External Drive

Key Keeper · Post by **Key Keeper** » Sat Oct 18, 2008 11:04 pm

I have 6 internal hdd and want to move all my stuff to one drive. I want to get an external drive so I dont have to share stuff over the network here at the house when I want to watch an avi or something on my laptop. I only have one external hdd and its a WD. What do you guys recommend for an external hdd in the Tb range? I seen a lot of generic brands but not sure whats good an whats not for an external. I deffo want to stay away from WD.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 2:44 pm

My 2 cents: Once you get a new external HDD, sell that WD external. You'll be lucky to get 1 year out of it. I've had very bad luck with WD external drives. Maybe they don't like the heat in an external case, I dunno.

As a rule of thumb I would recommend any drive that has at least a 3 year warranty. If the manufacturer doesn't have enough faith to warranty it for more than 1 year, you shouldn't trust your data to it.

I like Seagate externals IF you're going to buy a retail external.

I would suggest, however, building your own (buy an enclosure and a drive separately - and buy a Seagate drive with a 5 year warranty). Why? Most of the retail externals are deliberately made hard to disassemble. It's almost impossible to open most of them without busting the case.

There are times when you may want to or need to remove the drive. For instance, you get some data corruption and you want to run Spinrite on the drive. Spinrite will work on a USB drive BUT it will not do as good a job because it can't access the drive subsystems directly. It defaults to a "virtualized" mode when working on USB drives which is less than ideal (it's also SLOW since DOS can't access a drive at more than USB 1.1 speeds). Steve Gibson himself recommends taking the drive out of the enclosure and directly connecting it to the PC to run Spinrite on it properly. Same applies for most low-level drive utilities. USB drives always run in a hardware abstraction mode that doesn't give full access to the low level functions.

So this is what I'd recommend:

VANTEC NST-360SU-BK 3.5" eSATA + USB2.0 Aluminum External Enclosure - Retail $33.99 (I have 3 of these and they are excellent enclosures): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817145167

Seagate 1Tb 7200RPM HDD $129 (5 yr warranty): http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148274

Seagate also has a 1.5Tb drive for $229, but frankly I think it's too pricey and I never like buying a new HDD technology. The 1.5Tb drives just came out and they need some time to work out the bugs. The 1Tb drives are rock solid. I'd rather buy 2 1Tb drives than the 1.5tb drive. If you're interested here's the link: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148278

ALSO do not trust your data to a high capacity drive. MAKE BACKUPS. The higher the density, the more error correction required, the liklier you are to lose data.

Modern high density drives are CONSTANTLY error correcting. It's frightening. This is why I prefer using a small drive for the boot drive (I have a 74Gb Raptor as the boot drive on my main workstation, with a 500Gb spare drive for the data). Low density drives are more reliable. That's why I haven't jumped on the 1Tb bandwagon yet. I have 3 external drives: all 500Gb. The 500Gb drives are pretty damn reliable right now. Still, you never want important data stored in only one drive.

Some solutions are good old DVD (or DVD-DL) backups (Blu-Ray-RW when it becomes affordable), multiple drives, RAID Array NAS drives, or some sort of affordable off site backup like JungleDisk & Amazon S3.

Anything REALLY important I keep at least 3 copies of. For instance my MP3 library: there's one copy on my file server, one copy on an external HDD connected to my file server that gets synced one a night, and a third copy on DVD backups.

Key Keeper · Post by **Key Keeper** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 5:13 pm

I have a small amount of critical data, pics/music/codes-passwords(encrypted rar of text doc) that will fit on dvdr's but for my other stuff I want to be able to access it from any machine withought having to network them and if I needed to "remove it in haste" then I could just unplug and stash it where ever. The hdd's that are installed atm, I would like to use for multiple OS's for toying around. I thought about getting a couple 500's instead of one big hdd so in event of failure I wouldnt loose everything. The price seems pretty comparable from external hdd to external enclosure+hdd so will probably just get an enclosure at frys and pick up a 750g from new egg for the time being and split it into 2 partitions.

b-man1 · Post by **b-man1** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 6:58 pm

good info here. i have been waiting a LONG time for larger drives to come down in price...i'd really like a 1TB. the problem then is, as FP said, you're going all in on one drive and could screw yourself. i wish the 2.5" sata drives were available for desktop computers like they are for servers.

perhaps a 750GB or 1TB drive + jungledisk would be the best way to go...

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Sun Oct 19, 2008 10:50 pm

The one nice thing about external drives is that you can keep it disconnected for a majority of the time. Thus, if you backup once a week, then it'll only get a few hours a week use. So, really that drive should last many years longer in such an unused state. Exactly what a backup drive is good for.

RubberDuckie · Post by **RubberDuckie** » Mon Oct 20, 2008 1:11 am

I have a WD WorldBook 1TB on the network and WD 320GB USB. Had both for about 2 years with zero problems.