, I'm sure most people who go online to write reviews just make the whole thing up!

give me a break

you can go to proper HW testing sites and see the exact same results, stop being retarded