Hey everyone, So I am looking to buy an external hdd because I am sick to death of swapping out internal drives everytime I want to do something and since I switched the layout of my room around I don't have enough room for 4/5 towers anymore. I am looking for something around 1tb for the moment; I can live with any brand and design as long as it is easy to use and reliable. Any suggestions?
I just bought the Samsung G3 2TB external, it was just 89 euro. You should go for 2TB! the price to GB ratio is just crap for 1TB vs 2TB, and it doesn't hurt to be prepared for the future. Here the price difference is 20 bucks (1TB 69, 1.5 79, 2 89) so it's a shame really to buy anything smaller for that price difference.
I would happily go for a 2tb drive, I meant 1tb as a minimum but reading it back I didn't explain that very well. I was contemplating this one - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/204506 The price looks very good but the speed seems to be an issue. I suppose in this instance, as with many others, you get what you pay for. Any one had any experience with Western Digital external hdd's?
Honestly I really don't think certain brands are better or worse these days, they all have their good and bad batches, and reliable data on failure rates is impossible to come by. Lots of people will have had a bad run with a particular brand at one point or another but it's not anything to base your decision on. Go with whatever capacity/spec/price balance feels appropriate.
I paid £80 I think for A WD 1tb Elements drive. I formatted it in FAT 32 and use it on my PS3 Slim NP. You can get a 2Tb for the same price now though.
This, just take any known brand and just look at the price. Failures will always happen no matter what, these kind of BIG hdds are for whatever big media files that you can live without anyway. If you want some kind of security for your data then pull out your wallet and go for NAS setups in at least RAID 1 mirroring.
What I would recommend and I do this for my personal stuff and my Dad's data as well, is buy a external enclosure that can take two drives, then get 2x 1TB, 2Tb whatever and Raid them so that they're mirrored drives, meaning you only see 1TB of data but its being written on two drives. The likely hood that both drives failing at the same time is extremely low. Its the best way to guarantee you won't lose your data. -Disjaukifa
Last I checked those enclosures tended to end up costing almost as much as one of the disks. Has that changed?
If you got a crap enclosure or a good drive th price will be similar yes. You just have to decide if mirroring is worth paying for.
Anything over 320gig imho are too fragile and if there going to be moved around alot they need to be handled with great care. Ive had all of my 1TB drives fail in under a year
Then Tomcat you are the exception rather than the rule - unless you were using a shitty make like maxtor or seagate eugh I loathe them. ither that or you are riding them hard? You would expect a HDD to last 3-5 years under normal use. Are you defragmenting them every waking moment? BTW the size doesn't make them fragile. They will always be realtively fragile. It is manufacturing differences between performance, non performance and brands plus they don't make them like they used to. One thing I forgot to add though I definitly wouldn't reccoment a 2.5" external drive. Get yourself a meaty and many 3.5". It is less portable but gnerally less problems and easier to replace should the inevitable happen. I'd personally reccomend Western Digital (Elements over that MyBook crap though). They have been my preferred manufacturer for 9 years now. My joint second place goes to Hitachi or Samsung. I've done repairs for a living and every maxtor or seagate I've seen fails relatively quickly in a rather epic fashion.
They don't exist, haven't for years. Check the Google report on their millions of hard disks, it's got some genuinely interesting stats. Drives that are worked constantly don't die quicker than those that are mildly used. Go read, it's honestly worth a look.
I had a really old Maxtor 40 GB Drive die on me a couple of weeks ago, coincidentally. It was ten years old, probably, and had gone through a lot. Still, now it's dead. I say get the Samsung. I always get Samsung stuff (I have a Samsung 500 GB external HDD, in fact) and it always works for me.
I know they got bought out by seagate, but that dosnt stop seagate or maxtor being shit in the day nor the combined might sitll being shit. You can still see maxtor in 2nd hand sales or old stock or when repairing, so it is why I mentioned them I've only lookd at a few thousand systems, not millions though so my experiences will differ. I had had problems with WD though but only their first generation Raptors. The best drive I ever had though was an IBM Ultrastar 36Z15 in my gaming rig 8 years ago. I miss those days and that drive. Some people hated IBM, but if you buy their cheap shit as with any manufacturer it will probably be shit. That drive was godly Also Alchy there is no problem with constant use as it is less effort to keep the disk idling than to stop and start. The problem is with constant abuse is that the drives are forced to work hard for long and it can wear out any number of parts too quickly.
I guess it comes down to what you term "abuse". I would tend toward the notion that "heavy use" in a Google datacenter is probably pretty damn abusive to a drive. In the report, by the third year highly utilised drives actually survived longer than low use drives. They float the idea that it could be a "survival of the fittest" thing where error-prone drives under heavy use all died in the first year or so leaving only the most reliable drives remaining, which makes sense. Just wish they'd released data on brands too.
I like Western Digital best. I also have an iomega powered USB external drive which I got dirt cheap at the time with 1TB in it. As long as you get a well known brand you should be fine. If you get some random chinese drive then you'll probably end up regretting it. I have to disagree with leaving the drive on all the time not affecting reliability. Most modern USB drives get pretty warm if left on for a long time and heat is the biggest enemy of a HDD. I always power mine down if I know they won't be used for a while. Just make sure you gracefully power it down using OS dismount function (in Windows you can left click the USB drive icon in the task bar and select 'Disconnect'.
Actually, heat doesn't really matter. I should've just posted this at the start, I guess: http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf Skip to the conclusion on p12.
