External Hardrive

[Sinh Nhut Nguyen]

Hi, I'm looking for a 1 terabyte external hard drive (to act as the3rd copy)to back up my Maxtor and Western Digital hard drives. I would like your recommendation on brands, thank you.


Nate,

[hotsecretary]

If you're purely using it for external storage .. I'd recommend the WD Green series, they're pretty reliable in my experiences with them.


And they're pretty darn cheap!

[Sinh Nhut Nguyen]

My two external hard drives are for photo storage only, they're each other's clone and I only turn them on when I need to use them. Now I want a larger drive to back up those 2.

[jimr]

I have faced this same question...


Google studied the typical hard drive you might buy (100,000+ sample size). Their data basically concludes <span><span class="normal"]there ARE NO significant reliability differences between manufactures. <span><span class="normal"]Two most "dangerous" moments are: brand new drive, and 3 yo. drive.


If you buy a drive and it works for the first 6 months it will most likely work for the next 3 years.


All based on statistics so you still could be that odd one that has a drive die every year.





I know my bad luck so I try to take extra steps to avoid it. So I went with Network Attached Storage (NAS) build on RAID 5. Basically multiple drives that cover off the data so if one drive dies the other pick up and NO data is lost. Very unlikely two drives will fail at the exact same time.


I worked it down to two drives:


The Data Robotics Drobo ("http://www.drobo.com/)Hard Drive Enclosure. You can buy any SATA hard drive you want in any size combination. They have won lots of awards and it is an impressive and very simple storage device.


The 5 TB <span>Lacie ("http://www.lacie.com/us/products/product.htm?pid=11278) is simple too. At Raid 5 (it is 80% capacity) so you get 4 TB of
usable storage.


There are lots of other choices out there in NAS. I like the Drobo mainly because you can mix and match your drives and it requires virtually no effort on my behalf to maintain it. The big plus with Drobo is you can buy that 2TB drive in a years time when the price is down to $100 and pull out an old 500 MB drive and put it in WHILE it is running and lose no data.

[Keith B]

I'm curious on this too. I use to only use Seagate and swore by them. Lately have read some horror stories about them and mine acted up the other night. It wouldn't mount then I went into severe panic mode. I unplugged the power supply and plugged it back in and it seams to work fine. But I am now in the market for a new 1TB FW800 drive. I was eying the Seagate until this episode now I'm looking at OWC's.

[Maleko]

I have 2 Seagate FreeAgent external hard drives.


1 500GB and 1 1TB, both are superb and very fast. Highly recommended!

[hotsecretary]

Unfortunately... I personally feel the Seagate consumer drives aren't as good as they used to be.


I feel they've focused more on the Server/SAS market... that's why I recommend the WD these days as I have no problems with them. But then again I'm running 2 Seagates in my NAS :)


As for a NAS... I personally love my QNap! But that Drobo looks like a nice little unit if you don't need all the bells and whistles, if you do take a look at QNap NAS'

[EdN]

Unfortunately... I personally feel the Seagate consumer drives aren't as good as they used to be.


I feel they've focused more on the Server/SAS market... that's why I recommend the WD these days as I have no problems with them. But then again I'm running 2 Seagates in my NAS :)






I've been a dedicated user of Maxtor hard drives for many, many years. Maxtor has been bought out by Seagate and I've used them and have had ZERO problems in almost 20 years.


Like you, I'm also concerned with Maxtor hard drives as a couple of generations ago, they've had high failure rates. Seagate use to be a durable brand and I'm now hearing problems with them too.


So last week, I was shopping for 1 TB hard drives to back up photos and the best deal I got was Western Digital's 1 TB USB/eSata/FW400 drive. I bought one of them and 2 -500 gig USB portable drives to copy critical images for storage in a safety deposit box. I was a bit disappointed in the back-up speed with USB and FW. It took over 24 hours to back up 300 gig and a friend told me that perhaps the drive is formated with such a small block size to squeeze 1TB onboard that speed is badly compromised. It seemed my old 320 gig Maxtor External USB/FW drive was WAY faster.


Anyways, I'm breathing easier now that everything is backed up again but still haven't done the safety deposit thing yet.

[hotsecretary]

If you have the option... eSATA is very very fast, USB 1.0 is dreadfully slow!!! Turtle slow!

USB 2.0 isn't too bad, but still slow.. eSATA is the best you'll do these days really.

[Alan]

Unfortunately... I personally feel the Seagate consumer drives aren't as good as they used to be.
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I had an internal Seagate (less than a year old) that failed. It contained a year's worth of my photos. The computer warned me that its failure was imminent, so I barely got the stuff off. Then, it failed. I was almost prepared to send the drive to a recovery lab, but my fortunes were with me before that expensive move.


I use WD Green drives. Never had an issue with them yet.

[hotsecretary]

Knock on wood!


I've thankfully never ever had a PC drive die on me at home, but working in IT I've seen all kinds die :) I typically replace my PC all the time and now that I have the NAS I have the luxury of having some nice Velociraptor drives as my primary OS / gaming drives in Raid0.

But I will say the Seagate SAS drives seem to be pretty reliable with the hundreds we use in our servers, I've personally replaced 4 in the past few years.


But for home PC I'm with you, I will stick with WD until they fail me... I have a Green one that's been in my Media PC which I never ever shut off and it's used on a daily basis to watch TV/movies and it's running like a charm and uses less power!

[Maleko]

its all about luck of the draw.


A hard drive (excluding SSD) is a mechanical component, has moving parts and is very delicate. You could have a drive that was knocked in transit etc, then your going to get a duff one.
In my time using Maxtor hard drives (before Seagate took them over) I had nothing but problems with them, even at work we kept gettign duff ones, but that was a while ago when Maxtor were on their own, now they technicaly don't exist as they are owned by Seagate down. Again thats my own expereince with them.


I have had X2 80GB Western Digital internal hard drives in RAID running my Operating system for YEARS and have been perfect. All my other internal drives are western digital and have been brilliant. All my external drives are Seagate - dont ask why just what I do :P.


IMO Seagate and Western Digital are the 2 leaders in top make hard drives, again down to personal opionion what you have had luck with and not.

Both of them make brilliant external&amp; internaldrives, so take your pick as to which one you fancy.

[Fink_Studios]

I would personally say spend the extra money and go for a lacie rugged or raid drive they might cost a bit more but they are work horse drive. That's the only brand I trust my first harddrive from over 6 years ago is still running strong with 600gb of stuff on it

Good luck with you purchase