1 terabyte external hard drives?

[Dances_With_Wiener_Dogs]

I've seen numerous 1 tb external hard drives for about $100, but don't know what brands are good and what brands to stay away from.

 

Any suggestions?

[Francois_Dumas]

I have three now.. Two from Iomega (they were the first I think) and one from Toshiba. All work fine so far.

[jmseattle]

Just bought one (Seagate) from Costco a couple of weeks ago. Plug and play via USB. Works great for backing up HD

[AZKomet]

Maxtor is a plug and play as well. Good job so far.

[tbloomq]

Maxtor is a plug and play as well. Good job so far.

 

fyi.. Maxtor was acquired by Seagate. Most likely they are the same quality level.

 

Tom

[Rogue_Trader]

I've just acquired a Western Digital, good value. You find a lot of their HDD's inside computers. Seagate also a good name, although I sense they are trying to "differentiate" their product, at a higher price.

[Mike O]

Steve,

 

Right up my alley.

 

The 1TB drives selling for $100 are consumer class products, 3.5" 7200 RPM drives with varying amounts of cache (memory used for read-ahead operations). Fundamentally, the disk drives from one of the five vendors currently manufacturers are basically the same in terms of performance, reliability and cost. Unless the product specifically states its from "Western Digital" or "Seagate", or ... you're not likely going to know WHAT drive is actually in that chassis. For example, Francois mentioned he has (2) Iomega units. Iomega does NOT make the drives, they merely OEM them from one of 5 manufacturers and most likely either Seagate or Western Digital (the current high volume consumer disk drive suppliers) I suspect unless it's specifically stated on the outside of the unit (or in the documentation) or unless one were to open the Iomega chassis, one does NOT really know who the drive manufacturer is that was used for that particular external disk drive.

 

If I were buying today, I'd stick with Seagate, or Western Digital branded units.

 

Mike O

[hANNAbONE]

+1 Seagate..!

[Dances_With_Wiener_Dogs]

Thanks folks! Time to go shopping.

[Jerry Johnston]

Can't tell you which are best because they're all much more cheaply made than the 5" hd's of years back. On the other hand they're much cheaper, smaller and hold more. The one drive I'd stay clear of is IBM's made by Toshiba. Most of the time I buy Western Digital and while they're made almost identical to Seagate I've had fewer go bad in a 3 to 4 yr span. I figure by this time next year they'll all be solid state drives.

[Charles Elms]

I have both Maxtor and a Western Digital 1/2 TB external USB drives. I would go with Western Digital. The Maxtor works ok but leaves 'serious' erros in the event log because of power saving spin down feature. No big deal, but I don't like to see the red icons when I review my event log.

[Dances_With_Wiener_Dogs]

I ordered a WD Passport, 500 gb. I think part of my decision was the 500gb are powered by the USB cable. The 1tb and larger drives also need a AC power adapter which makes them more of a hassle to transport.

[Gregori]

Funny - I've always avoided Western Digital. (And Maxtor - ugh.)

You'll find that a WD drive is in a significant number of the low-buck units. As of last year or so, Maxtor is now the cheapie line sold by Seagate.

 

Seagate, Toshiba, Hitachi are all generally good HD makers. But - as with everything else - you get what you pay for.

 

I've always made my OWN external hard drives. You can buy your drive of choice (speed, capacity, durability) and your enclosure of choice (interface, noise, size, power options, and other features) instead of being stuck with what some marketing department decided would be "acceptable" compromises to hit some target retail price point.

 

Currently, my enclosure of choice sports a Seagate 1 TB drive, and offers USB 2.0, Firewire 800, and eSATA connectors - so I can hook it up to any of my computers at the fastest speeds (currently) possible on any of them. (I LOVE eSATA - it's pretty much indistinguishable in speed throughput from an internal drive.)

 

However - I paid more for the empty enclosure than you're looking to spend on the whole device. So ultimately, your choice of solutions should be driven by your needs and intended use. If it's just a backup of what's on your desktop (or laptop) then a 'cheap' drive with just USB is fine. (Note that ALL hard drives will fail eventually, so have a backup plan in place, and actually DO the backups.) but if you want to actually *work* off the external drive, get a good one.

 

 

 

[Mike O]

(and cost effective too!)

 

Mike O

[Joel]

I've been using a 250 gb WD Passport for a couple of months to backup my work product and home PC documents so that I've got access to almost all my data almost all the time, in a device that isn't much bigger than a wallet and needs only a USB cable. Pretty nifty and inexpensive. Time will tell how durable it turns out to be.

[stubble!]

Well since Steve already bought his drive, the only thing I can offer is that one of my seagate Freeagent USB drives failed two years after purchase. First problem I've had with any of them. Five minutes at Seagate.com, and I had a replacement two days later. I paid $20 for the advanced shipment, which included a paid return label.

 

I was pretty impressed with their warranty handling. No questions asked.