External HD

Walt

Walt

Messages
366
Name
Pete
Edit My Images
Yes
Thinking of getting a bit of exernal back upand have being having a look at this from Ebuyer: Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard Drive
Anyone had any experience good or bad, or even any others i should take a look at, taking a budget of about £60 in to account :thumbs:
 
IMHO and this is generally how I have found it over recent years, Seagate used to make very reliable drives, but since their amalgamation with Maxtor I have found that reliability has suffered, Maxtor were the drives I would never buy due to high failure rates but now I find that Seagate are the same and I stay well clear
 
Never had a problem with Lacie myself, but that's mainly because they've always supported firewire connectivity.

I bought one of these the other day - it's gone up £3 since I bought but very pleased with it so far; fast, quiet and works brilliantly with Time Machine on my MBP. The little blue light on the front is a cool touch too :)
 
Have a look at the Western Digital External Drives, as they have come down in price.
I personely have a ICE Box Caddy, which I can put any SATA or IDE Hard Drive into. Either a 2'5'' or 3'5'' size. And the really good part is that if I want to increase the GB size I just buy another hard Drive from a PC compont site and put it in the Caddy !
What I tend to do is when I up grade my PC and put one of the replaced Hard Drives in the Caddy.
So I have gone from 40GB, 60GB, 160GB, 320GB soon to be replaced with a 750GB !
 
Get yourself one of theseAntec MX-1

and one of these 1 TB Western-Digital-WD10EADS-Green-SATA-300-32MB-Cache

Its not the cheapest option But - you know the drive inside is quality and has a 3 year warrenty

My misus has 2 of these one backs up the other and is kept in different place - never had any issues with failure

You cannot trust any drives with data you must backup and no substitute for a drag and drop to second drive:thumbs:
 
Well thats given me something to think about, thanks all. :thinking:
 
Walt said:
Thinking of getting a bit of exernal back upand have being having a look at this from Ebuyer: Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard Drive
Anyone had any experience good or bad, or even any others i should take a look at, taking a budget of about £60 in to account :thumbs:
Click to expand...

Had one of these for about 2 years - I think.
Now half full and no problems to report at all.
 
Can't go wrong with WD drives or Samsung at the moment, see very few failures of either
 
The thing to remember is that an External HD stands more chance of failure than an Internal unit (more chance of physical shock)

I backup my photos onto a NAS AND onto a External USB drive

I'm not paranoid, honest :D
 
Walt said:
Thinking of getting a bit of exernal back upand have being having a look at this from Ebuyer: Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard Drive
Anyone had any experience good or bad, or even any others i should take a look at, taking a budget of about £60 in to account :thumbs:
Click to expand...

I have got 2 of these recently and I think they are very practical. I purchased 2 docking stations from Amazon, well worth the extra money and they help loads with undocking, also come with a couple of carry cases as well which are useful.
 
I usually go with LaCie drives - I still do, but I killed a couple in Iraq 2 years ago and found after trying to repair them that they used Hitachi and Toshiba drives inside the cases just like almost every other manufacturer...lol
 
Thats that sorted then, going for 500gb either Seagate or LaCie and put everything onto disc as well.
Never had anything to do with external hd`s before, am i right in thinking that photo`s stored on one are easily accesible to view on the pc :shrug:
 
I am currently using a Transcend 500GB Shockproof external drive and so far it seems ok.
 
Arkady said:
Same as the HD in your PC...
Click to expand...

Thought it sounded like a daft question, but its better to ask before spending rather than effing and jeffing a lot when you find it won`t do what you want it to :bang:
 
orinoco said:
IMHO and this is generally how I have found it over recent years, Seagate used to make very reliable drives, but since their amalgamation with Maxtor I have found that reliability has suffered, Maxtor were the drives I would never buy due to high failure rates but now I find that Seagate are the same and I stay well clear
Click to expand...

maxtor and seagate although owned by the same company put out completely different products.

seagate purchased maxtor to get hold of some technologies and kept maxtor on as a budget brand sister. i wouldnt touch maxtor with someone elses bargepole but i have 3 seagate drives at present and have no issues.

specialman said:
Never had a problem with Lacie myself, but that's mainly because they've always supported firewire connectivity.
Click to expand...

ive just had 2 lacie drives fail at work within a week.. one is definately just the enclosure failed as the drive works inside a PC but the 2nd sounds like the head is scraping the platter. one thing that interested me, the first one has a foxconn hard drive?? not exactly premium parts there..
 
Arkady said:
I usually go with LaCie drives - I still do, but I killed a couple in Iraq 2 years ago and found after trying to repair them that they used Hitachi and Toshiba drives inside the cases just like almost every other manufacturer...lol
Click to expand...

I would be very cautious with Lacie. They use a lot of Maxtor drives. I personally had a nasty failure (all my backups), and so did many other people as you could find out with the help of google.
 
Well we get given them - I have a variety of External drives that I bought myself, from LaCie, Freecom and Seagate...apart from dropping the two in Iraq while they were switched-on and working (resulting in catastrophic failures from the write-arms scraping across the drives), I've had no dramas...
One of the Freecom drives is a bit noisy, but that's just the fan, I think... I put it on a mouse-mat to quieten it down when it's switched on during back-up...
 
Walt said:
Thinking of getting a bit of exernal back upand have being having a look at this from Ebuyer: Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard Drive
Anyone had any experience good or bad, or even any others i should take a look at, taking a budget of about £60 in to account :thumbs:
Click to expand...

I had this exact drive and it failed on me in just over a year. Starting whirring very loudly so I ditched it for a western digital
 
I use SATA IceBoxes and buy 1TB or larger drives to put in.

I use eSATA so I can actually boot very quickly from externally hooked up drives - I'm using Samgung 1TB and 1.5TB drives at the moment, in seperate IcyBoxes. The larger drive is backed up from the smaller one with "SyncToy" periodically.
 
Arkady said:
apart from dropping the two in Iraq while they were switched-on and working (resulting in catastrophic failures from the write-arms scraping across the drives),
Click to expand...

If you needed to erase them to non-recoverable military standards, you could always fire a few rounds through them :lol:
 
Have been using a Buffalo drive for just over a year now. No problems with it so far, although it only gets plugged in once every couple of months to do a back up.
 
This is something I have been looking into as I use a Compaq Notebook, and i have been getting msgs coming up saying that my C: is almost full :suspect:

The Western seems to be getting good reviews. Will be keeping on a eye on this thread!
 
Bit the bullet today,called in PC World and came across a WD Elements 1tb for £64.99 so i decided to give it a new home. :thumbs:
 
Walt said:
Bit the bullet today,called in PC World and came across a WD Elements 1tb for £64.99 so i decided to give it a new home. :thumbs:
Click to expand...

Which is going back because i was assured in the shop it had automatic backup capability which according to the Western Digital web site it has not. :thumbsdown:
 
I have a total of 3 drives - all Seagate.

2 external drives as primary and backup
1 portable drive as an off site backup that I sync up every week or so.

Paranoia? Yes.

Biggest fear, the two external drives were bought at the same time and are from the same batch. Chances are, one fails then the second one will not be far behind. Hence the portable drive bought six months later - so different technology, certainly different batch - so mttf will be completely different.
 
Some things to consider are:

- What is it being used for? Backup alone or transferring files also?
- If using it for transferring files from computer to computer then you should consider portability.
- If portability is an issue then consider one powered by USB alone. If not then none of this matters.
- USB powered ones have slightly slower transfer speeds I believe but im not sure.
- USB3/Firewire/eSATA connections for faster speeds.
- Actual drive spin speed: 5400/7200

I personally use a Seagate Freeagent Go 500GB, which is light, slim and small enough to put in a pocket which is ideal for me as I use it a lot for transferring files from my PC to University PCs. Only problem I have encountered is the automatic backup software on the drive doesn't work with Windows 7 64Bit.

The last one I had was an Iomega which are totally rubbish imo, poor quality, usb connection at back doesn't always work and is not recognised on my computer without wiggling the wire about. It was a large chunky 3'5" one with seperate power supply.
 
Finally settled for a Hitachi Simple Drive 1tb, so far so good looks good feels solid and the supplied software is just what i was looking for.
Up and running from box to fully working in 10 minutes.
Certainly could never be called portable but thats not a problem cos it`s probably never going to come out from under the desk.
Thanks for all the advice and help, its being interesting to here peoples thoughts and experiences with various hard drives :wave:
 
I recently got a 1.5tb Samsung F2 for about £60 from Scan, I then bought a e-sata/USb Icy box, in total it came to about £80, and now getting lightening fast transfer rates through e-sata. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top