Anyone Use Portable External Harddrives? I Need Advice

[Rl'Halsinor]

Right now there are several good deals for portable harddrives: Western Digital's Passport, Seagate's FreeAgent Go, and Maxtor's One Touch Mini.

I don't have a clue as to reliability and dependability of these portables though I have read some horror stories of failure rate. I have also read that external HDs can run hot and that Seagate offerings are more solidly built, but as with anything hardware there are bias' galore.

Objective advice and suggestions please. Thanks.

 

[XCorvis]

USB/firewire external drives use regular old hard drives inside them. The vast majority of hardware problems will be with the drives themselves, rather than the interfaces. Seagate drives come with a 5 year warranty - 2 years longer than anyone else.

External HD enclosures are not normally actively cooled (like with a fan), so you might go for an aluminum case that conducts heat a little better, especially if you're going to leave the drive on a lot.

I always like to hit http://www.newegg.com and read the user reviews of the drives and enclosures. You can usually start to see trends. If something has 4 stars and over 100 reviews, it's probably fine for most people.

 

[Bront]

I'll swear by Western Digital's reliability. I don't use any other HD in any computer I build.

But beyond that, go for what's a good value. Transfer rates and performance should be fairly similar.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

I've had bad experiences with Maxtor drives and no longer use them. Too many failures and replacements, at least in my experience they wear out fast and with hard use even sooner.

Western Digital is good, I've got an older portable HD of theirs and even though it's seen lots of use it shows no signs of degradation or otherwise wearing out. But this is the only Western Digital drive I have.

I almost exclusively use Seagate drives, and they've never failed me yet. I use my computers and their drives very hard, other brands have worn out in a year or less. But I have Seagate drives more than five years old that still work as well as the day I bought them.

 

[ssampier]

Western Digital and Seagate are two manufacturers I really trust. Maxtor has been absorbed by Seagate. I have been disappointed in the Western Digital NAS devices, however.

Here it the external drive that one of our employees uses:

Western Digital Media Center
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,1666197,00.asp

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Maxtor has been absorbed by Seagate.

Good maybe with some time it will improve the quality and reliability of their products.

 

[azhrei_fje]

Heh-heh, it's amusing to see the concept of Seagate buying out another company combined with the thought that maybe the quality would go up!! Years ago, Seagate was well-known for their "stiction" problems. (Google it if you're interested.)

I put a WD drive in my Tivo Series2 about 2.5 years ago and the thing works fine. It's a bit noisier than the drive that was in the unit before, but going from 80GB to 200GB is a no-brainer. And the drive is busy all the friggin' time! Either the machine is recording a show/movie, defragging the drive, or generating a Suggestion list based on the latest guide info, but whatever it's doing, it certainly seems to be busy. I wouldn't hesitate to get another one of those.

Of course, for my computers I'm pretty cheap: I buy the lowest-price, highest-performance drive I can get. I figure that I work with these things all the time and I don't mind spending 20 minutes to swap out a drive. My fileserver uses a software RAID to stripe/mirror data across multiple drives so a drive failure doesn't bother me too much. I have two WD 500GB drives sitting on shelf in my office for when I need them. Buy them on sale and you can make a killing. I got both of these right after Christmas for $69 each (!!) at the local big box store. (Limit one per person, so I had to drag my wfe along with me. She wasn't happy until I told her what the typical price would be. )

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Heh-heh, it's amusing to see the concept of Seagate buying out another company combined with the thought that maybe the quality would go up!! Years ago, Seagate was well-known for their "stiction" problems. (Google it if you're interested.)

Yes they had problems, but that was a long time ago. I've been using their drives almost exclusively for nearly eight years now and in that time their reliability and quality have been unimpeachable in my machines. They've clearly gotten over their problems, so hopefully they can do the same for Maxtor.

I also agree that Western Digitals are good drives. But I only have the one as opposed to a crapload of Seagates running on four machines and don't like basing an evaluation off a singular sample, so I prefer not to make judgements there.

 

[Relique du Madde]

I like WD but BEWARE some of their larger drives are actually rumored to have DRM built into their specs and may prevent you from accessing certain types of media placed within them if it detects a network connection.

 

[Raevynn]

WD Passports

I have been using the WD Passports and they seem to work just fine. I travel a ridiculous amount and like the fact that they are very lightweight. I have two 160GB and 1 250Gb. I also bought them at Costco as their version of the WD comes with a neoprene carrying case.