<story><title>Western Digital&apos;s 16TB and 18TB drives: EAMR HDDs enter the retail channel</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/15903/western-digitals-16tb-and-18tb-gold-drives-eamr-hdds-enter-the-retail-channel</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jacquesm</author><text>My personal recipe for buying drives: wait until Backblaze has run them for a year and then pick the winner. That gives a pretty safe strategy. I also buy them in small lots to avoid having the same firmware and number of hours on them, and order 3 (cold) spares so I don&amp;#x27;t have to wait for an order to come in in case a drive dies. Call me paranoid.</text></comment>
<story><title>Western Digital&apos;s 16TB and 18TB drives: EAMR HDDs enter the retail channel</title><url>https://www.anandtech.com/show/15903/western-digitals-16tb-and-18tb-gold-drives-eamr-hdds-enter-the-retail-channel</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sillysaurusx</author><text>In my experience, buying the “latest and greatest” hard drive is a recipe for disaster. They should put a sticker on the box that says “warning: will likely die within one year.”&lt;p&gt;Maybe I’ve just gotten unlucky over the years though. Can anyone else confirm&amp;#x2F;deny that the latest hard drives tend to be unreliable?&lt;p&gt;(Cue sampling bias...)&lt;p&gt;EDIT: The article is about an enterprise HD, but I meant to ask a general question about consumer-grade drives. Presumably enterprise drives are much more reliable, because reasons. (It would be fascinating to know those reasons though!)</text></comment>