[pullhair] External Hard Drive [/pullhair]

[burnws6]

I'm going crazy. It's day and night with these things. Everywhere I do research, half the people say it took a **** on them after 2 weeks the other half say its the best hard drive they've had.

I need a reliable means of storage. Are external hard drives just not reliable to a certain degree?

I need some options thrown my way.

Thanks in advance.

 

[chip]

I have a 750GB USB ext hard drive I use for backup. I backup all the data from my PC on to the USB ext drive maybe once a month. I find it very reliable. It sure is better than no backup! My drive cost me less than 100$ at Costco maybe a year ago. I am sure they are bigger and for less $ now.

 

[burnws6]

I have a 750GB USB ext hard drive I use for backup. I backup all the data from my PC on to the USB ext drive maybe once a month. I find it very reliable. It sure is better than no backup! My drive cost me less than 100$ at Costco maybe a year ago. I am sure they are bigger and for less $ now.

What kind?

 

[chip]

its a Maxtor one touch.

 

[Derrel]

Maxtor external hard drives have been good for me for quite a few years. I always buy the Firewire models. I've had a Western Digital that died,and another Western Digital that has survived a year and a half. I've had a LaCie that was good too.

 

[FrankLamont]

I have a Seagate: but just be careful with portable ones, and don't knock them (portable and desktop) ever: especially - in fact, don't even touch them when - they're moving.

 

[benhasajeep]

I do not rely on just a 2nd drive. At a minimum my keepers go onto CD's in the past, DVD's now. My very best stuff is on 3 drives and Disc. And I will probably get a Blueray recorder with my new desktop (or install one after I get it). We currently have 3 USB drives. Oldest is about a year and a half. Knock on wood, I have never had a drive failure in anything! Probably a dozen computers in 20 years.

I have been tossing around between a new desktop and a home server. I am now leaning towards a full tower that can handle 4 drives, and a network storage server / device. That way I have have tripple rednundancy without as much clutter.

I figured as long as I go through the motions of at least tripple redundancy Murphys Law will be kept at bay and I will not have a failure. :lmao:. But as soon as I go to just 2 or no backup, I am sure Murphy's Law will take affect.

My drives are a mix. The oldest is a 500gb WD Mybook USB external. Newest is a 250 gb 2.5" Segate I bring with me in my travels.

 

[Garbz]

Reviewers bias means that people with a bad experience will likely shout it from the roof tops. So if you have half the reviews say it's great and reliable, and another half say they broke straight away there's a good chance that they are still incredibly reliable. I certainly wouldn't go out and review every piece of equipment I buy and am happy with.

Also it's a harddrive. I know of no endemic faults with Maxtor One touch drives. However there are multiple modes of failure. It is an external harddrive so I always question when a harddisk dies after 2 weeks did the own trip over his own USB cord and the harddisk take a tumble?

 

[wiredhernandez]

Having been in the IT industry for 15 years... My personal experience shows Seagate to be the most reliable drive manufacturer overall. I currently have 4 external drives (all seagate .. newest are 2 years old) All drives can and will fail some day as they are mechanical and have moving parts. The simplest thing to do is have at least two and backup data to bothdrives.. You can get fancy with raid but using a program or manual backups is easiest... I also take annual backups of my backups... Hope this helps..

 

[itznfb]

I need a reliable means of storage. Are external hard drives just not reliable to a certain degree?

To answer your question are they reliable to a certain degree?.... sure. It all depends on what you define as reliable. What impact is there if that drive is lost? If you lose the external only do you still have a primary copy? If you lose the primary how easy will it be to restore from the external?

Every level of redundancy you add exponentially increases your rate of survival from a catastrophic failure.

For my daily data and regular hobby photos I use a Mirrored set of internal 640GB data drives and a 640GB single OS drive for the OS and apps. Every night a job kicks off and does an incremental backup to a hot-swappable internal 1TB drive. Once a week I clone that drive to a 1TB external and store it in a fire proof safe.

For everything that I cannot lose I also run a backup to DVD and store at a hosted location.

If I lose anything.... I guess it was meant to be lost.


The best off the shelf solution you can get right now though is a Western Digital MyBook Mirror Edition.

 

[Village Idiot]

its a Maxtor one touch.

Maxtor external hard drives have been good for me for quite a few years. I always buy the Firewire models. I've had a Western Digital that died,and another Western Digital that has survived a year and a half. I've had a LaCie that was good too.

Get it off now!!!

We've had several versions of Maxtor drive and the industry consensus is that they're crap. More than 50% of the 300 some odd HDD's we've ordered are dead. Several, and that's a small number are from human error like drops and such, but most just died.

maxtor reliability - Google Search

I'm going crazy. It's day and night with these things. Everywhere I do research, half the people say it took a **** on them after 2 weeks the other half say its the best hard drive they've had.

I need a reliable means of storage. Are external hard drives just not reliable to a certain degree?

I need some options thrown my way.

Thanks in advance.

What's your budget? An external HDD is not a suitable backup. I've looked at multiple options including multiple externall HDD's in RAID configuration, optical copies, servers, etc...

The easiest and best solution I've used to date is Windows Home Server on a HP Media Smart Server. In short, it's become a reliable backup to all my computers as well as a storage device and a streaming media service.

First use is of course a back up/storage solution. The one that I bought has 4 drive bays and WHS can see up to 9TB of space. I have 1.75 in mine with two drives and will end up adding more in the future. WHS handles storage differently than any other version of Windows has previously, iirc. When you add a drive, there's options to add it to the storage pool. It creates basically one big drive that's separate by folders. Each user can get their own private share as well; there is no partitioning or assigning drives. It also give you an option to mirror folders and/or their sub folders. What this does is creates copies across multiple drives so if one fails, you don't lose data. The more drives you have, the more redundancy you have.

To actually make this a reliable backup, there's an option to plug in an external drive and backup the server itself, so you can keep other backups off site if you wish.

WHS will also automatically backup the computers in your house on a set schedule. The HP version of the WHS console supports Time Machine as well. I use mine to backup my Windows 7 (formerly Vista) Gaming rig, OS X and Win 7 laptop.

A bonus feature for me is the streaming. I dumped about 300GB of movies and music onto the server. I can watch movies on my PS3 streamed over the network and listen to music from any of my computers.

It also has a feature to setup a domain through Windows so you can remotely access the server over the internet. This is the only feature that I really had trouble with, but it was more of a matter of getting the settings right on the router for WHS to work properly.

Over all, this has been the easiest solution I've used yet. It's based on Server 2003, but is a lot less complicated for those without the tech experience. You put a disc in your computer and it finds and sets up the connection. You have to use a Windows computer to intially setup WHS and for major admin purposes, but you can access it just as easy with OS X. I've even had an Ubuntu install with SAMBA on it. I got it working but it was such a pain to get everything going and I was always having issues with it.

I think I paid $300-$400 for the server and included software from newegg.

 

[Dao]

There are only 2 type of hard drives in our world.

1 - Dead hard drive.
2 - Soon to be dead hard drive.

Reliable storage is good. But it does not mean you do not need backup unless the data you store is not important. So you can store your files in your computer and backup it up on a external drive.

 

[SpeedTrap]

Anyone who has recommended multiple drive backups is correct, there is a right way to back up date and a single external dive is the least secure method of doing so.

In our studio we are using a Drobo as our backup solution, it is loaded with 4 X 1TB Drives and all files are copied to it, it is fully redundant with data protection. This is just level 1 of the backup, we also have another Drobo offsite that all the Data is copied to every 2 weeks.(This could be done every week, but I like to live dangerously)

 

[burnws6]

Wow, the feedback has been awesome.

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU HAD SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO ADD.

Puts everything into perspective...thanks a bunch guys.

 

[Mr. Murmeli]

I'd personally recommend Western Digital.

I have to be honest: when people say "I've had two xxxx's and one yyyy's and no problems whatsoever", it doesn't say anything about the reliability of the whole brand. I've seen more thorough research in some computer magazines and I recall the WD and Seagate were winners in terms of reliability.

My brother has his own security company, so he's dealing with hard drives a lot (today's digital recorders use hard drives). He said he's had most trouble with Maxtor, although obviously some newer models might be a lot better than the ones he used to use. After installing enormous amount of digital receivers with hard drives, he's come to a conclusion that Western Digital is very, very reliable and nowadays uses them exclusively. He also said Seagate's to be good but have had to replace them more often than WD's.

Good luck with your choice!

EDIT: My OS is currently running on a 5 year old Maxtor which still works fine, but my next hard drives will be WD's.