What brand should I go for in finding an External Hard Drive

[nysulli]

if your carrying around your laptop constantly, i'd suggest a 2.5" external HD, the ones that are fully USB or firewire powered. very nice to carry around, i've got 4 of them myself, you might pay more per MB, but the seagate freeagent 160gig is only 110 at bestbuy atm, and should be plenty of storage for your needs

 

[krmathis]

LaCie make great external disks.
I have a 0.5TB one, which have been running without any problems for more than 4 years so far...

 

[jdimitri]

It doesn't really matter how long the warranty is does it?
When it screws up, you'll be more pissed about your data being gone than $100

I like the look of the WD and maxtor ones.. But i've personally had good luck with seagate ones

Personally i got a seagate 160gb drive and put it in an enclosure of my choice.. It's a tidbit cheaper and definitely smaller

I'm just wondering.. can i get the small ones used in the new ipod?

 

[nineohtoo]

I got a seagate as a secondary in my pc, but my external is a firewire WD mybook. They're on sale at costco for $140/500gb. Good deal.

 

[RYCeT]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bigizzy75 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Whats wrong with free agent?

It's bulky, inflexible, made of plastic & no power switch. You only able to place it standing up.

This is my favourite enclosure. It's using metal, have fan, quiet & never got hot. The only downside, the power adapter that came with it sucks & easily malfunction.

 

[shigzeo]

i use the wd mybook 500 professional edition which has dual 400 and 800 firewire and doubles as a host for those ports. wonderful. id rather not touch usb when hd are concerned... not after using firewire

 

[bigizzy75]

What if I got a portable Seagate Freeware? Like the smaller 80GB one. Will that be to bulky?

 

[Ice Nine]

I just bought a Maxtor (which has been bought out by Seagate) 750 gb external hard drive with one touch back-up on sale for $199 at Best Buy. I also have an HP external 300 gb that I also like a lot. Neither of these are portable but are great for storing media on.

 

[DanG]

Skip Western Digital. I bought a 400GB MyBook last Black Friday and had used it without too much difficulty for a little while. Then I tried to move my iTunes folder over and encountered an error. The result? All the music that had been "copied" was gone for good. As was absolutely everything else that had been on the MyBook.

Total piece of crap and a regrettable waste of $100. I'm never buying anything from that company again.

 

[FallenAngel]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RYCeT /img/forum/go_quote.gif This is my favourite enclosure. It's using metal, have fan, quiet & never got hot. The only downside, the power adapter that came with it sucks & easily malfunction.

That's the one I have with a 500GB SeaGate, cost me around $150 a few months ago for both. Only complaint so far is that the fan isn't that quiet, I'm using it with my HTPC and it's the loudest thing in the system. I regularly turn the fan off for the 2 hours when I'm watching a movie.

 

[acidbasement]

If portability is important, then get a USB or firewire powered external HDD. If not, get an enclosure and internal HDD, which, if you need portability, have the significant downside of requiring AC power.

 

[AlanY]

Does anyone have any good suggestions for raw 3.5" enclosures? It must support Firewire (don't care about FW400 vs. FW800, either is fine) and I do not want a fan. I would prefer a metal case due to their heat-dissipation/sinking properties, but I would consider plastic. I really like the look of the MyBook Pros (small, silver, no fan, Firewire), but I'd prefer to get an empty enclosure and add my own drive. Drive interface must be SATA.

Also, does anyone know if the MyBook Pros use SATA drives internally?

 

[AlanY]

Does anyone have any comments on the new My Book Studio series?
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/pro...74&language=en
I know it's not just an enclosure, but the 500 GB model is price-competitive with most of the enclosures+raw hard drives I've found that meet my requirements (fanless, Firewire, SATA, etc... Firewire usually adds to the price). It also has eSATA connectors which is nice for the future. Normally I would prefer a Seagate drive internally, but the current Seagate 7200.10 500GB drive is louder than their previous series (not on the spec sheet, but in many comments on NewEgg), so I'd probably end up going Samsung or WD anyway.

 

[John D.]

I've had a 250 GB Maxtor external for a couple of years now,
no problems so far!!!!!!!

 

[HardHeadCase]

Seagate/Maxtor