External Hard Drive recommendations please

[Golf4food]

Well, I had been wanting to get an external HD for many months now and never got around to it... now our iMac is dead and everything that was on it is lost except for the photos, which I also store on Flickr. So I am certainly now going to be getting an external HD! I'd like to keep it around $100 or less (new house, two mortgages for the time being, etc.!). Any good recommendations? Doesn't need to be huge, mainly concerned with reliability.

 

[kmadams]

Well, I had been wanting to get an external HD for many months now and never got around to it... now our iMac is dead and everything that was on it is lost except for the photos, which I also store on Flickr. So I am certainly now going to be getting an external HD! I'd like to keep it around $100 or less (new house, two mortgages for the time being, etc.!). Any good recommendations? Doesn't need to be huge, mainly concerned with reliability.

Hi,

I don't have any great recommendations, just to warn you to not count on the external hard drive as a back up, use DVD's too. One month I had the hard drive on my computer fail, and 2 weeks later the external hard drive also failed. So now everything has a second backup on DVD's.

 

[MICKEY88]

I personally use a dock, and internal drives, this allows me to swap out drives quickly and also keeps the drives running at a lower temp since they aren't in an enclosure..

 

[Golf4food]

Hi,

I don't have any great recommendations, just to warn you to not count on the external hard drive as a back up, use DVD's too. One month I had the hard drive on my computer fail, and 2 weeks later the external hard drive also failed. So now everything has a second backup on DVD's.

I will certainly be doing that as well, but on a less frequent basis, probably. DVD monthly, EHD nightly, perhaps.

 

[scoot241]

I've never had a problem with Western Digital hard drives. I just purchased a 1TB internal drive.

 

[mike_r]

I've never had a problem with Western Digital hard drives. I just purchased a 1TB internal drive.

I second the western digital drives, I have about 4 external ones in different sizes(160gb to 1TB) and never a problem with them. The 1TB i got from dell.com about a month ago and paid $95.00 for it.

 

[Groucho]

Seagate has easily the best warranty. I would be inclined to go with an external case and put in a drive myself, but if you're not confident in your abilities, you may want to buy a ready-made one. (It's not hard to put them together!)

I'd recommend getting on NewEgg's mailing list. Just a few days ago, they had an internal Seagate 1tb drive for $80.

Still, I wonder consider your alternatives - like online backup. Mozy is $5 month (cheaper when you buy one or two years at once, and you can find discount codes online too - supposedly I can even give a 10% referral discount via my account but I don't see how right now )... there are plusses and minusses to online vs an external drive, but IMHO unless you have a slow internet connection and are backing up massive quantities of data, online backup wins every time. Once you set it up, there's literally nothing to do. No worry of the drive going bad, no manually configuring backups (which can be a real misery sometimes)... it just sits in the background and takes care of things. (And it does support Macs.) Carbonite is another alternative though Mozy generally gets the nod as being the better product.

Remember that with hard drives, they can continue to appear to work for a while after they're beginning to fail, too, and you won't notice unless you actively test the drive. (Many failing hard drives used for your operating system are only noticed when a necessary system file gets lost and the computer won't boot anymore; with the nature of backups, you're unlikely to notice the drive failing until it completely gives up the ghost.)