Which External HDD Should i Buy?

[focus]

At the moment I'm looking at the below (Needs to be 2TB or larger).

http://www.msy.com.au/product.jsp?productId=2370

http://www.msy.com.au/product.jsp?productId=2499

http://www.msy.com.au/product.jsp?productId=6861

If these suck could you recommend one for me?

 

[steronius]

is it for backup, or storage?
if it's for storage, you have a single point of failure (as usual with internal drives too)
if for backup, consider a device that could be used with USB, or ethernet. if your budget allows, consider a dual bay NAS for mirrored backup.
http://steronius.blogspot.com/2010/10/inevitable-happened.html

 

[focus]

It's for storage. I jus want somthing that's reliable and wont break
I'm just really indecisive

 

[lemon-tree]

This is essentially just the age-old comparison of hard-drive manufacturers; in this case between Seagate and Hitachi (Which are used in LaCie, last time I checked anyway). I don't own any Seagate drives, so I cannot really give a good comment on their reliability. However, I do have two Hitachi drives and they have both so far been flawless.
Either way, they both use drives from well known manufacturers, so you should be ok there. Note that all of those drives have different warranty periods, so I would suggest not going for the 1 year drive.

 

[Sharky]

This is essentially just the age-old comparison of hard-drive manufacturers; in this case between Seagate and Hitachi (Which are used in LaCie, last time I checked anyway). I don't own any Seagate drives, so I cannot really give a good comment on their reliability. However, I do have two Hitachi drives and they have both so far been flawless.
Either way, they both use drives from well known manufacturers, so you should be ok there. Note that all of those drives have different warranty periods, so I would suggest not going for the 1 year drive.

I have 5 Seagate drives and so far they have been flawless; one is still going from 2005.

 

[Smith6612]

I've replaced a few failed Seagate drives for other people, but they could have failed from anything. I've had good luck with Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi so they are all good brands to look at.

 

[luck31]

Whilst the traditional brands of Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi are usually good - that hasn't meant they haven't made bad drives. For example, a mate of mine had 3 Western Digital My Passports bought at different times die on him one after another.

Not sure if OP is willing to consider building your own (I notice OP's links are to pre-manufactured solutions), but personally I like building my own solutions by buying an external hard drive case meeting my requirements (e.g. has eSATA and USB) and then putting in my choice of hard drive. This way, if say the controller of the external casing dies, then I know I can easily pull the hard drive back out and still get to my data off it either by swapping the case or plugging it direct into my PC. Of late (past few years now) I've been choosing Samsung for my hard drive installations. IMO Samsung have been making very competitive drives (reliabie and decent performance for often very reasonable prices) - at least from the ones I've picked up from local computer stores in Western Australia over the recent years.

 

[focus]

Thanks all I ended up getting a Seagate.
I got the external HDD yesterday and i can connect it to my laptop but when i try connect it to my desktop computer i get an error saying USB Device not recognized.

Note that my 500GB hard-drive gets detected just fine.

Any Idea's?

 

[essxlad24]

This is essentially just the age-old comparison of hard-drive manufacturers; in this case between Seagate and Hitachi (Which are used in LaCie, last time I checked anyway). I don't own any Seagate drives, so I cannot really give a good comment on their reliability. However, I do have two Hitachi drives and they have both so far been flawless.
Either way, they both use drives from well known manufacturers, so you should be ok there. Note that all of those drives have different warranty periods, so I would suggest not going for the 1 year drive.

 

[steronius]

There should be no reason it won't connect to the desktop.
Assuming windows, I suggest making sure you have all updates installed.
I googled the issue and some reports say install TweakXP and other reports say disable FireWire... so you should do a little search.
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=194531 has suggestions including not enough power over the USB.

 

[focus]

Thanks.
I ended up pluggin it in using the USB at the back of the computer instead of the front and that worked!

Also one more thing. The 2TB i got does not have an 'off' switch. Does that mean i just unplug it from the power whenever i want to move it around?
That won't damage it at all?

 

[Smith6612]

Not necessarily. Before moving it, make sure you "Safely Remove" the drive from the system first. Most drives when this is done will spin the disk down. From there you can unplug it. If the PC is off, the drive should already be spun down but it shouldn't hurt to remove power if you must move it. Moving it a foot or two can be done while it's running, just be gentle. If moving it a decent distance, give it 20 seconds after removing power to spin down.

 

[MaestroFX1]

I have a deal of great faith in LaCie products.

I had used LaCie d2 and Secure, which has fingerprint protection with filesystem encryption, in the past.

Now, I have been using LaCie Quadra 2TB for while.

It is a great product. It has four interfaces – USB, FireWire 400, FW 800 and eSATA.

It gives you maximum portability.
You can use its USB interface almost anywhere.

If you need to transfer large amount of data very quickly, then you can use eSATA interface, which allows transfer rates up to 3Gbps same as SATA2.

And, if you have a Mac in your working environment, then you can use FW800 also known as 1394b, which allows transfer rates up to 800Mbps.

And, they provide good customer support too!

Thanks