The best hard drives??

I don't have much to offer; my experience with enterprise class HDDs is mostly SAS (unless you go way back over 10 years). I didn't even know that such a thing as "enterprise class SATA" exists. One caution: I can't point to any manufacturer as "always good" or "always bad". The reality is that drive design is an incredibly hairy job, and small issues can appear in a given model to mess up the reliability of a particular design. Sometimes those design issues don't appear until some time after release. In other words, the fact that brand X has really good 4 TB drives doesn't necessarily tell you much about their 8 TB drives. Conversely, if brand Y had a bad implementation of 3 TB drives, that probably doesn't carry over to later models (not even later models in the same size, let alone in different sizes). If you run your drives in a well cooled enclosure, that will help. I've seen some drives that became problematic when run at the high end of their temperature specs, as might happen in high powered servers or in storage arrays with lots of drives in a small enclosure. Some failure modes are related to temperature, and if your drives are well below the spec limit that will help. Conversely, do pay attention to HDD temperature specs. Those numbers should be taken seriously. A lot of electronics can be run moderately over temperature without serious consequences, but the mechanics of hard drives are often far less forgiving. paul