Best kind of hard drive for heavy use?

[Thomas Mueller]

I had a hard-drive crash last night, GPT corrupted, don't know whether it's a software fault (NetBSD-current 7.99.15 i386) or hardware.

Main question is what kind of hard drive is used for heavy compiling in FreeBSD, base system and ports, what might be used to create packages and base-system downloadable images.

Using a USB-stick installation of FreeBSD including Rod Smith's gdisk, I could possibly restore the partition table, assuming hard drive is not going bad.  It's a Western Digital Green 3 TB dating to May 2013.  Experience with Western Digital makes me very afraid of "green" hard drives.

I seem to be able to access the partitions, from the USB-stick installation of FreeBSD but not from NetBSD or Linux System Rescue CD, or at least the partition mounted as /home, read-only, would want to rsync that user data to an external USB stick or other drive, before doing anything that could mess the hard disk further and destroy my user data.  I have rsync on that USB-stick installation of FreeBSD.  I need to fear that any kind of write to that hard drive, even to restore the partition table, could push my data further to destruction if it's a hardware fault.

After updating my backup with rsync, I could try to restore the GPT from backup at end of disk; I also found a backup copy of GPT data on the USB stick.

Tom