[External Backup Storage] Platters be breaking like it's a Greek wedding...

Inquisitor77

Hey y'all, I'm in the market for a good external storage device and was hoping to get recommendations from all the cool kids on what to buy. About 2 TB should suffice in terms of size. I don't necessarily need NAS - I just want something that I can keep connected to my desktop and store stuff on every once in a while. In addition, I have a laptop that I'm going to wipe and give away, so I will want to shove all of its contents into the external drive as well in case I need to retrieve some random document that I forgot I needed.

Speed isn't really the issue for me so much as reliability. Every time I want to pull the trigger on something, I hear horror stories from people about how X brand failed and Y brand will die 6 months in and you can't do anything about it. Are there any models out there that are known for being extremely reliable?

Thanks muchly!

Foomy

Synology is one of the best reviewed brands if your looking for a NAS: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822108095 is a great 2 disk NAS. and then 3tb hdds run about $140 each, for a total cost of about $500.

for single disk usb external drives, this seagate is generally well regarded: http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00829THQE/thewire0f-20

The actual drives in any enclosure are only made by 1 of 3 companies still in the HDD game, with WD and Seagate being the main 2 as far as 3.5" desktop drives go, and the technology and parts they use are very very similar. So while your going to see people saying stay away from "X", you'll see an equal number decrying the other company, neither is better in reliability.

But hdds will do what all hdd do, and that is at some point they fail, some people go 10 years, some 6 months, but at some point 100% of drives fail. and the only people who really bother to post reviews are the unlucky folks who end up with the shorter lifetime drives.

Personally I would suggest going with the NAS solution, and then running the drives in a raid 1 configuration, your only getting 3tb of storage, but if one drive fails you won't lose your data.

Unknown

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Inquisitor77

Thanks for the responses! I'm not sure I want to shell out hundreds of dollars for a NAS solution... The most I was hoping to spend was $150 or so. Good info about the warranty - I'll make sure to look at the small print on the warranty before deciding on something.

Alecthar

electricitylikesme wrote: »

These days you're best getting WD - they have a 3 year warranty vs the Seagate 1 yr.

Of course, Seagate drives don't lie about their SMART data.

Meh. You say toe-may-toe, I say READ ERROR.

MichaelLC

I posted about it in my RaspPi thread, but worth repeating here:

Got a good deal on a Seagate 2TB external drive over Black Friday. Organized and moved a bunch of my files off my laptop, then unplugged everything so I could set it up it up with the RaspberryPi.

Next day, plugged in the drive's power: Bzzzt....pop! Plugged it into the laptop; no go. Turns out I plugged in the laptop's power, which is the same round plug as the Seagate. Burned out the controller board.

Managed to recover most of my stuff, but lesson learned. Think I'll go with a solid-state solution which does not require external power.

Inquisitor77

I would love a SSD solution since that is probably the most physically stable storage medium. The problem is that it costs $$$$ when you get into the TB+ range of data.

For those who are curious, I went with this 3 TB Seagate Backup Plus. It's at the same price as the 2 TB model right now, so I figured it was a good deal. My current backup storage is a Seagate, and it's held up pretty well.

Thinking back I've had both WD and Seagate externals fail on me, but both cases were the 2.5" cheap travel versions, so that might have had something to do with it...

Thanks everyone!