Hey people, it's about time that i get my self an external hard-drive. All those seasons of my glorious TV shows are taking up too much space on my C drive. I just want to make sure that I'm getting my moneys worth by purchasing a good quality External Hard-drive. So can you suggest some quality, reliable external hard drives that last? For example, those Western Digital "My Book" external hard-drives that looks nice and glossy and cheap and all, but I've heard that they break down after a couple of years, which I can't have. So you know, just some good quality external harddrives.
Your request is IMHO very broad and a little naive.
I understand what you want from a technical standpoint, but recommending the "best" takes into account several things.
I don't keep a hard drive in primary duty service for more than 2 years so I can't tell you which of the 4 brands of hard drives I use would be most reliable.
Many of the external hard drive vendors are not hard drive manufacturers you don't necessarily know what hard drive is inside the enclosure.
One thing you can be sure of is that they are consumer grade hard drives and not commercial grade hard drives.
Besides, you should have a backup contingency for any data that you can't do without. Do you plan to buy 2 external drives for that purpose?
Personally, I don't buy external hard drives. I buy an external enclosure and put a bare drive inside. It save me about 25-30% and I get to choose the drive.
However, if you were to put a gun to my head and said "Choose or die", I have had the most success with Seagate. However, let me add that I have an LTO3 tape drive and everything is backed up on tape so if I lose a hard drive at any give time it's only a minor inconvenience.
Well as far as company goes, I've kinda figured out which companies are good. I just have another problem now. The one I want is really good, feature wise and reliable, as it is from LaCie. But the only problem is that it does not have a fan built in. That is really bugging me because i am going to have it running all of the time and i am just worried that it will over heat or something. Know anything about this?
here's an amazon link of the product with the details of it down the page.
eSata only on the proviso that your PC has eSata, of course.
@fahram2
As you probably know already, LaCie is not a hard drive manufacturer. All they make is the enclosure. You could still be getting a Western Digital hard drive inside that enclosure.
Actually, LaCie does make external hard drives. And from what almost everyone is telling me, they are a good company. Now, the hard drive that i want has holes all throughout the bottom and on the side too for ventilation. I think that would be okay, but still im going to have it running almost 24/7 so just wanna be positive it wont over heat.
