I've got through two 2TB USB drives I use for backups, one a Western Digital and one a Seagate, both bought within a month of each other. Both lasted about a year and then failed. Now I'm shopping for a single 4TB drive knowing full well that the same thing will happen. I fear for the integrity of my backups. 

If you have the money 2Gb 850 EVO SSD has 5 year warranty (as do all the 850 EVO drives).

 I had great luck with Seagate ST3500s. They started having errors after 7-8 years of service.
 WB Blues seem to be more reliable for me than Blacks.  IDE drives seem to last forever.
 AS for printers it's the only thing HP gets right. I had a 920 that was solid.
 I have a Brother Laser Printer.  It works fine.  Most of my printing is PDF.
 
 My mom gave me an older Brother LP with over a dozens cartridges. The drum wheel was going bad which was a $250 repair.  I gave it to a friend who runs a computer repair shop. While I didn't want to invest the money for the repair he said the old ones are worth fixing.
 
 I have two legacy systems with Intel and Asus boards.  When the components die they won't be replaced. A Q6600 will still run modern DAW software.  The other has an AMD Phenom IIx4 945 with an Asus board and nVidia chipset. It's still pretty good for audio.
 
 M-Audio gear: 2 AP2496, 1 AP192, FW 410 still in use.  Terratec EWX 2496 with Vista64 beta drivers still in use.
 
 The most I ever forked over was $500 for a Yamaha SW1000XG and was rendered useless with AMD and Intel updating platforms.  If I could do that over again I would buy an RME Hammerfall PCI card. Still supported to this day.  Another one was a Tascam 822 PCI, rock solid, low latency, not bothered by IRQ sharing, only to be retired because of no 64 bit drivers.
 
 With M-Audio dropping driver support for good stuff, Tascam and Yamaha increasing their lists of legacy devices, these are on my do not buy ever list.
 
 I've had more good luck with hardware than bad.
 

kevinwal
I've got through two 2TB USB drives I use for backups, one a Western Digital and one a Seagate, both bought within a month of each other. Both lasted about a year and then failed. Now I'm shopping for a single 4TB drive knowing full well that the same thing will happen. I fear for the integrity of my backups. 

I bought a 4TB WD Black about 3 years ago and have had no problems at all.
 
I have found that if I keep my drives cool that they last MUCH longer. A few I have are pushing against 8 years old. But you're right about backups, it is almost impossible unless you want to spend some bucks.  I do a rolling backup thing. Whenever, I get a new drive it gets a copy of all the critical data. Over time, everything gets rolled to the new(er) drives and the others are consolidated until they fail.
 
Sonar hates it as I'm always losing vst link and have to fix old projects.  There is no way I'm moving it all to a cloud though.

Hi all-
 
Thanks for the comments. I probably made the time of these failures sound compressed; it was actually over a few years that my drives, printer and monitor failed. I never lost data from the Seagate drives that died since I could tell from the sound they made while reading folders that something was wrong and I was able to get the data I needed from them backed up before the replacement drives arrived.
 
The Canon printer dying bothered me, since it was *just* out of warranty; there was absolutely no warning; I'd just bought replacement ink for it and it was such a dog-gone pretty printer!
 
I'm still using my HP monitor (with VGA rather than HDMI input.) I bought a $10.00 DP to VGA adapter so I can use one of my Samsung monitors alongside it with my laptop.
 
I know all hardware will ultimately fail. I've actually been very fortunate over the years, but since I *was* so fortunate with drives, printers and monitors for so long, I guess the last few failures surprised me a bit, hence the vent.
 
Thanks again-
 
-Susan

I understand. I've had pretty good luck but have had failures that went from bad to worse.
I REALLY need to get a docking station and a few HDs for backup, I do backup but I need to start cloning and doing it right... however, every time I go shopping online for hard drives and looks at the ones I can afford, not the cheapest, middle of the range, I read a few good reviews and some horror stories. It is depressing for someone like me who really knows nothing about all this, I just do what others tell me I should and hope it works. I guess I'm just going to cross my fingers and buy some HDs and a USB 3 docking station. I know I need SATA and USB 3.0. SATA, or SATA III who knows? Not me.
 
When I was still using a 386x (a Cyber Max with TURBO Boost), I think it was when I had updated to the wonderful OS Windows ME... my C Drive crashed. I put it in the shop and asked them to try wiping the C drive and re-installing an OS... and to NOT do ANYTHNG to the second HD. They wiped both drives then denied they did it. The second drive had about 5 years of my daughters music on it. I finally got most of it restored for her a few years ago, she had moved on and is producing other music, she was a DnB DJ playing clubs back then.
I learned a big lesson... pull all the drives you don't want messed with before letting anyone work on your computer.
Another reason I need to start cloning my drives.
I am interested too... is a drive a drive or is a Toshiba better than a Seagate better than some other? I figure for backups green drives are OK but if I have to actually replace a HD in a machine maybe by then SSDs will be cheaper.
 
Hardware failures are always bad news.

Speak of the devil... I have a 1TB WD Black HDD going bad. I can't complain as it is about 7 years old.  Luckily it's just slow and hasn't failed completely yet. I'm off to Microcenter when they open. I'm going to replace it with another 4TB WD Black and replace my system drive with a Samsung SSD.
 
I ran across something that we may want to be aware of though.  It may just be a coincidence but I had the music cranked to a fairly loud level. I'm wondering if keeping the CPU on the desk with the speakers may cause an issue with the drives. I have never had any issues before (that I know of) but after listening for a while is when I noticed the drive going bad. The drive going bad is also the same drive where I keep my music files.
 
 
Perhaps the vibrations caused a head crash or bad spots on the platters? Just a thought...

Neither is likely, but heavy vibration can increase seek time required (which looks like "slowing down").

jbow
I understand. I've had pretty good luck but have had failures that went from bad to worse.
I REALLY need to get a docking station and a few HDs for backup, I do backup but I need to start cloning and doing it right... however, every time I go shopping online for hard drives and looks at the ones I can afford, not the cheapest, middle of the range, I read a few good reviews and some horror stories. It is depressing for someone like me who really knows nothing about all this, I just do what others tell me I should and hope it works. I guess I'm just going to cross my fingers and buy some HDs and a USB 3 docking station. I know I need SATA and USB 3.0. SATA, or SATA III who knows? Not me.
 
When I was still using a 386x (a Cyber Max with TURBO Boost), I think it was when I had updated to the wonderful OS Windows ME... my C Drive crashed. I put it in the shop and asked them to try wiping the C drive and re-installing an OS... and to NOT do ANYTHNG to the second HD. They wiped both drives then denied they did it. The second drive had about 5 years of my daughters music on it. I finally got most of it restored for her a few years ago, she had moved on and is producing other music, she was a DnB DJ playing clubs back then.
I learned a big lesson... pull all the drives you don't want messed with before letting anyone work on your computer.
Another reason I need to start cloning my drives.
I am interested too... is a drive a drive or is a Toshiba better than a Seagate better than some other? I figure for backups green drives are OK but if I have to actually replace a HD in a machine maybe by then SSDs will be cheaper.
 
Hardware failures are always bad news.

Hi Julien-
 
I'm glad you got at least most of your daughter's music restored.
 
Yeah, hardware when it dies is very disappointing ;)!
 
-Susan

bitflipper
As azslow3 mentioned above, when multiple things fail in a short time you need to take a look at power and grounding. Invest in a real power conditioner / surge suppressor / UPS /  power distribution box and it might save your bacon down the road. If possible, run a dedicated circuit to your audio and computer equipment in which there is a separate ground wire that doesn't connect to the neutral anywhere except the N-G bond at the service panel. If that's not possible, consider an isolation transformer and make sure all your gear is on the secondary side of it. That'll will improve power quality, safety and greatly reduce hum/RFI/EFI problems.
 
I learned these lessons working with large computer rooms and multi-million dollar systems that drive huge companies - and consequently cannot go down, ever. Many of my customers measured downtime in millions of dollars per minute.
 
Of course, I couldn't personally justify the kinds of extreme measures those big operations took, but I have implemented a poor man's version. Doing the grunt labor myself it cost only about $500 total, including the UPS. I'd originally planned on adding an isolation transformer but couldn't afford it - turned out not to be necessary.

I soooooo agree.... had endless problems years ago and after running a new dedicated power leg, problems disappeared.  Decent power conditioner / surge suppressor / UPS  is a couple hundred bucks or less at costco...
 
Last month we had all kinds of problems in our neighborhood, power wackin' out for days... my system survived, although the ups didn't... I'm sure it saved my bacon though (had gone thru 2 motherboards in a couple years prior to getting one.
 
Immediately replaced it.