I need some advice before buying a external hard drive

burtons

I'm looking to buy a 1TB external hard drive from argos for my laptop so could someone tell me what brands I should stay away from and what's the difference between these models.
Maxtor M3 1TB External Portable Hard Drive.
Seagate Backup Plus Portable 1TB Hard Drive.
Seagate BUP Slim Portable 1TB Hard Drive.
Toshiba Canvio Basics 1TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive.
Seagate 1TB Portable 2 Year Rescue Service.
WD Elements 1TB Portable Hard Drive.
Seagate Backup Plus Ultra 1TB Hard Drive.

forever.insane

I tend to buy Seagate when I need to. Ive never had an issue. My HDD is a Seagate, while my ssd is a Samsung.

I've also used western digital. In fact I had the wd element's 1tb and had no issue with it.

agrinnall

Having lost a lot of data by dropping a hard disk I now buy Storejet drives.

kwikbreaks

I just took a look at the first drive you mentioned and the Argos specs are poorly written - says USB2 and USB3 which is just telling you which ports it will work on and not what its so you probably need to check the specs elsewhere before buying to get answers if those answers are important to you. Unless there was a big price difference I'd get a USB3 type unless I only had USB2 ports and had no plans to upgrade PC for quite a while as they are noticeably faster,

There are 2 basic types of external drive (excluding network attachable types)...

Portable are typically 2.5" laptop drives which are powered by the USB lead some older/cheaper ones use 2 ports with a split lead to satisfy their power requirement)

External drives are typically 3.5" desktop drives and require a separate power brick. They are quite large physically in comparison to portable drives.

USB2 are potentially slower than USB3 drives if you connect them to a USB3 port. Either type will work on either type of port.

I wouldn't worry too much about branding so long as it is a recognisable brand.

were

Although I have bought Seagates, I tend to avoid them as had in the long past reliability issues.
They should hopefully be similar. Unless you have had many 100's of each, at the same time, doing the same thing, it is hard to say which one is better, but I would go for the one with the longest warranty.

John_Gray

As always (and as said above), it is a matter of luck which models from whichever manufacturer will last and which will fail. Even drives of the same model and manufacturer will have different failure rates.
Always plan for the situation when your drive will fail.

I tend to choose one about a third of the way up from the cheapest available at the time. This is an entirely arbitrary decision!

Heedtheadvice

Really all the preceding is good advice!

As an alternative to David's recommendation of buying biggest bang for your buck (you do need one big enough to last several years of data etc. as a minimum) if this is your only backup device then, provided you can afford to buy sufficient size I would consider buying two slightly smaller units rather than one big one - if that is the only consideration, and the 2.5 laptop type drives. Firstly it means you can take two backups on two different devices (always preferable) and do a simple but good backup regime. If one fails then you have another! Secondly the laptop varieties, designed for portable machines tend to be a bit more physically robust should you be unfortunate enough to drop one!

As has been posted on other threads only the two main manufacturers now and probably not much to choose between them, so as mentioned above, could be best just to get one well warranted from the cheapest store rather than just looking in the high street.

toshi

Some consideration:

Bigger capacity
Longer Warranty (WD offers 3 years)
Price (of course!)

As people mentioned, the quality is a lottery game, Maxtor has been owned by Seagate, I often buy WD, but I have got a Seagate 2TB USB as it was cheap, but its hard disk was made by Samsung. (Samsung sold their hard disk division to Seagate). So the brand would be irrelevant now ?

Decision time ! If I would choose one from Argos, I would buy Toshiba 2TB because of Price/capacity. Extra £20 for 1TB isn't bad.

http://www.argos.co.uk/product/4994978

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Other option but I am not sure if this would suit your requirement.

1) Replace your existing hard disk with a SSD
2) Use the existing hard disk as an external hard disk with USB enclosure.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/ORICO-2-5-inch-Transparent-HDD-Case-USB3-0-to-Sata-3-0-Tool-Free-5/32799107509.html