choosing a hard drive

aqueoushumour01

Im looking to buy an external hard drive for my laptop (ideally at least 160gb but probably more like 500gb) and would like to know which brands are the most reliable, and which I should avoid. I've looked on amazon and i've seen maxtor, seagate and western digital. what are these like?

I'd be running software from it so I imagine the faster the better so will probably go for a 7200rpm and i'd like it to be powered by usb ideally. anyone got any recommendations, and other things i should be looking for?

Marty_J

I think if you stuck to those brands, you'd be fine.

You'll get some that'll tell you Western Digital are rubbish, and they'll only use Seagate, and you'll find just as many who say Seagate are rubbish and they only use Western Digital, and so on.

They're the main brands, and I have used them all without incidence.

evilgoose

its been a while since bought external drive, had an external Lacie drive it was usb powered, very neat device. I not sure if you'll get a 7200rpm powered through usb. What may find is that if you power through usb it will drop its spin speed down, but then if mains powered it will speed itself back up. usb can only supply upto 5v I think. I probably out of date with the info now though.

I've had a western digital disk die on me, but their support was excellant and I got a replacement from them, as said above you'll get people who swear by one brand and others by another.

The worst disks we had were fujitsu, literally we had a batch of 25-30 of them die at less than a year old in the summer weather. (That was obviously a bad batch!)

totalsolutions

Why the extra costs for an ext. unit? Just put the biggest you can get straight into the laptop and go from there....

esbo

[edit - I am no longer sure if USB2 speed does actually limit the speed, from my calculations in a later post it would
appear not, USB1 however would limit the speed]


I think the speed of the drive is pretty irrelevant as it is the data link which is the limiting factor, mine is USB 2 and in tests I did a copy took about 2.5 to 3 times longer than an internal drive to drive copy (approx figures) however thats plenty fast enough to play a video from. I think it is possible to get faster transfers than that with firewire 800 and ethernet but you will pay for that, for example £100+for a 500gb drive, whereas my USB2 cost £60 here:-
http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/371335/IOMEGA-500GB-EXTERNAL-HARD-DRIVE

Some very good reviews here!!
http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/product/B000JVRQUW/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt/202-9655232-1750233?%5Fencoding=UTF8&showViewpoints=1
I did read a bad one elsewhere where someone said he lost all his data, but maybe he dropped it!! (Must have been Cain's, the last on the page!!).
Thing is as they don't need to run at full speed they should be more reliable and quiet. mine actually was inaudiable next to my computer.

Whatever you do make sure it is not USB 1, that's a snails pace. Failures for devices like these tend to follow the bathtub curve, so either very early or very late, but with very little in between. I am going to give mine a 'good thrashing' early on when it is under warranty

barjam_2

our laptops are getting so full up with kids rubbish (not rubbish to them:rolleyes: )
so hubby bought this from pc world http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/store/pcw_page.jsp?BV_SessionID=@@@@2139310389.1215940508@@@@&BV_EngineID=cccladeeilfldedcflgceggdhhmdgmk.0&pageFrom=SimpleSearchProducts&page=Product&sku=324729

ordered it online for instore pick up
seems ok so far also got 3 year gaurantee also its mains powered

aqueoushumour01

totalsolutions wrote: »

Why the extra costs for an ext. unit? Just put the biggest you can get straight into the laptop and go from there....

i would prefer to put an internal drive in but the issue i have is I would somehow have to copy everything over from my current hard drive to my new one. I didn't get a Wn XP installation disk with my laptop so i wouldn't be sure how to install the OS onto the new one, so it seems simpler to get a new external hard drive.

Unless I have two slots in my laptop - i don't know, i'll have to open it up when i feel brave enough to do so.

If i do get an external drive, will the usb 2 be fast enough for my computer to run (RAM and CPU consuming) software from it?

totalsolutions

Nothing to open up. Look for a screw or two on a side cover panel, remove & then just another small screw and the drive slides out (there is a little plastic/flexi bit to help removal)

Backup up your docs to a cd then.
Look for a hidden recovery partition on the drive and burn that to a cd.
External drives are always slower.

Avoriaz

totalsolutions wrote: »

Why the extra costs for an ext. unit? Just put the biggest you can get straight into the laptop and go from there....

That probably makes sense.

What is the biggest disk currently available for laptops that normally use 2.5 inch drives rather than the bigger 3.5 inch drives used in desktop and tower pcs etc?

Last time I looked 160gb appeared to be the biggest 2.5 inch drive available.

That should be plenty big enough for all but the very largest software installation though 2.5 inch drives are more expensive per gb than 3.5 inch drives.

I have an 80 gb internal drive on my laptop that is only about 40 % full. It has everything I need regularly. I use a couple of 250 gb 3.5 inch drives in USB caddies to store my backups, video and music files etc. It only takes a minute to attach and use them when necessary

esbo

Actually I am not to sure if USB 2 does limit the speed or not, I need to go through
my figures again. I am backing up some data and my estimate of the data rate is
2 minutes per GB or 0.5GB per minute which is 8.33 MBytes/second, assuming 8
bits to a byte thats 66 Mbits/second. USB2 can do 480 Mbit/s so it is certainly not
limiting the speed by my maths. USB1 can only manage 12Mbits/s so it's certaintly
not USB1, but then I am a bit puzzled as to why it is so much slower than internal
driver to drive, copy, about 40% of the speed, I am not sure what the bottle neck
is, maybe it is deliberately slowed down to make it so quite, it is inaudible compared
to the other drives on the computer, but then it is totally unfragmented.
It looks like it will take 2 hours 20 minutes to back up 68.4 GB. Thats about 1/2
a GB a minute. Which would mean 8 hoursish to back up 250GB, but then thats
a hell of a lot of data and I can do it unobtrusively in the background, or over night.
I will have to see how it compares to other drives but I am finding it hard to get the
figures. It's not a problem really as I will rarely be shifting such vast amounts of
data about but I will have to do some more research to explain the numbers.

What kind of data rates are other people getting when backing up data to their
external drives?

Another thing I am pondering is seeing if I can open it up and take the drive and
and put it inside my computer as an internal drive, but that would invalidate the
warrently (assuming they found out!!).

I may also reformat it to NTFS from FAT32.

Marty_J

USB's maximum raw data speed is 480 Mbit/s. However, the full theoretical real-world speed is about 60 Mbit/s, but most devices actually operate at a much slower speed and 8.33 Mbit/s certainly isn't bad.

If data transfer speeds are an important consideration in an external drive, Firewire 400 will generally provide faster real-world performance than USB 2.