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A few years ago when I last bought hard drives 4 TB were just coming onto the market and had questionable reliability.  How reliable are they now?  Are they 4 TB on one side or double sided 2 TB drives??  Does this even make any difference? Thanks for any advice.

As reliable as any drive as long as they have adequate cooling. But I question the purchase of 4TB drives these days when 6TB drives are readily available and just as good.

As for how they achieve 4TB, it isn't something you really even need to know. In some cases they may add platters or they may have learned to increase the data density or a combination of both.

Thanks E.J.

There are no particular issues with 4TB drives that I'm aware of, or have experienced with my numbers of WD Green, Black and Red 4TB drives. The worst drives of the past few years, as a class, have been 1.5TB and 3TB models, and I have stayed away from them. Several Seagate drive models had somewhat poorer reliability, so I've been avoiding Seagate for a few years. But recently their reliability seems to have improved. HGST drives (now owned by WD) are generally recognized as the most reliable, if you care about this enough to seek them out.

Search the forum for "backblaze" for past discussions with links to drive reliability reports published every so often by Backblaze. They assess reliability of drive manufacturers and models based on their use of hundreds or thousands of copies of different drives.

Part of drive reliability is appropriate use of the drives. Cooling is essential, as E.J. mentions. Also, not doing something like putting Green drives optimized for constant power management into a RAID box that requires them to have a completely different mode of operation than they were designed for.

Thanks to you too Royce

I've had 5 4TB drives in my Drobo for over a year and they've worked flawlessly (knock on wood!).