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.
