Advice on external hard drive please

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Duncan.F

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Duncan
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Hi,
My laptop is getting full........ I really need to start backing up stuff and would like recommendations for an external hard drive please! Running Windows Vista if that makes any difference.

Ta

Dunc
 
neil_g said:
not maxtor, otherwise seagate, WD, lacie.. etc etc. youll get horror stories for every make but in my opinion just avoid maxtor and you should do fine.
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I had a maxtor portable external hardrive, couldn't fault it, was problem free for well over a year...


...that was until it randomly wiped itself a fortnight back and i lost a heck of a lot of my images. :'(

So, whatever you get, make sure you keep back-up copies. I learned my lesson anyway.
 
Back up all your shots to DVD its the cheapest option.
 
Bought a Seagate 1Tb from PC world last week. £79.99 instore, though if you stand instore and order it on phone (or reserve ahead) £61.99

Chose seagate purely on the brand - though for £62 and the capacity was the bargain of the store.
 
I have a LaCie 2big Quadra (2Tb) external drive. I have it setup in RAID1 mode so the two drives mirror each other. Once the fan kicks in it sounds like a jet though so I wouldn't recommend one TBH...

I have a buffalo drive at work and I can't fault it. Reliable, quiet, good build quality and decent prices too. Western Digital drives are also very good.

As Neil said I'd avoid Maxtor drives, had a few of their internal drives fail on me during the years.
 
I have a 1TB WD my book world edition - been running constantly for over a year without any problems. It is sat near the wifi router / modem thing as it is plugged into that and so backs up over our wifi network, it has a bright blue light which can get annoying in the night if you ever sleep in the same room as it though!
 
I have had a Maxtor for 7 years and it's never missed a beat. I have also just bought a Maxter 500gb portable HD.
 
I have an IOMEGA drive, about 5 yrs old and still going strong
I have a Western Digital 500Gb. The power supply broke, but the drive is doing OK inside the PC now
 
STARRIDER said:
I got a seagate 1tb last week from maplins..excellent......so far..:thumbs:
Click to expand...

I also bought one of these a few months ago, massive storage & very fast write/read speed via USB2 :)

Only slight negative is the device has a seperate power supply unit, i.e. its not USB powered like the more expensive & generally smaller capacity external hard drives.
 
I have 2 external hard drives.

Main one is a Lacie drive that I use for Time Machine on my mac

portable is an Iomega

transfer all images from camera to Mac, backup using Time Machine, then transfer all images on to portable device, so always have back up, and images on both hard drives, therefore not taking up space on my MacBook Pro!

J
 
Seagate 320Gb Go for Mac works really well and takes no space. WD 1Tb is an option although it has power cables and makes a little bit of noise. I keep it off most of the time.

I'd also recommend against Maxtor and Lacie as they are the same thing inside. I heard their second name is CorruptFirstSector.
 
I had the same problem! So today I bought a Iomega 1tb for £65 from Comet :cool: Seems ok for the money, pretty quick too
 
I've got a 1TB WD MyBook which has worked fine so far. I'm about to get a 1TB WD MyBook NAS drive so that all our home laptops can use the NAS drive for primary storage and I'll plug the original 1TB MyBook into the NAS drive via USB for backup storage. Note that I also backup onto DVD all of my client files.
 
Just moving stuff off of your leptop onto an external drive isn't 'backing it up'. If you have anything at all on your PC of any value then you need to be regularly making copies of it onto an external device and keeping it somewhere safe. Drives fail, DVDs get damaged, laptops get stolen, files get corrupted and accidentally deleted. Get yourself a decent backup strategy before you lose everything.
 
Looking at getting a Seagate 1Tb from Maplins, £20 off according to advert in Saturdays Mail,
 
I've had a WD 250 gig for a couple of years has been fine, I'm getting a 1TB shortly, probably from Novatech as they are just down the road from me and only £64
 
artyman said:
I've had a WD 250 gig for a couple of years has been fine, I'm getting a 1TB shortly, probably from Novatech as they are just down the road from me and only £64
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Is it USB only or with full FW800 and esata? I paid over £110 for mine from Apple
 
If you back up to DVDs you will be sadly disappointed in a few years when you come to retrieve them.

I have DVDs that only a year later have started to corrupt, even though they just sit there doing nothing. They are notoriuously unstable - and the next crop of machines probably won't be able to read them. new computers cannot read DVDs from a few years ago. I know, my library operator found out the hard way (hard way....oh suit yourself)

The oNLY secure method of archiving is to put stuff on a server grade machine. Make sure whatever you do is backward compatible. Blue ray machines will not have DVD readers......some already don't. If you had backed up onto floppy discs from 10 years ago....where is your floppy slot on your new comoputer then?
 
SLRist said:
Just moving stuff off of your leptop onto an external drive isn't 'backing it up'. If you have anything at all on your PC of any value then you need to be regularly making copies of it onto an external device and keeping it somewhere safe. Drives fail, DVDs get damaged, laptops get stolen, files get corrupted and accidentally deleted. Get yourself a decent backup strategy before you lose everything.
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Have an online back-up as well.....
 
I don't know whether it counts for USB attached drives, but Seagate used to offer a 3year OEM warranty, or a 7 year consumer warranty on their internal SATA drives.
Apart from the fact that in my experience their drives have failed less than other brands (I am talking nearline storage here though), the fact that as a consumer I can get a 5 day turnaround (on average, once it was 3 days!) on a failed disk has made them a very attractive proposition to me.
Do note though, that OEM warranty is not transferable (one company tried to stiff me with a second hand Seagate disk from Dell, it wasn't until I read off to them the email addresses that were stored on the disk that they accepted they were in the wrong and offered a refund).
 
neil_g said:
:thinking:

um sorry but whats stopping the "server grade" machine from dying/burning/getting nicked?

the only REAL method of protecting your data is multiple copies with one stored off site.
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Yes, that is a good point. In fact, I think that digital photos are a lot more likely to get stolen than old film negatives. (and less likely to be in a fire-safe)
I had my data on a server grade machine for three+ years. Unfortunately the raid controller died. The controller is no longer in manufacture, so I had to upgrade the controller. Unfortunately, the next controller up was PCI-e, not the PCI-X which my server ran on. Had to upgrade the whole machine.
However, all the data was safe, just out of commission whilst I got the upgrades in place.
Given the warranty (I mentioned above), I would be happy with my data on a raid 5, plus remote backup.
 
2 x Seagate 500Gb USB drives for me.
All images stored on one (which is in use all the time), and regularly run SyncToy to copy changes over to the second (which is switched off most of the time).
Should really take the second off-site too.....
 
My solution is an eSATA/USB docking station - like this one. There's a 1.5 TB 3.5 inch drive in there most of the time for regular backups. Once a month, or so, I'll replace it with a 500GB 3.5" drive, do a full backup and store that disk elsewhere.

It was also very handy when upgrading the drives in my laptop - cloning old drive to new drive over eSATA is a breeze.
 
Thank you for all the replies, very comprehensive, thoughtful and reasoned!! I only wish I could make a decision! May start a new thread on offline storage... Seems to make sense to have a local and offline option.
Thanks for all the input!

Dunc
 
There have been loads of thread like this in the computers etc forum.

With regards to externat drives it depends on a lot of things:
Do you want to take it everywhere with you? (Get a mobile self powered one, but if using USB do you have 2 free ports?)
Do you only use it in one place? (Powered 3.5" drive, these are cheaper)
Do you want a network attached one? (Slower, but no wires)

Then you have to take into account what bus:
USB (slowest but most common)
Firewire 400/800, does your computer support it? Likewise eSata (all of these are faster than USB, in my experience FW800 is MUCH faster)
 
IMO you can't have too much back.

I find it chilling to talk to togs who never back their stuff up. One day your computer's drive WILL fail. Fact.

My Mac has a full bootable backup on an external firewire drive. This is done via Superduper. I then have another external drive containing a clone of my entire system done using Carbon Copy Cloner. My third external is partioned with an Aperture Vault on one part and a Time Machine backup on the other.

Finally, I have a portable drive with another Aperture Vault on it that I keep off site.
 
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