External hard drive brands

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Bill16

Senior Member
Browncoat

Browncoat

Senior Member
His inquiry is about external storage, and SSD offers no distinct advantage over HDD in this regard. SSD is a performance-based product, and while development continues to narrow the gap between price and overall storage capacity...you'd basically be paying more money for less storage by going with SSD.

As for RAID...well, that's a whole other animal that probably far supersedes the needs of most members of this forum.
 
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Dave_W

The Dude
I like both Seagate and WD, however the WD are so much louder than the Seagates. I wouldn't mind so much a loud external but I put a WD Black drive (5 yr warranty) in my tower as a second internal and by God is it loud.

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aroy

Senior Member
I use both Seagate and WD in my Desktop and as external backup drives. Both the brands are equally good, but have some lemons too. Normally in India we get 5 years warranty on Seagate drives, on WD it varies between 3 and 5.

. For long term backup I would not use any thing more than 1TB. Even that size, with USB3 takes more than 8 hours to fill up.
. I always use the slowest RPM drives available for back up as they fail much less than high speed drives.
. For really critical data I use two dtives
. Please note that for data integrity, HDD has to be read at least once a year. The safest method is to copy the data to another drive. That reads the whole drive and at the same time creates a fresh copy.
 
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mikew_RIP

Senior Member
aroy said:
I use both Seagate and WD in my Desktop and as external backup drives. Both the brands are equally good, but have some lemons too. Normally in India we get 5 years warranty on Seagate drives, on WD it varies between 3 and 5.

. For long term backup I would not use any thing more than 1TB. Even that size, with USB3 takes more than 8 hours to fill up.
. I always use the slowest RPM drives available for back up as they fail much less than high speed drives.
. For really critical data I use two dtives
. Please note that for data integrity, HDD has to be read at least once a year. The safest method is to copy the data to another drive. That reads the whole drive and at the same time creates a fresh copy.
Click to expand...

Good idea
 
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weebee

Senior Member
I have a 5 year old Iomega that's still hanging in there. I just bought a 1TB WD ultra and spent a couple hours yesterday putting about 72 gigs of photos in it. So far a like it.Easy to set up.
 
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Bill16

Senior Member
Maybe in the future sometime, I'll be able to get another hard drive to go with this one. But for the next while there will be very little spending for me. My wife might need some special medical supplies and such. :)

Thank you for the cool idea! :)

aroy said:
I use both Seagate and WD in my Desktop and as external backup drives. Both the brands are equally good, but have some lemons too. Normally in India we get 5 years warranty on Seagate drives, on WD it varies between 3 and 5.

. For long term backup I would not use any thing more than 1TB. Even that size, with USB3 takes more than 8 hours to fill up.
. I always use the slowest RPM drives available for back up as they fail much less than high speed drives.
. For really critical data I use two dtives
. Please note that for data integrity, HDD has to be read at least once a year. The safest method is to copy the data to another drive. That reads the whole drive and at the same time creates a fresh copy.
Click to expand...
 
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RichardFlack

New member
Perhaps you've already done this, but I'd look at the various PC mags review fora, cnet etc for current opinions. I have had no problems with WD, of which I have several from 1TB to 4TB. (One small issue, the latter is slow to come out of hibernation, but it's not an issue the way I use it). I have had Seagate too, but not recently. I do recall seeing a comment or two a while back about some quality issues but no idea if those were isolated cases.

Redundancy is a very good idea for critical data. Indeed one copy should be offline in a separate location (house fire etc).
 
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aroy

Senior Member
If you have older HDD lying, then you can buy a USB "case" with interface and use it for storing data. I assemble my desktops, so over the years I have collected a lot of HDD. As I regularly upgrade I have all sorts of capacities from 8GB to 750GB lying free. Recently I just connected them one by one to my desktop and archived all my data on two sets of drives. That is apart from the current backup I keep on recently acquired WD USB3 drive I bought for $100.
 
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RocketCowboy

Senior Member
aroy said:
If you have older HDD lying, then you can buy a USB "case" with interface and use it for storing data. I assemble my desktops, so over the years I have collected a lot of HDD. As I regularly upgrade I have all sorts of capacities from 8GB to 750GB lying free. Recently I just connected them one by one to my desktop and archived all my data on two sets of drives. That is apart from the current backup I keep on recently acquired WD USB3 drive I bought for $100.
Click to expand...

That's what I do too, though usually the old drives come from when systems get upgraded to SSDs.


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zutty

Senior Member
I have 8 ext. hard drives..Total of 26 TB...I have 4 LaCies, 2 WD's, 2 Fantom, They all are 7200 rpm, some FW800, some usb 3.0 some 2.0 and my iMac's internal drive is a 512 gb ssd. That said, all drives have a finite life. A matter of time before they eventually fail. I have redundant back ups so if one drive fails, I have back ups. As far as which brand? They are all as good as the drive and chipset inside the enclosure.
 
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rocketman122

Senior Member
Nothing like hitachi. shame they sold out their consumer market.

WD is ok/meh. but I have 2 failed HDD right on my desk. Seagate is the juice of the garbage when you throw out the garbage. reliability is just garbage.

Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

there is no quality mfr anymore. I use a 3.5 HDD as a 3rd backup external HDD. too slow those 2.5" drives.

thank god maxtor and fujitsu left years ago. now its between meh and crap.

if a HDD starts giving me issues, I kill it purposely and get a replacement. it must be dead otherwise the store will argue and say its fine. when you have transfer issues thats the beginning of the end.

everyone should use spinrite once every 6 months on their HDD.
 
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aroy

Senior Member
rocketman122 said:
Nothing like hitachi. shame they sold out their consumer market.

WD is ok/meh. but I have 2 failed HDD right on my desk. Seagate is the juice of the garbage when you throw out the garbage. reliability is just garbage.

Backblaze Blog » What Hard Drive Should I Buy?

there is no quality mfr anymore. I use a 3.5 HDD as a 3rd backup external HDD. too slow those 2.5" drives.

thank god maxtor and fujitsu left years ago. now its between meh and crap.

if a HDD starts giving me issues, I kill it purposely and get a replacement. it must be dead otherwise the store will argue and say its fine. when you have transfer issues thats the beginning of the end.

everyone should use spinrite once every 6 months on their HDD.
Click to expand...

1. Try using USB3 external 2.5 inch drives. If you have USB3 on your computer (my desktop MB does not, but I installed a USB3 card), the HDD to external drive is as fast and at times faster than SATA to SATA in the Desktop.

2. Spinrite was fine when the HDD sizes were small. With 500GB HDD it will take at least 20 hours to perform a thorough diagnostic scan (read/write cycle). What is faster is to just copy the HDD to another formatted one, and then format and copy it back.
 
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rocketman122

Senior Member
aroy said:
1. Try using USB3 external 2.5 inch drives. If you have USB3 on your computer (my desktop MB does not, but I installed a USB3 card), the HDD to external drive is as fast and at times faster than SATA to SATA in the Desktop.

2. Spinrite was fine when the HDD sizes were small. With 500GB HDD it will take at least 20 hours to perform a thorough diagnostic scan (read/write cycle). What is faster is to just copy the HDD to another formatted one, and then format and copy it back.
Click to expand...

a format is not the same thing as using spinrite. I use another computer and let it run. whats one day without one HDD.

not using 2.5 drives. no way.
 
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