I am looking at a 3TB hard drive for a specific purpose.

This drive will see occasional use, maybe once a month dropped into an external dock to do a full system backup (including OS, system files, and executables) to be kept off-premises.

Would this be a good drive for this purpose, or should I look elsewhere? At the moment I have 1,903 GB (1.86 TB) of data which is more than a nominally 2TB drive will hold, so I need the 3TB capacity.

Blazing fast speed is not a requirement, in fact (like with the empeg) a slower drive would be advantageous in terms of reliability and heat generation.

Suggestions?

tanstaafl.

edit: Hmmm... the backup software I was looking at claims to support hard drives only up to 2TB. That changes things, maybe...

I haven't got any of them here yet.
But if I were to purchase one today, it would likely be the 3TB WD "Green" drive. So far, the 2TB and 1.5TB models have been way better than expected.

Cheers

I have three of those 3TB WD "Green" drives in a raid array on my fileserver. Haven't had any problems after following Mark's advice about using ext4 and a new linux kernel. No problems at all with the drives.

Jim

Same here. I've bought one of those WD green drives, the type with 300 Mb/s sata interface because that one came with the necessary interface card and the 600 Mb/s did not.

Works flawlessly so far. Cool, quiet and plenty fast for my purposes (I use it as the data drive in my desktop pc - I've got an SSD for the OS drive).