[hciman77]

I have decided I want a backup of my music files currently on CD - I figure 500gb will suffice and allow some future growth.

Can anybody reccomend a reliable external hard drive - my PC is a laptop so internal drives are not an option. I have seen plenty for sale but all (so far) have had patchy or too few reviews.

Cheers

 

[AFAI]

I have a Western Digital My Book, and its worked perfectly for a while now. I've been using WD HDD's for about 8 years, and never had one fail. You can find them on newegg.com for a good price. Another good brand is Seagate.

 

[hciman77]

Quote:

Originally Posted by AFAI /img/forum/go_quote.gif I have a Western Digital My Book, and its worked perfectly for a while now. I've been using WD HDD's for about 8 years, and never had one fail. You can find them on newegg.com for a good price. Another good brand is Seagate.

I have a 60GB USB WD and it is excellent but the larger WDs seem to be a bit less consistent according to the reviews I have seen...

For some reason reliability of larger drives seems more patchy - the missus and I have 7 smaller (up to 250gb) USB drives and they all work flawlessly...

 

[AFAI]

I have the 250 GB model too, so I can't speak for the others. I'd search around Maxtor too and see if they have one with good experiences.

 

[justin2net]

anything but maxtor. seagate 320 gig sata drives are really cheap nowdays and get the job done. put that in a external usb2 enclosure, and thats it.

 

[Gatticus]

Why don't you just buy an external USB HDD enclosure then you can use any HDD you like. I have three of these and use Samsung HDD's mostly but one is an old Maxtor. I personally like Samsung and Seagate HDD's with the nod going to Samsung because they are the quietest. You don't need to pay extra for speed for backup purposes, you just want reliable and cool running.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.p...nologies%20Inc.

You can also get these in SATA versions but SATA versions cost double what an IDE one does so just stick with IDE. Only thing I have found with these enclosures is to make sure you set the jumper to master and not cable select. Found that out the hard way.

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?minorcatid=1027

 

[Xakepa]

When comes to HDD, I'm buying noting but Seagate. I've been thru probably 100 HDD over the years and I recall only 1 clicking Seagate, but swarm of WDs, Quantums, Samsung etc. IMHO, for a backup drive reliability is everything, so I won't gamble.

 

[Andrew_WOT]

After extensive research I got myself new 400Gb Samsung and Azio enclosure from newegg. No complaints whatsoever, fast and very low noise.

 

[royewest]

Any drive can die eventually. You might look into an enclosure that can hold several drives and set them up as mirrors -- that way if one dies the other is typically still good and you can replace the bad one without losing data. A manual option is to have two external drives and alternate backups between them.