Externals are somthing I know next to nothing about. I almost bought an Iomega 500 Gig one yesterday but I wasn't sure if it'd even work on this or my eventual new Laptop. My plan is to have all the programs on my laptop and all the data (Music/Roms/Photos/Videos/Documents ect) on the External. 500 gig HDs seem to go for more online than they do in person and that's the kind of HD I want. What brands are the most reliable and have the best compatability with XP pro/Vista Machines?
Compatibility isn't really an issue. The best way forward is to just buy a standard SATA laptop drive from a reliable manufacturer with a good warranty and then buy a caddy to put it in because that's all external drives are. I personally would go for a Western Digital, their warranty policies are fair and last 5 years. I stripped the internals out of my external caddy and just leave the USB to SATA connector on my desk and then I can just swap and change drives whenever I like. Perhaps not electrically safe but I'm still alive now.
Just as Twimfy says. In my case I've had an external Western Digital 500GB HD for almost 2 years now and it has worked great and never failed, though I know some people don't find them very reliable.
Here i have two 160GB 2.5 Sata HDs on external USB cases. It was the cheapest solution and it's working great.
Also good thing to watch is dual power. Some external caddy use an extra cable (take another USB) for additional power and the disc then take 2 USB slots.
The Western Digital "Elements" drives might be right up your street - you can get them in 640 GB or 1TB flavours (the new black models, at least - the discontinued silver line had smaller sizes). They're USB 2, but are powered from the mains. I've got a few of them, as does my friend - and I'm going to be getting a few more in the near future. They're great - highly recommended. Especially since they're manufactured by Western Digital, which, along with Seagate, are the best drive manufacturer I've come across. EDIT: I forgot to mention: they're detected as USB mass-storage devices, so will work on practically anything which supports such things (Linux/Mac OS/Win 98+).
Drives are up to you, and there are lots of brand name manufactures. The big thing about external hard drives (IMO) are the controllers. I've never had a drive die on me, but I've had pleanty of cheap controllers fail. As an example, I have a Laci external drive which costed a bit more, but works like a dream. At the same time, I also have an External enclosure I got from HK for 10 bucks + a brand name drive. Guess what? The enclosure started doing funny things after a while. I had to remove the drive and find a better enclosure for it. Thats just one situation, but another one is even worse: Some drives aren't really as large as they say they are. They just combine more than 1 drive inside the enclosure and do some cheap RAID implementation on them. And if your drive dies, your data is screwed. That is, unless you can find some joe-nobody manufacture of a particular controller chipset (>_<)! I learned this the hard way! EDIT: By the way... In my case the external HD package I got that did this 2 drive RAID nonsense was a "ComStar". Got it cheap... Got what I paid for. About after 1 year, everyone I know who got one had controlers die on them. I had to use some expensive recovery software to get my data back. Some non computer junkies weren't so lucky. (>_<)!
I have a couple of external 2.5" hard drives, one is over 4 years old, it's only 100GB taken as a spare from an old HP laptop, it is a Segate drive in a slightly more expensive Japanese made enclosure and has worked a treat, even if I take it with me a lot and take it around the world too. It's formatted as FAT32 so it can be used with my PS3 and is useful to transfer movies and the like to it. I recently bought a 500gb Maxtor onetouch III drive, and it's been good, was cheap and works great, backed up my laptop HDD well and I have used it more then once to recover the image. I also have a big fat powered external maxtor 1tb drive which I use to back up everything. I have back ups of my work files on two laptops and all three drives. Ditto with images and other important files. The only issue I've had with the drives is with power, some laptops won't give enough juice to power it just through a single USB port so you need to use two. I was surprised that the Acer Aspire one worked with just a single port even via battery. This can be an issue on notebooks with 3 USB ports and no you can't use a unpowered hub (why does no one make a simple rechargable battery power hub?) Don't use a unpowered hub to run drives, they may cause the drive to get less power and could cause data loss. Don't use RAID on a laptop, there really isn't any reason, just get into the habit of making backups, the Maxtor drives do this quite easily with a single press of the button on the hard drive. Oh and make sure you set your power settings on a laptop correctly as the last thing you want is for your laptop to die whilst it's writing data, also make sure the drive does go to sleep after a few minutes as in the long run it'll save you battery life. The only other issue I find is using two external drives via USB and trying to transfer data between them, it can be quite slow.
Hey folks, in a slightly related question, when you mention data loss Jamtex, what are the factors primarily involved in that? I have an off brand external drive (Rock hard disk, 500 gb) of which I read pretty negative things about it, after I bought it (oh well.) However it's not failed on me yet, but the only thing I use it for is storage, as in I'm not keeping it plugged in and running for long periods of time. It's more for back up. So my question is, how long exactly does data store on such a drive until we have bit rot, or data loss or whatever? Or am I more in danger of just having the drive fail completely?
Got 2 Iomega 250Gb external drives which we've had for 3-4 years now and they've never failed, got a Western Digital elements 1TB which has been reliable and we did have a samsung HDD in a Sata caddy but the HDD died on us althought the warranty service was excellent and actuallt he caddy works great.
Hawanja: I don't know when drives loose their magnetic properties, but unless you have a head smash or some mechanical failure, I wouldn't worry about it.
So far my best recommendation is the MyBook Series, especially the Home Editions since they add the Firewire and eSATA ports for faster speed than USB 2.0. I've got a 500GB and a 1TB and I haven't had a single problem yet.
