Recommend me the best external hard drive

I want a 1tb hard drive to hold all my porn. What's a good brand?

I'm thinking about one of these: WD MY BOOK PREMIUM EDITION II: http://www.compuplus.com/i-WD-My-Boo...

What do you think?

There's also a "Lacie" and a "SimpleTech" brand, but I've never heard of them.

Is western Digital a reliable brand?

I prefer to get a kickass enclosure and just buy a normal hard drive. Gives you more flexibility, if say you need to pull data off a hard drive from a computer whose motherboard died (just swap the drives), or if you want to slot the drive into your desktop, etc. Pricewise, both options will run you about the same amount.

Plus, you can get an enclosure that suits your needs, or is a more jack of all trades kind of beast, universally firewire/usb/esata, or holds any size hard drive. I know I've needed mine for problems when my minitower or laptop needed backing up.

But yes, WD is a good brand. So is Seagate in my personal experience. Maxtors I've had less luck with, two different ones died on me from just normal day to day use, right outside the warranty period.

What he said. Internal drive + enclosure = win.

Anything more is usually just an excuse for a price markup.

See if you can get a enclosure with a hot swap rack that you can connect to your network for ultimate PR0n!

The WD 1TBs will be a good choice for an external enclosure, because they're designed to run cool and quiet. They're NOT performance drives, so you don't want them as your main C drive, but hanging off a USB they'd be excellent.

Right now, the Hitachi 1TBs are the performance kings, just about equalling the Raptor 150s, while offering eight times the space, but be sure to keep one of those backed up, as their reliability isn't that great. Probably not a good choice for an external enclosure, as they're hot and loud. Fujitsu has just shipped a new, 3-platter 1TB drive that might be really good, but I haven't seen any benchmarks on it yet. Seagate is kind of the middle of the road... better reliability than the Hitachi, better speed than the WD.

For a main system drive, the WD750s are one of the best choices -- they're a lot cheaper, and offer excellent performance. The Hitachis are faster, though.

The best external dive might be an old internal drive.

I've got a LaCie connected to my mac and it's okay. It looks nice. I'm not really a hardware person so I don't know how to say if it's good or bad. It works, and it's never not worked, and that's good enough for me.

The LaCie drives are nice, but apparently their USB link doesn't always work on Mac. My wife has one and I think she had to use the firewire link instead. I've got a MyBook and I like it, but I've seen some quirky behavior that I'm not sure is related to the MyBook or something else. If I leave it connected to my USB port and running, my PC will crash occasionally. Also, backing up to it via Norton Save & Restore will get CRC errors unless I turn down the speed to maybe 1/3 max, and some kinds of backups (a collection of folders containing tons of tiny files) simply never succeed. However, the drive works fine through Explorer so those may be problems with Save & Restore. However, I'm inclined to think that the WD driver app is a bit screwy.

Posting this has inspired me to see if there is a driver or firmware update for the MyBook. I'll let you know if there is and if it fixes the problems I have.

I've been considering getting an enclosure for a SATA drive with built-in network support - is there a good buy to be recommended?

The main advantage to buying a branded external drive rather than a standalone enclosure and drive is that the branded drives are usually matched to be cool and quiet as Malor said. They also tend to have added features in certain versions such as a LAN jack. Standalone enclosures are good but if you are buying a large and/or fast drive, make sure it's one that has good heat dissipation and/or active cooling to prevent premature wear or failure on the drive. I've had drives literally bake themselves by running too hot for the enclosure they're in. The branded drives aren't marked up as badly as they used to be and compared to a bare drive and a good quality standalone enclosure, there isn't too much difference. For the branded drives, the WD MyBook and Seagate FreeAgent models are really nice.

I've had drives literally bake themselves by running too hot for the enclosure they're in.

Yowch! Well, I'd rather have reliable drives and maybe pay a few dollars more.

I guess I'll check out the Western Digital one, because I can't find a store that ships Seagate to my town. Hope they don't die on me! =)

I've had about a dozen of the LaCie 1TB "Bigger Disk" models and have had ten of them fail.

These however are four disk models that come in a RAID 0 config and I think they roast themselves. They just have too many failure modes. I've also used a single-disk LaCie model that has been fine.

LiquidMantis wrote:

I've had about a dozen of the LaCie 1TB "Bigger Disk" models and have had ten of them fail.

These however are four disk models that come in a RAID 0 config and I think they roast themselves. They just have too many failure modes. I've also used a single-disk LaCie model that has been fine.

Yeah, it sounds like one of those new Chinese brands that come out of nowhere or something.

I have the 500mb version of that and I'll agree with the earlier statement that they work well as storage area but not so great if you plan on running it like your main drive. Which is something to consider, depending on how often you need to access the porn stash.

We've had a Western Digital NetCenter attached to our router for the last 6 months or so. It connects via USB or ethernet, runs quietly, offers a USB pass-through for other external mass storage devices (we have our digital camera's docking station attached), and, so far, runs perfectly.

I'm not sure if they sell these any more, but they're a solid, reasonably priced choice.

Mex wrote:

Yeah, it sounds like one of those new Chinese brands that come out of nowhere or something.

LaCie is actually a high-end brand that's popular with Mac snobs. Well, it's high-end in that they have fancy looking designs (that they claim are designed by Porsche) and cost a lot more even though they're basically the same thing as every other brand. I've also heard they aren't terribly reliable which is pretty sad considering the premium they command.

I bought an AcomData firewire/usb enclosure at CompUSA for $30.

The cheapie one I had (before I returned it) was flakey. It wasn't recognized by my computer half the time.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

LaCie is actually a high-end brand that's popular with Mac snobs. Well, it's high-end in that they have fancy looking designs (that they claim are designed by Porsche) and cost a lot more even though they're basically the same thing as every other brand. I've also heard they aren't terribly reliable which is pretty sad considering the premium they command.

Surprising, I have a LaCie (which I just refer to as the "Lacie drive" for some reason). About a year ago, I needed an external hard drive quickly, and didn't really care about the specifics. I simply bought the cheapest one in the store with a reasonable storage capability, which happened to be a LaCie. I chuckled over the "Designed by Porsche" claim when I bought it, since it nothing more than a generally featureless metal cuboid.

IMAGE(http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/8111/lacie200gbexternalusb2hoy2.jpg)

I would go a NAS route with DLNA so that I could put the unit, say, into a closet, and use it as a media center for my family pictures and music collection to be exposed to Xbox 360 in the living room.

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

I would go a NAS route with DLNA so that I could put the unit, say, into a closet, and use it as a media center for my family pictures and music collection to be exposed to Xbox 360 in the living room.

Mex wrote:

I want a 1tb hard drive to hold all my porn

Umm... I think I'd rather not have it networked =)

But you could be a P2P hero.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

But you could be a P2P hero. :)

Sort of like a jukebox hero for the digital age.

I've got 2 WD 500 GBs (one on my PC and one on my wife's). Never had any problems with them.

I'd give the nod to WD over Seagate if you're running an Asus mobo. I have three different Asus boxes which all fail to post after being powered down while attached via USB to either one of my Seagate external drives and left to sit for awhile. They never successfully send the signal to the drive to shut itself down, it goes into some funky powered-on-but-not-really-available state, and I have to unplug the external drives to get the machines to boot. My Abit and Microstar boxes had no such problems, and none of the Asus machines experience this trouble with my WD drive.

I have a 250 Gig Lacie that I got on the cheap through Lacie's outlet portion of their web site. I'm looking for a bigger drive now, as I am really digging Time Machine for backing up my iMac and new Macbook.

Since I am now a Mac snob, I guess I will just get another Lacie.

I have a 750gb WD MyBook and it works great. My friend says he has Guild Wars installed on it and can run it off of the external drive. While I haven't actually done that, I have been able to watch movies images off of it with no problem.

DeThroned wrote:

I have a 750gb WD MyBook and it works great. My friend says he has Guild Wars installed on it and can run it off of the external drive. While I haven't actually done that, I have been able to watch movies images off of it with no problem.

Ditto, just got one for my wife. I have a few I made in enclosures and the MyBook is SILENT in comparison.

Just a heads up but my coworkers just snagged a bunch of Western Digital 500Gig External Hard Drives from their local Target stores for just $69 (normally $130). It's a year end clearance deal so its not listed on their website and they may be sold out. You may need to ask to have a price check done as well as one of the stores my coworkers went to didn't have the drives visibly marked down.

I did some snooping around for a good external HD solution and the Western Digital My Book Mirror edition (1 TB, RAID1 out of the box) seemed like a good deal for my Windows XP system. I really want that hassle-free, always-on backupping and the 500GB is enough for my needs. If it worked, that is...

I've got it installed, it looks cool and plays nice and quiet, all diagnostics say that everything is fine... yet Windows says I can't write to it, because "the directory is corrupt and unreadable". It does open the system files already on the HD perfectly fine. Obviously I've contacted WD's support, but this seems like the kind of thing where there should be an easy solution I'm just missing. You'd think the diagnostic would say something's wrong if it's actually broken?

No help to your predicament, but my external hard drives chronicles continued with failure. I had another dozen 1TB drives, this time Maxtor OneTouch drives, die. They'd also manage to sometimes make whatever host computer they were attached to become unresponsive or behave errraticly (RPC timeouts, etc.) Our final solution for getting a robust off-site backup mechanism was to get an external SATA enclosure with hot-swap trays that eject the drive itself, not the tray, connected to an internal PCIe SATA controller with an external multilane connector.

Since the external SATA box is basically just a sheetmetal box with a PSU and wiring that holds 5.25" drive brackets you could do the same thing for home use by just buying the 5.25" SATA bay. Actually, here's one.

ARISE THREAD!!

So I have finally convinced my wife that, with the ease at which she does bad things to laptops, we should get an external HD so that she no longer needs to manually move zillions of pictures from laptop to laptop.

My budget is around $150 (canadian).

Ideally, I would like something that is wireless or that I can connect to my modem so that it appears on the network as a folder she can drop stuff into. Failing that, a recommendation for a nice USB external HD that I can give to her, she plugs in, drops pictures, and I take away from her.

Edit to add - I am not looking for performance, or for this to be a HD to run software off of. Reliability and ease-of-use is the key for me.

I have a LaCie that's been great, though they're pricey. By contrast, I had a Western Digital MyBook that was DOA, but broken in such a weird way that I thought I was doing something wrong and it took me weeks to realize the truth. Between that and the flimsy construction of the MyBook, I'll never buy one again.