How are the 2 TB Drives Doing?

My current external 1 TB drives are filling up fast. I noticed that there are several high quality brand name 2 TB drives now available at reasonable prices. How are they doing? In the past the early models of higher capacity drives came with a high rate of issues/failure.

Is it safe to buy a 2 TB drive for long term storage?

I think it is too soon to say whether the useful life of high capacity drives has improved. I'm looking at RAID solutions for increased capacity and reliability.

RAID is a preferred solution for redundancy and higher availability. But it is important not to buy cheap drives, which typically have only one bearing on the platter spindle. These are cheaper to build, but get really sloppy in use. First they start getting "soft" errors which the error-checking will take care of limiting data corruption. But after a while the errors exceed the ability to self correct - and you get a failure. Best to get what are termed "enterprise-class" hard drives, or at the very least, the 5 yr warranty version of the consumer hard drives - these are manufactured to a higher quality standard and undergo more aggressive testing - with the result being a lower likelihood of data loss from a drive failure.

Any data storage scheme should include replication, preferably off-site. I like Carbonite, but here are others. These usually cost around $60/yr or less, and you have unlimited data storage. Accessible through a web-based interface, if you couple this with a backup program like the free version of SyncBack, you'll have a safer solution than just a single drive.

Thanks for the responses. My current flow is to have the current year's work on two drives in my tower. One drive is a primary and one a back up. I then have the older images on an external (along with the current files as well) 1 TB drive. I have a second 1 TB drive, which is a duplicate of the first external, stored off site at work. The external are almost full. So, I have thought of getting the 2 TB units from Western Digital to expand the system.

All drives fail. It's just a question of when. The evidence suggests that the manufacturers overstate the Mean Time Between Failures ("MTBF") by as much as 50%, and that after three years failure risk rates climb steeply. So unless you plan to replace your hard drives pretty often, consider RAID.

RAID is a complicated subject, but in many RAID formats the risk of drive failure is managed; loss of one drive in a RAID 4 configuration doesn't lose any data., for example. RAID in this sense assures your data is always available. RAID is not a backup strategy; in this context, it's a data availability strategy. Note this is a true, controller-driven array, not software-based RAID systems, which (so far as I know) can't get you to RAID 3.

Backing up is a whole separate issue, and in this context I just want to ay that the bigger the drive, the bigger the backup problem.