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Originally Posted by Drury18
I've never really looked into these before as I never saw the need for them however I have a laptop now which I think is about to die on me (the screen will only connect if the lid is open at a certain angle, otherwise I get some wierd patterns on the screen) and I would prefer not to lose all my documents as I have some personal and some work and would like to have a place to store them so if I need to change computers I have it all in one place.
My biggest question is are these more reliable then DVD/CD backups? Do they have a high failure rate like some USB keys or smaller portable devices or can you have moderate amounts of confidence in them?
If you are only backing up approxmiately 250GB, is it worth it?
I've seen ones advertised as "Portable" and "Desktop" but not alot of information on what makes them different. For the use I need, is portable the better option over desktop?
Can you recommend a brand name that while still being budget conscious, is a quality product?
Thanks in advance.
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It's the wrong tool for the job if reliability is your utmost concern.
They are the same exact thing as desktop or notebook drives thrown in a $10 metal box.
You do not buy an external harddrive for essential backups. Mechanical drives can always fail. The reason you buy them is for convenience. If you get a 2.5" external drive, it's a laptop harddrive inside a metal box and it requires only USB to power it. You only need one cable and not a separate power cable as you would with the larger 3.5" drives.
If backups are that important to you, I would never recommend mechanical backup over burning onto high quality DVD-Rs (a good quailty Taiyo Yuden dye).
USB keys do not really have a high failure rate. People are just using them in the wrong way. Just ripping them out without going through the safely disconnect process or pulling them out while an operation is happening (even in the background) can corrupt them. A high quality USB drive or SSD would be more reliable than a mechanical harddrive.
If you bought an external, to be honest I would just buy a 250GB laptop mechanical harddrive ($40 on sale). Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba, etc. are all decent for reliability and are the only options really available at retail usually. Then I would buy a $10 enclosure to throw it in as the enclosure rarely makes a difference unless you need specific connectors (firewire, esata, external sata, etc.) and all the small notebook external drives don't really have any space for shock protection anyway.
It is the cheapest option for $250 backups and it should be pretty reliable if you don't treat it roughly and properly go through the safely disconnect hardware prompts before you disconnect it.
250GB is about 60 single layer DVD-Rs or 30 dual layer DVDs so it is a lot to burn if you go that route. It is still safer to burn onto high quality discs (don't buy cheap/shoddy ones with cheap dyes) than to rely on mechanical backup.