Topic: External Hard Drives
started by: Common Citizen
Posted by Common Citizen on Jan. 09 2013,8:09 am
Do any of you tech gurus have a suggestion for an external hard drive make and model? Price range?I would like to use it to store personal confidential docs, family photos, etc...
My goal is to go paperless in 2013.
Posted by This is my real name on Jan. 09 2013,9:45 am
I use a Seagate GoAgent drive that I bought at Walmart about two years ago. I don't recall the price, but I'm guessing it was less than $30 for a 320GB drive. It still works fine, though the automatic backup hasn't been working as well as it had been - that might be due to the age of the my older computer, though (I am in the process of switching over). It works fine for copying things over manually to the drive.
Posted by Wolfie on Jan. 09 2013,11:15 am
I would stay away from Western Digital, as they have had too many issues with usb access due to poorly written firmware on the usb to drive interface. I currently hve three of them. 1 500 gb and 2 1tb usb externals that some times are recognized and most times not. No expected corectiver action from Western Digital on the horizon, and after reading the tech forums on WD.com I am not the only one. It also doesn't matter which operating system either as I am running from 98se to 7 on various machines including linux on a couple laptops. Kind of leads me to believe its not a system/OS issue, it has to be the firmware as when I plugg the Hard drive directly into the machine as a fixed unit its spotted and works flawlessly, so the drive is not an issue just the interface card between the drive and the usb bus. Sorry for the long read but I figured I could inpart some wisdom.
Posted by irisheyes on Jan. 09 2013,3:28 pm
< Toshiba Canvio 1TB - Radio Shack > I have this model. There is a 500 gb version also depending on what you need. You can encrypt your data up to 256-bit and have it password protected. I shut off the cloud backup (internet backup) and have photos, docs, etc. stored, as well as a backup of my entire hard drive in case of failure. I took the contents of my old hard drive and put it on a different computer using this.The reviews you see on Radio Shack aren't very good, mostly because there's only like one or two reviews, but I've had no cable or connection issues at all. I did a lot of review checks before purchase, but I usually check Amazon more for reviews.
The software takes a little time to get used to, but it seems to function well.
Posted by Common Citizen on Jan. 09 2013,4:05 pm
Thank you.
Posted by Glad I Left on Jan. 09 2013,6:04 pm
I would stay away from WD as well. I have had nothing but problems with them as well.My company bought 6 of them in 2009 and we did a ton of road testing in Canada and collected a crap load of data that we stored on these drives. 4 months later, 4 of the 6 were trash and the data was unrecoverable. About 300GB of data on each the 500GB hard drives and at least 400 man hours lost. Thanks WD.
I stick to Seagate mostly.
Posted by Grinning_Dragon on Jan. 10 2013,11:08 am
buffalo makes some real nice external devices, as well as NAS devices.As for western digital, it depends on what you get. Black dot drives are what you need to look for in a drive from WD. Since these are part of the enterprise line. The same holds true for Seagate drives as well, that you need to buy the enterprise level drives.
The other issue is WD is pretty much the leader in the IDE development, and Seagate is the leader in SAS, legacy-SCSI, Fibre, etc development.
Posted by Common Citizen on Jan. 17 2013,8:49 am
I keep hearing things about "clouds". I know Irisheyes keeps a dossier on me but the idea of storing all of your personal things over the internet with some other company doesn't sound very smart to me. What all the buzz?
Thoughts?
Posted by irisheyes on Jan. 20 2013,11:32 pm
I've been hesitant to use the cloud option on mine for that same reason. But if something happened to destroy your electronics like a fire, flood, tornado, locusts, etc. you'd likely lose your computer, external hard drive, and whatever other backups all at the same time. That's why it'd be nice to have important data on the cloud. Preferably if you could encrypt the data.Or, burn that same stuff on a disk and have a relative keep it in their safe. If you don't trust your relatives, give it to me and I'll keep it next to your dossier.
Posted by Common Citizen on Jan. 21 2013,9:40 am
Posted by nedkelly on Feb. 03 2013,7:55 pm
(Common Citizen @ Jan. 09 2013,8:09 am)
QUOTE
My goal is to go paperless in 2013.
No Charmin no more?
...nedNo more Charmin
Posted by hmmmnoidea on Feb. 07 2013,6:31 pm
I am on my 3rd drive..they go down just like a pc and you lose everything. !st one lasted about 7 years, 2nd one about 3 years. Cd's are good for about 5 years if you keep them stored right, but limited space. tigerdirect.com is where I ordered my last one from got a 2T for about 100.00 beats Walmart pricing hands down. If I could get internet where ever I went I would prolly use cloud or another online provider. I use my drive for keeping music, I DJ so it gets used alot. Hope that helps
Posted by Common Citizen on Feb. 10 2013,4:51 pm
(nedkelly @ Feb. 03 2013,7:55 pm)
QUOTE
(Common Citizen @ Jan. 09 2013,8:09 am)
QUOTE
My goal is to go paperless in 2013.
No Charmin no more?
...nedNo more Charmin
That's not a problem. I learned an efficient way to utilize crap paper from the Rangers. It's called Ranger paper. Utilizing one square, poke your finger in the middle, wipe, using your other hand...pull the square off your dirty finger and it comes away clean.
The loony left would call it sustainable environmental science. We called it rationing