External Hard drive question

Hi Guys

Im in the market for picking up a new external hard drive but was wondering what are the better ones to get and which ones I should stay away from. A store around me here has a 1tb Seagate on sale but was reading some reviews on it and people were syaing that it dies on them after a few months and others were saying that it developed a clicking noise over time. If anybody could lend me some help over this that would be great

Jeremy

I bought a 2TB Samsung on ebay for A$147, 6 months now and works just fine.

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Portable or permanent?

Size?

I've always had WD passports. I use plural because my first was the only thing stolen when my uni house was burgled four years ago.

I got a second, and its been fine and dandy ever since.

Very small and fast transfer times, basically, a megatron usb datastick on steroids, fits in a palm. They go up to 750gb on usb2/3 compatability.

Let me guess, you're after a desktop one? :P


Jenson drives it like he owns it; Lewis drives it like he stole it

Kind of want a portable one but a permanent one would be fine, dont plan on really taking it anywhere so having to use a power cable would be no problems, also in the 500GB to 1TB range, how did you know I was after a desktop one? form the other thread?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/29/2011 12:45AM by RenaultFan.

Personally, I'd get one of these (750GB), these (640GB) or these (500GB) and stick it in this in it. As with all USB-powered hard drives, there won't be any issues providing the USB port you're using isn't too far from the motherboard (some front ports could be an issue, as there's a long cable from the motherboard to the USB ports, and power is lost over the length of the cable, but laptop USB ports work fine, as do powered USB hubs). They provide a second cable too, which plugs into the first cable, so you can power the drive from two USB ports (which should work with front USB ports).

If you plan on buying another 2.5" hard drive, then make sure it's 9.5mm high, as some of the larger capacity laptop drives are 12.5mm high and won't fit in most enclosures.

As for Western Digital's own Passport drives, I agree with Danm - they're excellent. My old 20gb drive from about 8 years ago is still kicking about somewhere, and I've got another at work, though they seldom get used now (I've got two of the above Icy Boxes with another couple of Western Digital 500GB drives in them).

Had 2 Western D failures a couple of years back. When I sent the drive back to them after it failed after 1 week (srsly?), I was incredibly pissed off about the lost data. They said the drive wasn't damaged and they'd easily be able to recover the data and put it on the replacement drive to send to me. Fantastic solution to an unfortunate problem. The drive arrived and they just hadn't bothered anyway, and then to cover there asses they said they shouldn't have offered that service in the first place. A year later, the replacement drive died too.

So f**k you Western D. You've given me more hardware failures than Q-Tec.

I recommend Samsung. Solid as a rock. I have a 40mb (yes, MEGABYTE) Samsung drive that still works. I love that it's too small to hold an album in MP3 format. I often wondered that if I tried it on Windows 7 that it wouldn't be able to use it.

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I've got an Iomega HDD 500gb. It's been mostly good. A few connection problems, but nothing serious. Considering I got it in a sale for £39.99, I'm very pleased with it

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Quote
Dave Ellis
Had 2 Western D failures a couple of years back. When I sent the drive back to them after it failed after 1 week (srsly?), I was incredibly pissed off about the lost data. They said the drive wasn't damaged and they'd easily be able to recover the data and put it on the replacement drive to send to me. Fantastic solution to an unfortunate problem. The drive arrived and they just hadn't bothered anyway, and then to cover there asses they said they shouldn't have offered that service in the first place. A year later, the replacement drive died too.

So f**k you Western D. You've given me more hardware failures than Q-Tec.

I recommend Samsung. Solid as a rock. I have a 40mb (yes, MEGABYTE) Samsung drive that still works. I love that it's too small to hold an album in MP3 format. I often wondered that if I tried it on Windows 7 that it wouldn't be able to use it.

Every time I post about hard drives, Dave replies with a Western Digital counter, and visa versa. This post will be no different.

Doing a count of how many Western Digital drives I've got,

- Home PC: 2x150GB WD Raptors in RAID 0, 1x1TB data drive, 1x1.5TB media drive.
- HTPC: 1x 250GB
- Work PC: 2x76GB WD Raptors in RAID 0 (my old drives from 2006 or so, and 2nd hand when I bought them), 1x750GB data drive, 1x500GB second data drive.
- Laptop: 1x500GB
- 2nd Work server (which is just a normal workstation on 24x7, doing WSUS and WDS duties): 2x36GB Raptors in RAID0 (again very old drives from my own home PC - from 2004 and been working 24x7 for the past year and a half!), 1x250GB data drive
- Loose drives at home: 1x1TB motorsport drive, 1x2TB backup drive, 1x36GB Raptor for test OS installs, 1x500GB drive with a VMWare image of the main server at work (which I use to test things at home)
- Loose drives at work (from memory): 1x80GB drive containing a live VMWare install for image deployment (XP), 1x80GB drive containing another image (Win7), 1x500GB drive for doing incremental server backups, 1x500GB drive for doing media editing both at home & work, 1x36GB Raptor which hasn't been used for ages, 1x80GB drive which has just been taken from a dead PC
- Portable drives: 1x500GB 2.5" drives in USB enclosures
- I've just bought another 2TB drive too (again for backups), but I'm yet to work out how to rearrange my data.

So I, somewhat worryingly, make that 40 Western Digital drives across home and work that I've bought (though the 80GB drives shouldn't be counted, as they will have been taken from dead PCs) which I can currently account for. Or 10.5TB to put it another way. I don't tend to throw things away or sell them - they always have a use.

In the time I've started using Western Digital drives (around 2002, my first PC), I've seen 3 failures. One was dead on arrival (so didn't affect me as there was zero data on it), one was from a Dell Tower someone brought in for me to fix, and the other was from an EMachine at another school with such a cheap PSU which had blown so obviously that the only part I could tell was left working was the DVD drive (which of course ended up on my shelf ).

Compare that to my experience of Seagate drives. Bought 2. Dead 2 (both within 6 months). One still works in a USB enclosure, but only for an hour or so at a time before it disappears again.

Samsung are generally excellent too, but the poor reliability record of the F1 drives (particularly the 1TB drives) after around 12 months left a bitter taste in the mouths of many. The F3 drives appear to have outlasted the F1s (in that I've not seen any above normal issues 1 1/2 years again their release), so hopefully they've got on top of their recent reliability issues.

Hard drives are very much a 2 horse race at the moment with Samsung and Western Digital. Seagate in the consumer space have been dire since they took over Maxtor, Hitachi have always had severe reliability issues, from the IBM Deathstar to the stack of dead 2.5" drives I've collected on my shelf from various laptops in recent years. Toshiba I've no real experience with, just a few laptops here and there - I think they're OEM only - I can't recall seeing any for sale over the years. I just hope Western Digital's purchase of Hitachi's hard drive division doesn't go the way Seagate's purchase of Maxtor went.