Recommendations for USB hard drive

enfield_freddy

the usb dock I mentioned earlier works on both usb 2 and usb3 , I tried several from amazon , inc ones with card readers and usb slots , most would not "release" and entailed me rebooting if I wanted to insert a different drive. the one I have pointed to , works great on win 7 and win 8.

S0litaire

agrinnall wrote: »

I was a bit worried at first that my £850 would disappear pretty quickly with only 8Gb to fill up, but luckily both drives you mention are TB not Gb (c. 8,000 times more space) so should last for a while .

I blame the meds!
Had day surgery yesterday. Drugs not totally out of my system... Lol

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!!! ^__~

Biggles

enfield_freddy wrote: »

the usb dock I mentioned earlier works on both usb 2 and usb3 , I tried several from amazon , inc ones with card readers and usb slots , most would not "release" and entailed me rebooting if I wanted to insert a different drive. the one I have pointed to , works great on win 7 and win 8.

I assumed the point of a dock was that drives would just slot in and out. Are you saying you need to reboot your PC each time with most of them? That doesn't sound good.

enfield_freddy

what was happening with cheaper versions off the dock was,


insert drive , turn on , read / copy files etc


press power button off , remove drive , insert new one , power on


info from old drive was still in file explorer ,


the one I have pointed to , yes I use its power button , but it shows the correct drive and works well


I have a collection of older drives , each labelled , and actually given weird drive letters , the above dock works well on win 7 and win 8,

Kaimoo

We have two wd 1T and 2T the smaller of the two has failed for no reason, it was almost two years old packed full of important photos which will now need to be recovered professionally if it's possible.

If it's important we now make back ups of back ups

S0litaire

enfield_freddy wrote: »

...
...

insert drive , turn on , read / copy files etc


press power button off , remove drive , insert new one , power on


info from old drive was still in file explorer ,
...
...

That's the problem.

Their is an option to either "Eject" or "safely remove" the drive if you right click on it BEFORE turning the power off on the hard drive. You might have to click on the small rectangle next to the time in Win7 and use that to eject the USB dock.

Most hard drive don't write everything to the drive the moment you send it, their can be a delay for a few seconds to a few mins depending on how busy the machine is. The "safely remove option makes sure everythig is writen to the drive before unmounting it and it being safe to power of and remove.

[Deleted User]

Currently, Which? has Buffalo as the most reliable, but fault rates are not particularly impressive even so:

Buffalo 11%
then
Toshiba 17%
Hitachi 18%
Seagate 18%

Apple had the worst fault rate (49%), but scored the highest for customer satisfaction. :huh:

enfield_freddy

S0litaire wrote: »

That's the problem.

Their is an option to either "Eject" or "safely remove" the drive if you right click on it BEFORE turning the power off on the hard drive. You might have to click on the small rectangle next to the time in Win7 and use that to eject the USB dock.

Most hard drive don't write everything to the drive the moment you send it, their can be a delay for a few seconds to a few mins depending on how busy the machine is. The "safely remove option makes sure everythig is writen to the drive before unmounting it and it being safe to power of and remove.

however the one posted above works correctly , several other brands on amazon did not

agrinnall

S0litaire wrote: »

I blame the meds!
Had day surgery yesterday. Drugs not totally out of my system... Lol

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!!! ^__~

Hope they've worn off now, as you should really also change b (bits) to B (bytes).

A.Penny.Saved

Biggles wrote: »

Hmm, thanks for all those suggestions.

I hadn't considered (or even knew about) a hard drive dock. That could suit me better than a HD, as I already keep a regular 'full backup' on a USB HD but am looking for something to replace my separate 'generational' long-term backups, which are presently done on DVDs. The concept reminds me somewhat of the old Omega 'Zip Drives' of several years ago.

My PC dates from 2010, so doesn't have USB3, but I guess it would be useful in my new drive/dock.

If your PC has a spare PCI-express slot then you could add a USB3.0 expansion card, they only cost about £10 to £15. I built my previous PC in 2008 and it had PCI-e slots. If yours was a pre-built machine then the number of slots could be very limited.

USB3.0 is a considerable upgrade over USB2.0 and is a lot faster and can transfer data in both directions at the same time whereas USB2.0 cannot.