External Hard Drives

I like Newegg, but then they have a shipping center 20 minutes from here. ... I'd go for the biggest drive that fits your budget, and watch for sales this month. Check out slickdeals.net, techbargains.com, bensbargains.net, for starters. If you don't need the portability, a full-size external would probably be a bit cheaper. Or get two smaller-capacity ones and double your backup fun.

Had good luck in recent years with WD and/or Seagate, although I notice a lot of so-so Seagate reviews on Newegg lately. I have two 1TB WD Elements externals and a 500GB Seagate Free Agent Pro that have been fine for over a year. I have a 320GB Seagate that's the boot drive in my about-to-be-retired main PC. Next PC will have a 640GB WD Caviar Black system drive. So ... I can't say any of them have been exactly abysmal. (I have 4 TB of live HDs running at the moment and am waiting for a sale on the new Samsung F4 2TB ... Video will eat up your hard drive.)

Only drive that's actually failed on me in over 25 years of owning/building PCs was an extravagantly expensive UltraSCSI one maybe 15 years ago. Of course, I tend to upgrade rather quickly, so I'm probably just lucky.

And Suicide: Did you try the drive-in-the-freezer trick?

http://lifehacker.com/5515337/save-a-failed-hard-drive-in-your-freezer-redux

 

They gave me one for work about five years ago and I forgot (legitimately) to return it when I was bought out/shitcanned/laid off. I found it a year later and it works nicely for storing movies that I don't have room for on my hard drive. Although, I just got a new laptop that has a 500G hard drive, so I don't need the space as much as I used to.

 

I too have had problems with Western Digital Hard drives.

 

I've had a SimpleTech 320GB external drive for about 3 years. I rarely use it - I back-up every few months. Knock on wood, I've had no problems with it, but I'm thinking I should do a DVD backup as well, just to be safe.

 

So do most people leave the external HD attached to the computer all the time?


Or do you do your backup, then put it away until the next time you need to backup stuff?

 

I've seen three external hard drives fry on friends right in front of me. The cheap ones have poor power supplies. What I did was buy an enclosure and installed the hard drive myself.

 

I only plug mine in when I'm backing up. Otherwise, it sits on my desk.

 

I have a 1tb Seagate. Works fine. It's set for an auto backup on all my files. Just easier that way.
Also good for storage of my home recordings.
I don't use my laptop enough, at least for anything important, to warrant a portable backup drive.

 

For storage of movie +/or TV torrents. You'd be surprised how quickly you go through 500GB.

The only EHD I buy are Seagate or LaCie. I've had no problems with either of these brands.

 

Yeah, I tried that with no luck. It went down around this time last year. I'd take it to Best Buy or something to get the files off and saved to a new external, but it has easily about 80 gigs of music I've "acquired" over time. I need to find someone I can trust, or somehow fix it myself.

Other than the Western failing on me, I liked it. It was probably my fault. I had taken the laptop and the harddrive into the living room one day to edit photos while watching Sunday NFL games and tripped over the cord, then knocked it to the floor. Story of my life.

 

So it sounds like, for the most part, that if the external HD were to fail, you would still be able to get the files off it and onto a new drive.