Category: Geeks r Us
Hi guys.
I am looking for an exterior hard drive with at least 1 Tb of room. There are a lot of possibilities out there. I figured I would ask this community because a lot of you guys are tech savy and you can give more trustworthy, non-bias information about certain ones. I haven't really used an exterior hard drive before so it will be interesting to see what happens when I plug it in to this computer. I will mostly use it to store music. If you could please tell me the type, the pros and cons of it, and any other advice you have for me in regards to exterior hard drives I would appreciate it a lot. Thanks.
Oh, dear.
That's external drive, and most are quite good. I would stay away from Lacie drives, because they're extremely proprietary, meaning you can't put another drive in the enclosure it's built for. I'd go for a my book drive, and you can get them in four tb in size.
The My Books are good drives, but one thing you have to consider is whether or not you want this drive to be completely portable. If so, you should go for a My PassPort, which runs off of just USB power and not an adapter. Tosheba and CGate are also good brands.
No. Western digital sucks. They die quickly.
Lol. Not sure why I said exterior but glad you know what I meant. I told you I am not an I T person. I heard a lot of good things about the ones that you can hook up by means of USB connection. Keep the suggestions coming.
I have a c gate 4 TB drive that cost me 139 which was advertised on blind bargons. Honestly, if you get a 4 TB and fill that puppy up in one year I want to know where are you getting your media content from? No seriously, this drive should do you fine.
exterior is an app term. The drive is outside. Smile.
I'd look at warrentee. 3 years is good, but anything can die. 3 years give you the confort of knowing the company will repair and try to save your data in the event of a crash.
Always good to pack up.
Cloud services are becoming so cheap, it might be worth a look as well.
I'd also go with one powered by USB, less stuff to worry about.
Other than that, shop for best price.
I like Western Digital.
External drives are so cheap these days that you might as well spend a few extra dollars to get that 2,3, or 4 TB if you can.
I highly suggest a service such as CrashPlann (this is what I use) or Carbinite (one I haven't used but plan to try.)
You can have all this data backed up in case the drive fails (and its not a matter of if, its a matter of when...)
Carbinite is $49 a year for unlimited storage.
I forget how much I paid for CrashPlan but that is also unlimited storeage. I paid for 4 years of storage with that service.
You might as well go with a USB 3.0 drive even if you don't have hardware that supports it. 3.0 is backward compatible, and if you ever upgrade your hardware, they'll all come with at least 1 USB 3.0 port as a standard option now.
Like others have said, go with the sigate. I have one of these drives, and have had it for about four years now.
I've used both Seagate and Western Digital drives. I could say good things about both. However, I've had one of my Western Digital drives for almost 3 years now, and the other for just over a year, and neither shows any signs of slowing down. I would say the person who said they die quickly just had bad luck. The one thing I will say is that Western Digital's built-in backup software isn't accessible, so just format the drive when you buy it, and get rid of it. That way, you have the max available space to store your files, and you don't have to worry about an inaccessible application that you won't use anyway.
As for these cloud services like Carbonite, how accessible are they? I've been wanting to use one for awhile now, but don't want to throw money away on something that won't work with Jaws.
I cant speak for carbinite, as I haven't tried it yet. when I do, i'll report back.I can speak for CrashPlann though .
This service works very well. It'll work good with jaws as long as you are ok with using the jaws curcer to click around.
If you have problems, all you need to do is call code42 software and they'll be more than happy to do a screen capture and fix whatever issues you have if you cant find/do it yourself with jaws. These guys have been nothing but helpful.
Hi,
As someone who has processed thousands of hard drives over the past 2.5 years I can assure you that they are all as bad as each other. Consumer grade storage is designed in such a way that maximises capacity & decreases costs, so compared to the drives of yesteryear, anything you buy will be extremely unreliable.
A good but not overly expensive solution would be to buy two drives of the same capacity but made by different companies & duplicate your files accross them. This way, if for example your Seagate drive is hit with a firmware problem that is suddenly affecting lots of other owners, you'll be able to get at all of your files from your Hitachi while your Seagate is being fixed.
I recommend people buy the drive with the longest warranty. Warranties *never* include data recovery (hense the importance of backups), but at least once you've lost ££££ worth of data you'll be able to get a recertified external drive for free.
Cheers,
Ben.
Oh, blind bargons has a 5 TB posted at this time check it out.