What do you guys use for hard drives? What brand? what size? experiences? sorry, I have a lot of questions of what I should get for software, coding and 3d CAD modeling.
External Harddrives
I have been using a Western digital my passport 1TB for about 4 years now and I love it. no problems at all. Bought for a very reasonable price at Costco. I also have two Seagate 1TB drives that are hooked up to each of my satellite TV receivers as PVR units and they have never had as much as a hiccup either. As far as software goes Western digital comes with a package but I have never tried it. I just use the windows software.
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I like the WD Portable HDs. I have one for my GoPro footages, 1 for photos, and another miscellaneous things. I mainly have the 1TB and 2TB versions. Western Digital has numerous versions of their portable drives but all have served me well. I actually prefer these portable drives then the desktop versions. I remember having gone thru 2 desktop versions that failed after a year of use. I recently picked up 2 extra 1TB drives at $40 each from Best Buy. Great to have on hand. I would love to eventually get my hands on one of the Samsung SSD portable drives to accompany my Gnarbox. I’d say, if you can afford it, go for the SSD drives but if you can’t… Western Digitals have served me well. 
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Prefer WD Red HDD’s for use in my Synology NAS (3 x 3TB drives in a SHR raid). They perform well under pressure and in the 4 years I’ve been using Synology NAS systems I’ve yet to have one fail. Only replacements have been to boost the storage of the NAS systems.
For use on the go it’s a 500GB Seagate slim and a 256GB Sandisk SSD. Both cheap and cheerful options which have yet to fail in 2 years of use. Also like that the Seagate slim has a removable SATA interface which allows me to use for data retrieval/recovery on other drives at work;
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For portable devices I prefer use of SD cards because they are physically very robust and portable, withstand water better (rinse in distilled water and dry slowly) and can connect to most anything (via adapters). I have a 128GB SD in my Chromebook and 64GB microSD in phone and carry an old 8GB microSD in an adapter to move files around with other folk. About 64GB is enough for weeks worth of travelling.
I have 3 external hardddrives. A WD 250GB I got about 10 years ago now, its socket is dodgy but its connected to a server. A Seagate 500GB and a Hitachi 1TB. I use these as youngest as my primary data store on a server, I copy a subset of important fiile to the 2nd oldest, and I copy a further subset of my important to the oldest. This is sometimes known as primary storage, secondary storage, tertiary storage. A very small subset about 2GB I replicate in multiple countries using rsync over SSH to a Raspberry Pi and write to their boot SD cards, as well as to the internal storage in my phones and tablets. I make use of truecrypt (compiled from source) across my Linux based devices.
As such I can withstand: my phone / laptop fails and I move the SD to another device (which also carrying a hdd could do also but hdd often don’t power off phones), a total destruction of everything locally, and a total destruction of one half of the planet.
When I can put a server on the moon I’ll be a little happier, a solar panel and a satellite dish?
Hi @cdarienzo1 I’ve always found that selecting hard drives are a very personal selection, and everyone has had different experiences. I see Seagate is mentioned here, and I personally wouldn’t touch Seagate because I ended up replacing 30 PC’s which had a faulty batch of Seagate hard drives in them 
I use Western Digital and Buffalo, I’ve never had any issues with these two brands and would go with WD first but this is just my own experience, and I’m sure there will be others here which haven’t had such great experience with these brands. WD gets my vote for build quality, support and price value.
Hope this helps a little! 
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