[Hard Drive] external 1TB

I have had good experiences with Western Digital, as have other people that I know. I personally have the 500 GB external hard drive (I know you're buying 1 TB, but still) from WD for a couple years now and have had no problems to date.

 

WD is definitely the biggest name there. If you want reliability, that's definitely what I'd go with out of those. Seagate is very good too... I've never had a Seagate drive fail on me... desktop, laptop, and external alike.

 

You must have a lot of photos...

 

A terrabyte drive .....man...how far we have come.

DD

 

or p*rn

 

A couple of weeks ago I helped somebody with a Western Digital terrabyte drive and it was a pain in the @sss! The drive came formatted in FAT32 and we were trying to back up some huge files, 6GB, at once and the drive wasn't letting us reformat it to NFTS. We figured out that the Western Digital drive ran a bunch of programs once you plugged it in so that you would see the the Western Digital logo on your desktop and some other back up programs, that didn't work, we had to shut those off in the task manager before we could reformat it.

I have been using LaCie hard drives and have no complaints. The also seem the most competitive for price. They also make a Terrabyte drive.

http://www.lacie.com/us/products/range.htm?id=10033

 

Yep Seagate drives work very well and my uncle works for Seagate and he needs some job security!

http://freeagent.seagate.com/en-us/hard-drive/external-hard-drive/Free-Agent.html

My uncle is going disown me though once he finds out I am using a competitors product.

 

Just bought a BUFFALO 500GB external because a Western Digital Passport died on me. I didn't drop it, scratch it, unplug it improperly, or anything that could have warranted a malfunction caused by my negligence. Luckily I only had some por... er, I mean, stolen mus... I mean, personal documents I didn't need... yeah, that's it.

I will not buy WESTERN DIGITAL ever again. I have a Seagate internal 750Gb I bought recently and that thing runs smooth as a baby's butt.

 

Funny this thread came up because I'm trying to retrieve my data and most importantly family photos from a MyBook WD 500 External Drive.. Drive was only 6 months old when finally the HD crapped out.. So I removed the case (It was a B@%$h) and now slaved it to my main computer but now I don't know what to do because the HD is so screwed up it can run a chkdsk on it I"m really pissed because I promised myself that I would backup the pictures to a dvd but never got around to it (because the drive was so new) Anyways I d/l spinrite so hopefully it can somehow fix/retrieve the data..

Whatever you do, whatever which product you buy back up the backup data to dvd's, online storage areas.. Me and my wife have been backing up our photos to smugmug.com and it has been fantastic.. Never have to worry about a HD,Backup HD, or bad dvd copies crapping out on you.

 

I haven't put it through much work at all yet, but I've got a Buffalo 500GB drive that I picked up on Black Friday for $60 (they had plenty, so I just walked in and got it at like 5pm). They had a 1TB for $120, but I don't have that much pr0n. So yeah, not sure if I'm much help except for the fact that I haven't had any problems with my Buffalo drive yet...

 

I've had no problems with Lacie and Maxtor.

I've used a 1 TB Iomega, and while it never crapped out, it was horrendously slow and very noisy.

I hear pretty good things about Seagate too.

 

I LOVE SEAGATE. I have returned 2 previous drives, and gotten BIGGER drives back in return.

They have like a 5 year warranty on their drives, and if something goes wrong you can send it back. I've sent 2 back after 4yrs of use, and got back larger drives. One was an 80gb and got back a 120, and the other a 120 and got back a ...250gb i think?

 

I don't know if you're storing them on your main computer as well, but a lot of people buy a backup drive and then delete them off their main drive as if the backup drive is somehow more failure-proof. If you want better protection, buy a Raid NAS (multiple drives). I've got one with 3 Samsung 500 GB drives for a total of almost 1 TB of drive space and another slot for another drive that I can just add on and the Raid array will expand. I use this to backup databases, Money files, password files, raw video, mp3's, and my parents' videos from the motherland... hehe. The only downside with a decent NAS is that it's more expensive.

*EDIT* : If your stuff is that important, you may also want to backup to DVD a well.

 

I've had bad experiences w/ Western Digital as well, although this is a few (2?) years ago now. I think Seagate ranks near the top.

But others say it's all a crapshoot, just don't buy multiple drives of the same model next to each other on the shelf (in case they all came from the same bad batch).

I also agree w/ Dr Dunk...make sure you have your important stuff on 2 different drives. Your external drive is no more failure proof than the one in your desktop/laptop. If you've got a lot of cash to blow, Drobo's are a dummy-proof raid solution.

 

Have you thought about using something like Mozy or Jungledisk ?

 

The irony of being able to put more on one disc is that if the disc goes bad, you probably lose more. lol. If you're archiving onto multiple cd's, I'd keep backups. I've had rewritable cd's go bad after 3 or 4 years of storage, but luckily had backups of them.