Looking to buy an external hard drive

[AvengeR]

I would like to buy an external drive to backup my important data and would like to ask the opinions of you experts out there. I have done some research and found out from many reviews that Western Digital has a high failure rate so I will most likely stay away from them.

What brands would you guys/gals recommend?

[REDVAN]

I have a Seagate Free Agent 250 that I got at memory express and it's good. I should have gotten a bigger one though

[CubicleGeek]

I've only ever built my own by buying an empty 3.5" enclosure and recycling my old hard drives, so I can't directly answer your question.

Here are a couple of things to consider though.

Is this for a laptop or desktop? Is mobility required/preferred? If the answer is laptop and yes, I recommend buying a 2.5" external enclosure and picking a 2.5" drive of your choice OR look for 2.5" prepackaged solutions, because you don't need to plug the drive in to a wall socket. The USB port will supply enough power to use the drive. Even if it is for a desktop, you might still want a 2.5" just simply because it's one less thing to plug in. Note that 2.5" drives are a little pricier and come in smaller available sizes (up to 200GB I believe).

This might be a little out to left field for you, but I figured I'll bring it up as an option. You might want to consider looking at is a NAS (network attached storage). D-Link makes the DNS-323 which comes at a fantastic price point (under $200) - prior to this they start at around $1000. It's gigabit, so extremely fast to copy even large files over the network - definitely faster than USB2.0. If you have more than one computer, everyone can access the space at the same time and without moving the drive around. It also supports RAID 1 if your data is really that important and you don't want to lose it. Note that $200 does not include the drive(s), you'll still need to buy the drive(s) separately or reuse any existing ones you may have not in use, so this is a considerably pricier option but might be worth the price difference depending on your usage needs.

[AvengeR]

Thanks CubicleGeek. The NAS option was not something I thought of, but it might be the better option since there are 2 laptops and a desktop in the house. I will look into that some more.

[photon]

I have a DNS-323.. neat little unit, D-Link's support is HORRIBLE though, so be prepared for nothing but frustration if anything goes wrong and you have to contact them. But it's a pretty straightforward unit. Just be sure that the drives you get are compatible.. you'd think all SATA drives were compatible, but they aren't. And there's no rhyme or reason as to what is and isn't, it seems to be purely random (Seagate 7200.8, fine. 7200.9, doesn't work. 7200.10, fine. No reason given).

The speed isn't huge (compared to a large network server or some of the more expensive NAS devices), but is well fast enough for normal usage (copying files, streaming media, etc). We use it as a server for the house computers and they all connect to it for file sharing.

EDIT: I switched to the DNS323 for power reasons, I was running a server but it was a waste of power, this unit takes almost no power, and spins down the drives after a span of inactivity.

I also use the RAID 1 option and store all my sensitive files and pictures and stuff there, so if a hard drive dies I don't lose my files.

To complete the backup circle I also have an eSATA enclosure with a hard drive in it, and every so often I do a full dump off the NAS to the external drive. In theory I should take that offsite (i.e. to work) so that if my house burns down I'd still have my files and pictures and memories and stuff.

I also run periodic backups from the house computers to the NAS device (via Arconis True Image).

Anyway, that's my experience. Backups are huge and in this digital media age I think many people will be losing all their memories (photos, movies, etc) via failed drives before this kind of system (or an online system, or some other system) really becomes necessary in most people's homes.

[CubicleGeek]

I also invested in a DNS-323 about 6 months ago, though it was a little bit more expensive at the time (at $220) than the $180 or so it goes for currently at Memory Express. Before this I also ran a separate machine running 24/7 just for file sharing. I can really say that after getting that device I really can't live without it. I sure don't miss the hit to the electricity bill for running another machine and having to periodically reboot or update the OS on the file server. The NAS so far has been completely maintenance free.

I find the speed fantastic. Since this past year I've only bought digital distributions of games as opposed to hard copies, I've been keeping the files on the NAS. It probably takes about 10 minutes to copy a 6GB image from the PC to the NAS. My USB2.0 enclosure is certainly not that fast, though as you pointed out it is slightly quicker running a dedicated file server. This is most likely attributed to superior caching ability that a PC has to the DNS-323.