What Brand of External Hard Drive?

[drcandon]

Well..not to put to fine a point on it..it is not the cheap crappy enclosure or how pretty it looks but what is on the inside that counts - the drive itself...

I have been in IT for too many years to count and the only drives I buy are Seagates...and they do get discounted you just have to look around..Since I don't want any litigations I am not going to comment on which drives are the crappiest, but all I can say is when a company backs it up with a 5year warranty and 100,000 hours (CONTIUOUS) or more or MTBF on drives then that says something...

Here in Canada, Future shop repackages their own drives and one month they had WD's in them,next month Seagates..I pick one up check out the serial and internal numbers - if it is a brand I have long experience with I keep it - othewise back it goes...

But with all external drives..when they say they are portible - and IF you want to keep you data - treat then like a carton of eggs...IMHO

 

[GrillMouster]

...the only drives I buy are Seagates...

I agree. Seagate barracudas are made for servers, where they are expected to run continuously for years.

 

[Groucho]

Seagates are hard to beat just because of the warranty. There's a very good chance that your drive will fail, I wouldn't buy anything with less than a 3-year warranty and a 5-year is even better.

Seagates certainly aren't immune to failure, but none of them are.

As others have said, the "no-name" ones are always just about always a name-brand drive in a basic case. At work, we recently had a customer with a Simpletech external drive, one-year warranty, that failed. I cracked it open, found a Seagate 160g drive inside, and got it replaced under Seagate's 5-year warranty.