Best portable hard drive - reliability?

Goodadvice75

Hi,

We're looking to buy a 1tb portable hard drive to do back-ups of photos, docs etc., and download movies to.

Have had a look at Dabs which seems to offer good deals.

We're considering:

Western Digital My Passport
Samsung S2
Buffalo Ministation (shock proof, seems very rugged)

Have read reviews on consumer sites (Comet etc) and all of them have good and bad - but quite a few for Samsung saying these failed after a few months and data was lost.

Pls can anyone comment on reliability or point me in the direction of any independent reliability reports? We're looking for something which will last us a good few years, hence going for a 1tb whereas we don't really need that much storage.

Don't know much about Buffalo, but we think Western Digital are fairly well respected.

Many thx for any advice/recommendations.

m5rcc

What's your budget?

A Verbatim Store ‘n’ Go is an unbeatable deal for a portable external hard disk

Goodadvice75

Hi there,

Thanks for your reply. They all seem to be around the £80 to £90 so wouldn't want to be spending much more than this if we can avoid it.

How much is the Verbatim one and are they well regarded? I've seen them come up as we've been searching online but don't know hadn't really heard much about them before.

Many thx.

flashsnaps

Hi,

I work for an IT Company and we see a lot of failed Western Digital external drives coming through for data recovery. I wouldn't use these! or Verbatim, cheap!

We use Toshiba external drives, not the cheapest or most expensive. But reliable and comes with 3yr warranty.

lionelator

I have 4 Samsung Story Station 2TB externals, very reliable over about 2 years now and 90 quid nets you 2 TB.

robmar0se

Please don't use a WD passport - they use proprietary PCBs, and pins which means if one did need to remove the drive from the plastic case it has proprietary pins which makes it useless. Don't know about others as WD did have a good reputation, but their external hdd's seam to be very troublesome of late so see a lot of them with probs.

You are better off buying your own sata caddy and a sata hdd drive separately - Samsung have a good track record for reliability. Then at least you have greater flexibility too.

arriva

External HD fail for the same reason laptops HD do. Because they are "portable".

Shocks and vibrations are the worst enemies for hard drived, this is the reason why desktops are more reliable than laptops. Less chances to get shaken, dropped etc. They also run cooler.

Even the simple action of carrying the laptop from one room to another then place it on a table while it is on can damage the internal HD.
You can imagine the damage when an external HD is knocked over. Yes, because it is fashionable to have ext HDrives propped upright nowadays... why..???:(
Ah, OK... heat dissipation, takes less space on your desk.. then what? you unintentionally pull the cable and down it goes.

If you buy an external HD then kick it around while it is spinning then the model doesn't matter much because all of them are going to fail sooner or later (quite soon I'd say).

Rugged? It means it gets hotter.

Also some switches do not power on/off the the drive correctly as a computer would. Then how many times we "cannot eject the mass storage device" so we just switch it off or simply unplug it? That's not good for the HD either.

Warranties are worthless as they do not included data recovery.

As you can see I have very little trust in external hard drives as a mean to backup data. It should be the other way round. backup your ext HD data onto your computer... :rotfl:

PS: however I do use ext HD to temporarily save data but they sit horizontally on a "pillow" made of an antistatic back filled with a slice of foam and never touched while in operation. They still fail though... :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

marms

robmar0se wrote: »

Please don't use a WD passport - they use proprietary PCBs, and pins which means if one did need to remove the drive from the plastic case it has proprietary pins which makes it useless. Don't know about others as WD did have a good reputation, but their external hdd's seam to be very troublesome of late so see a lot of them with probs.

You are better off buying your own sata caddy and a sata hdd drive separately - Samsung have a good track record for reliability. Then at least you have greater flexibility too.

The Samsung S2 drives also use proprietary PCBs with the USB socket connected directly to the drive, the WD Elements portable drives use a standard Scorpio blue drive and are as reliable as any make.

smos585

marms wrote: »

The Samsung S2 drives also use proprietary PCBs with the USB socket connected directly to the drive, the WD Elements portable drives use a standard Scorpio blue drive and are as reliable as any make.

We've had 2 WD elements exthdd 's go, one was the drive, the other was the internal board.

So go with Samsung, but if Marms is right, not the S2.

Robmar0se: Please don't use a WD passport - they use proprietary PCBs, and pins which means if one did need to remove the drive from the plastic case it has proprietary pins which makes it useless. Don't know about others as WD did have a good reputation, but their external hdd's seam to be very troublesome of late so see a lot of them with probs.

Should add three things 1 WD passport use a proprietary virtual CD software partition which is awkward to get rid of. 2 Comments regarding WD & Samsung hdds is based on our workshop expereince, not just individual retail user's opinion. 3 We see very little of Buffalo, could be good, or maybe not a lot around; not even sure at the moment whose hdds they are using.

jayme1

literally any hard drive can fail, the key is to never have all your eggs in one basket, buy 2 hard drives and keep them backed up identically, then if one fails quickly buy another hard drive and copy all your stuff from the working one to the new one and then the waiting happens all over again.

if you back up all your stuff to one place you're asking for trouble.

all my HDDs are western digital none have failed yet, I've had a samsung one fail on me once but as I say any HDD can fail you just have to bite the bullet and hope for the best and protect yourself by not having all your data on one drive.

Wootball

I've got both the WD and the Buffalo, and they're both excellent. The Buffalo is smaller and uses USB for power and data transfer so I'd recommend that, but both have been very reliable.