Can anyone recommend a reliable external hardrive please?

The_Grandmaster

Buffalo :j

John_Gray

Denty23 wrote: »

Ive been using External hard drives for a long time now, i have 2 external drives i use everyday. I have a Maxtor 300gb that i have had for about 2 and a half years and i have never had it fail on me yet and i have a 1TB Seagate Hard drive that i really do like you dont have to worry about turning it off when you power down your Pc it turns off by its self when your not using it. So i think ill be staying with Maxtor and Seagate for a long time to come.

I had a 300 GB Maxtor OneTouch II external drive which failed after 3 months; its replacement has been going for at least two years. It has the useful feature that the drive powers down after a minute or two when not in use, and takes about 15 seconds to power up again when data is wanted from it.

I've just bought a 2 TB Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Desk (no, not Disk, and what a snappy title!) and I'm not sure yet what causes agonising delays in displaying its directory structure on Windows Explorer. Other than that, it seems fine.

John_Gray

Knarf44 wrote: »

As JJ says above any brand of hard drive, internal or external can fail suddenly and without warning irrespective of its age. Always keep copies of your valuable and precious docs/photos on different media so there's no risk of losing them.

The most useful post in this thread, IMHO.
"Always back up your backups"!

familyfitz

Can anyone offer some advise on whether this is a good buy?

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=264482

I take with a pinch of salt the original price but at £79.99 it looked favourable compared to the Medion in Aldi today for 1TB @ £64.99 (I think it was).

TIA

A._Badger

familyfitz wrote: »

Can anyone offer some advise on whether this is a good buy?

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=264482

I take with a pinch of salt the original price but at £79.99 it looked favourable compared to the Medion in Aldi today for 1TB @ £64.99 (I think it was).

TIA

Seagate products are excellent - but google that price. Maplin is rarely the cheapest for anything.

Please do bear in mind what others have said about reliability. No hard drive will last forever. I've recently moved from Samsung (lousy support) and WD (had a few bad experiences with them) to Hitachi and Seagate but I realise they will all eventually fail. The issue is when.

Backup your backups!

familyfitz

A._Badger wrote: »

Backup your backups!

Thanks for that and yes, I will make back ups too just to be sure.. Will be nice to have a central place to store 'working' files of pics etc though..

Will google before purchasing too.

Thanks

Sherbert_DibDab

JJ_Egan wrote: »

Reason i post is you used the word reliable and a recent poster had to spend £500 recovering cherished pictures from a failed drive as she had no other copy's .

jje

My daughter dropped my seagate 500GB portable HD and it had everything on it. I haven't approached anyone about restoring it as I've had the HD go on my desktop and my laptop slide offa cooling tray so I was going to approach the same company for all, but if it's on that scale I have lost everything since 1998!

Do prices vary? A friend mine used to work with PC's for the police and he said the desktop HD would need to go to a clean room, but I haven't asked about the others as we don't catch up much now & I've had some health issues and am looking for a way to backup this semi broken laptop before it goes entirely.

I would need to explain my current issues with backing up and virus's etc on a seperate thread tho.

My Seagate freeagent was sturdy and survived a few drops by my teenagers & older children, I suppose I was lucky, under the circumstances. It's just that I've lost 3 HD's in about 5 months, and may lose a fourth if I can't back this 1 up.

I echo the sound advice of double back up. I did intend to transfer elsewhere once it was all on the portable but had some health issues that delayed it, and BOOM!

Is that a standard price then or can it vary?