Speaking of external drives - which one's are best?
 

Speaking of external drives, which one's are best?

Need to get one soon, running out of room and need to move some stuff (mostly pics) to an external. 500gb - 1tb should be plenty of room.

I have been told in the past to avoid seagate, what about lacie? Or, please suggest another brand :thumbsup

Thanks in advance for suggestions.

I use western digital

I've had a bunch and never had a problem with any other than a Maxtor. But that was a password and OS issue that was quickly resolved. As far as performance and integrity, I'd say it's a pretty level playing field. As far as transfer speed or disk RPM...I can't help you. Just for regular backups, you really can't go wrong with any. I wouldn't go with some generic Walmart brand shit though. Definitely go with a brand name.

*Watch all my externals crash now. <knocking on wood>

Yeah I was thinking of getting either WD or Lacie. Haven't decided yet.... Thought I would check with people here who use them often and if they have had any trouble etc.

:1orglaugh

Reliability is all i'm worried about really, and yeah will try to avoid walmart/costco/etc. type brands.
I had problems with maxtor before actually, but that was ages ago in an old P4 machine.

:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

Seagate ... more than 20 and so far so good.

You may not need this level of technology but I just purchased two G-Technology 6TB G-RAID External Dual Hard Drive Arrays to edit & store HD video files. Expensive but they perform well.

i like lacie or western digital

WD is the only brand I trust these days. They never do me wrong.

If you get a "mybook" or such be VERY careful of their backup sync programs. You could end up deleting things because they don't exist in one location or the other. ask me how I know. :/

I would NOT get a Lacie. I purchased one because I liked the look as it had the blue LED light in front and would match my entertainment system nicely. The damn drive died the first night I was using it. I will never buy anything from Lacie again.

I have since purchased roughly 4-5 2TB Western Digital "My Book" drives and have been using them for an extended period with zero issues to speak of.

Just picked up a wd 2 tb drive from future shop for $129

That's interesting, I'm still not 100% on them though.

Will see what I can find for WD or Lacie.

OOPS! worth noting.

Was just looking on the site, will see if I can find it :thumbsup

Lacie doesn't manufacture the drives inside the enclosure so it's anyone's guess what brand will actually be in there (and it's not always one of the biggies). Stick to a better known manufacturer...

I would get an external enclosure, and a separate internal drive or 2... not only will it probably be cheaper, you will be able to switch drives easilly later on...

When it comes to Western Digital, I'm not crazy about the MyBooks. I always had trouble getting my(or any) computer to recognize them on a consistent basis. I'm done with those things -- they're junk.

But the little Passport drives are awesome. Instant recognition and they have a USB 3 version. Mine gets at least 100 MB per second(I have USB 3 motherboard).

Highly recommend the passport. They go all the way up to 1.5TB, I think, and they have almost zero footprint.

I can't say a bad word about Samsung drives I use. They're mostly for backup purposes, so they're not used too extensively, but I have yet to see any of them fail.

Noted :thumbsup

I think I remember reading that thread, but at the time it was right at the bottom of my "to-do" list kinda thing. But now it's getting more and more important so want to get it sorted.

Thanks for posting the link :thumbsup

I've tried tons of different drives over the years.

No problems with Lacie being reliable, but hated that they (I had 6 / 500GB) didn't have on and off switch.

I replaced them with Fathom brand 2TB drives on sale at Buy.com for $99.95 a couple of months back. The drives are Hatachi inside, but cases are cool looking and have on of switch. Mine have USB 2 and eSATA.

Another option, and bit cheaper, is to buy a decent external case as some guys mentioned, then add the drives you prefer or use extra drives you have around. My favorite external case is made by CoolMax and available on NewEgg (http://newegg.com/ )

I have 2 LaCie drives ( 1 TB each ) : works fine, no excessive heat . Actual drives are Samsung 7200 RPM.
Also have 2 iomega ones ( 350 gb ( old ) and a 2 TB ( recent): works fine.

Do you think the hd is reading and writing at those speeds?

My luck must suck.

My daughter's Dell laptop was crapping out (surprise!), so I decided to reformat it and start from scratch.

Backed everything up on the Seagate (and this is two years of past college work, plus all of this year's current projects), checked the backups, and reformatted the Dell.

After re-installing the software, found out the Seagate just decided to die. It was 30 days old.

It's not a backup if you only have one copy. :( Did you manage to retrieve the data?

I'm paranoid, every file on my NAS ends up on at least 3 different backup sets, sometimes 4 for the really important stuff.

I use 6 Western Digital Passport Drives (500 GB and 1 TB) and never had any problem with them :thumbsup

That's dumb.

http://www.qnap.com/Products.asp

The drives themselves vary greatly from month to month. One time, Seagate will put out a
batch of crappy of drives, the next month Western Digital will have a bad run, then Hitachi
will have a bad run while Seagate has great ones. So brand doesn't tell you hardly
anything about quality. For standard external drives, it really comes down to cooling.
Get one with a well ventilated case. With a fan is best if you don't mind the noise.
Tigerdirect and other sites sell enclosures separate from drives if you want to have
more choices. Some of the Western Digital drives have other neat features, such as
being accessible over the network. The Western Digital My Book World Edition, for example,
hides a full Linux file server in it's case, which looks like any other external drive. You can
access your files from any computer on the network, either through Windows Explorer as
drive, through the browser, or even FTP. Those are the default features. With a little knowledge,
you could actually run your site from the Word Edition, using it as your web serve.
(After all, it's admin GUI is a set of web pages running CGI scripts ...)

Had you asked this question 5-6 years ago, I would have said Western Digital without blinking ... but a lot has changed in the past 5 years in HDD technology, and with Seagate/Maxtor merging, I personally think seagate makes a better drive than WD does now .... they seem to far outlast the rest -- however that is for INTERNAL bare drives...

As far as an external drive goes, I have lots of experience with many different drives, and the only ones that are still around that stood the test of time, are my HITACHI X Series drives ...

I would gladly recommend this drive to anybody .... I have 3 of them that are awesome, and I have bought at least 20 of them for clients, and never heard any negative feeback! :thumbsup

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-323-_-Product

If you use multiple externals you might want to get a BlacX. Then you can just buy "naked" drives from newegg or wherever and not have to pay for the enclosure each time. Just pop the drive into the BlacX and you're up and running.

And if you want to be smart about protecting your data think about TrueCrypt.

WD sucks ... I am with it...

http://www.plaisio.gr/ProductImages/600x600/1183850.jpg

Transcend Storejet Anti-Shock Rubber Housing Black 320GB External HDD

Thanks for all the suggestions :thumbsup

Newegg definately has the best deals. Been reading all the reviews and stuff aswell to make sure. Got a shortlist of about 4-6 different makes/models.

My personal experience (with internal HDs), both on the several backend servers I run from my home office, and also the frontend web servers at professional hosts.

- Seagate are at the bottom of the list. Way too many failures. I no longer buy them for myself and generally ask for anything BUT them when ordering a server. (Have had approx 20 Seagate drives in the past 5 years)

- WD has a moderate number of failures. Not a large percentage. (Have had approx 40 WD drives)

- Have had a failure with one Hitachi but the sample is too small to make a valid conclusion (only have 3 of those drives)

http://in.vu/images/morrowhdla.jpg

Always found these quite reliable, would recommend them to anyone!

:1orglaugh

I remember seeing that before! funny as hell :P

I have 4 500 gig WD's that are more than 1 year old. I need to grab a few 1 or 2 T drives and replace these.

That's what it says when I'm transferring files.

This is what I use: http://g-technology.com/products/g-drive.cfm

And I use an esata cable to hook it up. None of that usb shit. It moves FAST. I use them to back up CM's raw footage and edited footage and raw pics and processed pics. Each scene is around 20 gigs just of raw footage...so the esata cable hookup is awesome for moving big amounts of data very quickly.

Go with Seagate

I picked this 2TB WD up on sale for $80, free shipping, a couple months ago (ordered at 4pm EST and got it the next morning, even):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136471

..love it and no problems so far. Couldn't beat the price at the time, was $129.. down to $100 now.

I agree with the post that each company seems to have streaks of bad releases. Just read through the reviews a little on Newegg and you can make pretty good judgment on which model to go with.

I love these Verbatim Drives. I have many of them...

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search...tialSearch=yes

7 year manufacturer warranty

I posted earlier in the thread about those G-Technology drives too, Robbie. Very good so far for me. I actually purchased two of the 6Tb arrays to edit and archive HD video and photos.