Best External Hard Drive

[eggyuk]

I'm moving out of my folks house (yay) which means have to stop stealing space on my dad's external HD and buy my own (boo), which brings me onto here for the first time in a while.

I'm looking for at least 1TB. 3.5" and dimensions dont matter. eSATA a bonus but not essential.

Any suggestions?

Also any brands got particularly good software (or particularly bad)? Obviously any experiences of using them with W7 would be helpful

 

[desperado126]

well I had Maxtor and it Died within couple months so i suggest don't get MAxtor I've got samsung and t rock's,

well at least it works for me

 

[ccatlett1984]

samsung or western digital

 

[pparks1]

Seems all of my external drives are western digitals...while my internals flip forth back and forth between Western Digital and Segate.

 

[mlevy]

I have a WD MyBook. Only USB 2.0 but it's still pretty quick. My next backup solution will be an internal drive, to allow the Windows image backup to work right, unless I can find a reliable eSATA drive...

 

[Mark]

I have a WD MyBook. Only USB 2.0 but it's still pretty quick. My next backup solution will be an internal drive, to allow the Windows image backup to work right, unless I can find a reliable eSATA drive...

I have a 700GB MyBook as well and I wish I had gone for something else, I found that it was pre installed with allot of crapware and it was also formatted in FAT32 which meant I could not save any files on there larger then 4Gigs.

Unfortunately I didn't know it was formatted in FAT32 when I started to back up all my Data from my old external drive and when I did realize I already had 300GB on it, anyway i decided that I wanted to format and start over so I spent about 5 hours taking everything off again, formating and then putting everything back on.

On a plus side if you have your drive formatted in FAT32 you can it use to play movies on your TV if you have a DVD player with a USB port on it like on mine, which is very handy but for me it's not needed as I already have a 8Gig USB drive for that.

Another thing that really annoys me about it is when you don't use it for a couple of minutes it seems to go into some sort of power saving mode and when you go to access it again it usually takes about 10 seconds to respond, aside from that it's not too bad but I'm sure there are better one out there.

 

[zigzag3143]

Western Digital. I went thru 5 maxtors in 11 months, so Im not buying another

Ken

 

[pparks1]

I have a WD MyBook. Only USB 2.0 but it's still pretty quick. My next backup solution will be an internal drive, to allow the Windows image backup to work right, unless I can find a reliable eSATA drive...

Out of curiosity, what problems are you having with the Windows image backup? I've backed up to a 320GB external USB 2.0 hard drive and have restored numerous times, even to different hard drives without a single issue.

 

[desperado126]

lol Maxtor suck's i guess I'm not the only one with the problem

 

[FrogHopper]

How about one of these monsters?

 

[Mark]

How about one of these monsters?

That link doesn't work for me.

 

[mlevy]

Out of curiosity, what problems are you having with the Windows image backup? I've backed up to a 320GB external USB 2.0 hard drive and have restored numerous times, even to different hard drives without a single issue.

It tells me I can't schedule it because it's an external drive. I don't think it even gives me that as an option, though the drive is functional.

MAYBE it's the 4 GB file limit on FAT32, maybe I'll convert it and try again.


Grim, there wasn't a need to remove all the data then format and restore the data, the a filesystem conversion tool. The command is run the command prompt and is "convert f: /fs:ntfs" where f: is the drive letter.

 

[eggyuk]

So it looks like avoiding Maxtor and getting a WD Mybook seems the way to go. Thanks for the replies. I'm gonna look round to see what deals i can find.

P.S. FrogHopper -those Iosafes look awesome. Only found one site selling them in the uk, not cheaply either. :shock:

 

[noyb]

I prefer to build my own using an external Enclosure and a HDD of my choice.
This way, I can easily get to the HDD in the enclosure.

I have a SATA hd in one of these .. That is my next Fresh restore system.
All I have to do is swap the HDD.
Newegg.com - Rosewill RX-358-S

I've had good luck with WD HDDs to put in these -or my computer ..
Newegg.com - Computer Hardware,Hard Drives,Internal Hard Drives,Western Digital,1TB and higher

 

[mlevy]

Converting to NTFS on the MyBook fixed the Windows Image backup issue, ran it overnight....

 

[matt_0978]

i'm ntfs all the way, using a 0.5TB (well 500GB but TB sounds better ) freeagent desktop by seagate. had it almost 2 yrs and it's never let me down. think i paid about £50from maplin at the time, it was on special offer.

 

[pparks1]

Converting to NTFS on the MyBook fixed the Windows Image backup issue, ran it overnight....

Glad to see that you got it all sorted out. The 4GB limit of FAT32 would certainly present an issue with a large backup file.

 

[mlevy]

Glad to see that you got it all sorted out. The 4GB limit of FAT32 would certainly present an issue with a large backup file.

Worst part is, I've even TOLD people about the limit, but it never crossed my mind in this case. The error was misleading, it didn't tell me that it was a file size limitation, it just told me it was an invalid destination.