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External Hard Drive (1 Viewer)

Lichfield Birder

Lichfield Birder

...should've been here 5 minutes ago, mate....
Hi,

Anyone got an recommendations for an External Hard Drive for back ups. Ideally 1 TB as that is what my computer hard drive. Not looking for cheapest, but more reliability.

Thanks in advance.

Alan
 
Hi Alan,

Tesco were selling Seagate 1TB external hard drives at £59 just after Christmas, don't know if they're still available. That's less than half price.

I managed to get one in my local Tesco and to date it's been brilliant. I've loaded all my stuff and it's only used a fraction of the space available.
 
Lichfield Birder said:
Hi,

Anyone got an recommendations for an External Hard Drive for back ups. Ideally 1 TB as that is what my computer hard drive. Not looking for cheapest, but more reliability.

Thanks in advance.

Alan
Click to expand...

I have 2 Western Digital, 1tb and 320gb, no problems with either. Also use a Seagate portable, again no problems. The WD are about the size of 2 paperbacks, the seagate is a little larger than an iPhone.
 
My preferred solution was a docking station and a bare 3.5" drive. If your PC has an eSATA port (or if you've got a slot free to add one) then you also get transfer speeds massivly better than you'll get from USB.

The dock has been extremely useful - when I upgraded my HDD to a SSD I used to dock to clone the drive. When my internal data drive started to fail, again I used the dock to clone. I use two 3.5" drives for backup (one is stored off-site) and all I need to do is swap them over in the dock.

So it may be marginally more expensive than an all-in-one box. But it's a lot more versatile.
 
I have just bought the Seagate 1TB (from Amazon) that Tesco are selling. It works okay BUT it is not as fast as I would like it to be. I think you get what you pay for with the Seagate. I must admit I am happy with it though as I am not in a rush when backing up anyway.
 
I have a Samsung 160 HI ATA device 2.0 USB 125mm x 75mm x 9mm thk and its never let me down yet, got about a third space left, so will be looking for a new one soon will go with samsung again in the future.
 
Stick with Seagate...the best there is...period. Don't play around with anything less as you don't want to lose data...
 
lmans66 said:
Stick with Seagate...the best there is...period. Don't play around with anything less as you don't want to lose data...
Click to expand...

All I can say is 'Barracuda 7200.11'. Here's what Seagate themselves said about them....
Seagate has isolated a potential firmware issue in certain products, including some Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related drive families based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008. In some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.
Click to expand...

Oh, and their 'Momentus' laptop drive doesn't have the best reputation. I had two die before switching to a WD drive.
 
I had a new Seagate Momentus laptop drive die at a couple of months old too. Have installed the replacement which was supplied under warranty. The dreaded clicking sound for a few days then kaput. Here is hoping.
 
miketoll said:
I had a new Seagate Momentus laptop drive die at a couple of months old too. Have installed the replacement which was supplied under warranty. The dreaded clicking sound for a few days then kaput. Here is hoping.
Click to expand...

If the second one has any problems just say you want it swapped for a WD Blue. They're more reliable and faster (despite being 5400 rpm vs 7200).
 
I am looking for a NAS, so I can access my photos from all my three laptops. If anyone is interested I can let you know what one I picked and how I liked it.
 
"then you also get transfer speeds massivly better than you'll get from USB."

For sure, however as soon as you've filled the hard drive cache you'll be down to the write speed of the disk, surely that isn't going to strain USB2.0 let alone eSATA. Unless you're putting very small volumes across there won't be much of a difference?
 
I've currently got a couple of WD ebooks, which have been reliable, and a pair of Iomega 1.5Tb 'prestige' jobs that I got cheap at Curries in an act of desperation. They're not quick but they are shiny :)
 
Matt Prince said:
For sure, however as soon as you've filled the hard drive cache you'll be down to the write speed of the disk, surely that isn't going to strain USB2.0 let alone eSATA. Unless you're putting very small volumes across there won't be much of a difference?
Click to expand...

You are joking, aren't you? The write speed of any hard drive is going to be way faster than USB2. eSATA is just about as fast as SATA, so an eSATA external drive will be as fast as your internal drives. Anybody who's ever tried using a USB2 external drive knows it's a lot slower than their internal drive.
 
"You are joking, aren't you? The write speed of any hard drive is going to be way faster than USB2."

No not joking, just behind the times, the 'real' upper limit of USB2 is 40MB/s, the sustained write speed of a WD Caviar Blue is 70MB/s. So I take you're point. An eSATA in this case would be almost twice as fast.

"Anybody who's ever tried using a USB2 external drive knows it's a lot slower than their internal drive."

Perception is the key... A USB2.0 into a 1.5TB external is fast enough to capture miniDV without dropped frames.. and I just let it run when I'm transferring hidef so the comparatively slow performance isn't an issue for me personally.
 
Last edited:
For backup storage I got an AMS Venus ES2 dual-drive RAID enclosure (USB). It was recommended to me due to the RAID chipset, for some reason I can't remember now. As for drives...you can put in whatever you find a good deal on.
 
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