exterrnal HD recs?

[kid cue]

i just lost a whole bunch of important data. can anyone recommend a good, relatively stable external HD? LaCie seems to be the standard, and yet i read awful reviews about their drives on Amazon. it was Amazon, however.

[big screen satellite]

Originally Posted by kid cue

i just lost a whole bunch of important data. can anyone recommend a good, relatively stable external HD? LaCie seems to be the standard, and yet i read awful reviews about their drives on Amazon. it was Amazon, however.

i just bought a Toshiba External 320 gb HD & its got loads of space, is super quite and works fine... i use it for storing my customer data files at work which are typically 2GB each - i tend to run stuff from it all day - every day

info: 7200 rpm, read seek 8.9ms, data buffer 8mb -

(not sure what all that means but its on the box )

cost about £110

Matt

[joethelion]

weird... I've got two Lacie external HD's and I've never had any problems whatsoever with them

and they run on firewire, so I can still use them with my old laptop if the need arises

[viddy]

I'd reccommend any hard drive by Seagate. It's the brand everyone works on here at Sony when they're carrying critical data. I don't know if any external drives have Seagate drives inside them, but that's my reccommendation.

[froopy seal]

If it's for backup purposes only (so it's not running constantly, meaning the noise won't annoy you all day) I would simply buy a cheap external case and your favourite type of reliable hdd. Thus, you can easily change/upgrade your external storing device without paying royalties.

[chuck]

Or you could just go a little more hardcore.

An NAS in the house is where it's at - media is so prevalant and storage media so damn cheap these days - we need to be backing up strong.

RAID5 - bish, bosh.

[stimpee]

I used to swear by Seagate but we've had a bunch of them fail recently (5 in the last 3 months) at work. As for external HD's you never know what brand of HD people like LaCie or Iomega are gonna put INSIDE the box. For that reason i'd go with someone like Western Digital and their MyBook series, or buy your own empty external box and put in a WD or Samsung drive.

One thing to take into cosideration is the platter density / number of platters. The more platters the hotter the drive gets. e.g. a 400gb drive with 3x 133gb platters is cooler than a 4x 100gb platter drive.Less heat means less failures usually.

I'd probably now buy a SATA II drive of about 400gb-500gb and an external box with USB/Firewire/eSATA on the back. Something with 16mb cache, brand of WD / Samsung or maybe Seagate (yeah i know). Also check the manufacturers warranty period. Seagate now offer a 5 year warranty. Not sure about the others.

Note that if you buy a readymade external you'll most likely get an ATA drive with either 2mb or 8mb cache inside. Maxtor seem to be the cheapest so if you'll probably find one of theirs inside the cheaper you go.

</sysadmin>

[sola sistim]

didnt seagate buy maxtor?
i think i know why some have failed...

[froopy seal]

Originally Posted by sola sistim

didnt seagate buy maxtor?
i think i know why some have failed...

The only disks I've had trouble with were Quantum/Maxtor...