Portable external hard drives

Cinquestelle

I was wondering if anyone was aware of any brand surveys/tests recently by Which? Magazine (or others) on the reliability of portable external hard drives.

Zandoni

I'd be inclined to buy a hard drive and a usb3 case seperately and put them together.



I'd do this because a lot of the new manufactured exernal hard drives have adapted circuit boards on them and if they fail you are more likely to lose your data.

Neil_Jones

There's only two manufacturers effectively of mechanical hard drives as a whole these days - Seagate and Hitachi.

Seagate make the Maxtor, Seagate and any (mechanical) Samsung drives that are still floating around, and Hitachi make the Hitachi/HGST, Western Digital and Toshiba drives.

Samsung SSD's are actually made by Samsung and all the other brands of SSDs effectively are self made but use technologies from other companies, primarily Toshiba.

That being said, the caddies tend to go before the hard drives but a lot of them are butchered to be unique to the caddy which makes it impossible to reuse later. You may want to look at buying a standard caddy with a standard connector and then use a normal desktop drive so you can replace/upgrade it later as needs be.

Chino

Neil_Jones wrote: »

There's only two manufacturers effectively of mechanical hard drives as a whole these days - Seagate and Hitachi.

Seagate make the Maxtor, Seagate and any (mechanical) Samsung drives that are still floating around, and Hitachi make the Hitachi/HGST, Western Digital and Toshiba drives.

Whereas this Wikipedia article claims:

"List of current hard disk drive manufacturers:

• Seagate Technology, including its subsidiary brands Maxtor and Samsung
• Toshiba
• Western Digital, including its subsidiary brand HGST"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_hardware_manufacturers#HDDs

PRAISETHESUN

I'd recommend Seagate or Western Digital drives. In my experience these drives last, and I've only ever had one drive fail on me after 5 years. The Seagate drives in particular use the standard SATA interface with a small circuit board to convert to USB so it can be removed from its case if you could prefer.


For good reviews of PC stuff I'd recommend looking at the Tom's Hardware forum or TechRadar

agrinnall

Having lost the contents of an external drive by dropping it on a hard surface I now use Transcend drives which have at least some extra shock protection.

arciere

ANY device can fail, even if you spend ££££ on it. You should always back-up your data, no matter what drive you are using.
If data is important, you should always have a backup somewhere else, so should the drive fail, it shouldn't be much of a concern. If the data is not that important, then no need to spend hundreds on something that can fail anyway any moment.

Neil_Jones

Chino wrote: »

Whereas this Wikipedia article claims:

"List of current hard disk drive manufacturers:

• Seagate Technology, including its subsidiary brands Maxtor and Samsung
• Toshiba
• Western Digital, including its subsidiary brand HGST"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_computer_hardware_manufacturers#HDDs

The assets to make Toshiba drives are still WD/HGST property and the labels are effectively the same design for both companies so technically what I wrote is still true.