Recommended external USB drives

[JeffW]

Finally decided that external USB should be sufficient for my backup requirements. [I had thought a RAID NAS drive was best, but I think that's overkill.]

Any recommendations on brands? I bought a Seagate GoFlex 2TB USB 2.0 drive at BJ's for $100. Everyone else seems to have it for about $140+, so it seemed like a good deal (I haven't opened it yet, so I can return it). I'm not sure I want to run the Seagate software on it, but as just a straight USB drive, I'm hoping it's okay.

I've looked at reviews on Amazon & Newegg, and I'm not sure I've found any drive that's universally praised. Results seem very polar: either people are very satisified with them, or people seem to hate them (most often due to drive failures).

I'm also looking at a 1.5TB Iomega drive for about the same price. My father has a 1.0TB Iomega drive, I think purchased because at the time it seemed to have the fewest negative complaints.

My plan is to just use the drive for backups. Given what I read, I think I'd be reluctant to have the only copy of a file on those drives.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Jeff

 

[ctscribe]

Seagate

We have just used the Seagate to be our secondary back up of photos. it uploaded the photos from the hard drive no problem and access is simple. we have a 3T WD that is our primary back up. Have had no problems with either.

Seagate GoFlex 2TB USB 2.0 drive

 

[cp73]

Hi Jeff,

I have three external hard drives. Two are Western Digital and one is Simpletech. To be honest I dont think there is really much of a difference between all of them. I take a lot of digital pictures. I keep two of my external drives at home and one at work. The one I keep at work is a backup of all my files. I rotate the three drives about every six months. I believe one drive is about 350G, one is 1T and the newest is 2T. When I purchased them I always look for the best deal on them. I think my latest the 2T I purchased about two months ago for about $90 at Best Buy. I dont think you can go wrong with any of the brands on the market.

 

[ctscribe]

high price external harddrives

Due to recent flooding in Thailand the cost of external harddrives are up as the as most components come form Thailand and assembled.

 

[timeos2]

Speaking strictly from personal experience & the results I've seen from literally hundreds of customers over the past 25+ years I have to say that the Seagate line of hard drives - internal or usb/external style - have a better chance of a long life. Any drive - including Seagates - can and do fail however I've seen a horrendous failure rate for well over a decade with Western Digital vs a much lower failure rate for Seagates. It is so consistently the case that I have stopped using WD unless a customer demands it.

Years ago it was almost reversed with Seagate the "iffy" brand while WD was the Cadillac. But it changed and now appears to favor Seagate as the drive of choice. YMMV.

 

[JeffW]

Sounds like I probably can't do much better than what I have. I knew the $100 price at BJ's was a good one (Costco was I think close to $140, though for a USB 3.0 model). I know about the Thailand flooding, so I wasn't expecting to get a better price. I guess nothing is built "like it use to be", so you can probably run into a lemon no matter what you get.

Thanks for the input.

Jeff