External Hard Drive recommendations?

Hi all,

I'm looking to buy an external hard drive for my pics, as the computer is getting full and feels like its struggling.

I'm looking at about a 500gb capacity.

Can anyone recommend a good one?

Have seen western digital my-book
Freecom
Seagate freeagent


Regards
Graham

I'm going to order the Freecom 500gb external drive for the same reason.

I've used three 80gb Freecoms, and despite containing disks made by different manufacturers they've all been pretty solid - though of course that's no guarantee for the 500gb model.

The reviews -

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Freecom-500GB-External-Drive-Silver/dp/B000LQA652

are fairly comforting.

may or may not matter to you, but my girlfriends Seagate Freeagent flat out refuses to mount on either of my Ubuntu Linux machines.

I recently got a Western Digital Passport drive at work. It runs off bus power, so no need for an extra power brick and it is very quick on a USB 2.0 port. Don't know if it suffers from the same bizzare mounting problem as the Seagate since I haven't tried it on Linux, but under Windows it works perfectly.

My suggestion is to get a bigger drive for the computer, and an external drive for backup. Backing up onto DVD is hardly practical if you have a lot of stuff.

For the external drive, you get better value for money by buying the enclosure and hard disk separately. It only takes a screwdriver to put them together. I can recommend www.scan.co.uk, and I think Seagate make the best all-round disks. WD, Hitachi and Samsung are good makes as well.

3.5" drives are cheaper per gigabyte. 2.5" drives are more portable and can run off USB power.

I have an older Seagate 200Gb drive, a Freecom 250Gb drive, and a Western Digital 1Tb MyBook.

Of the three, I would recommend the Western Digital product. The Seagate (not the same model you mention) has a press button power switch and it always defaults to power off which is why I like it the least.

The freecom is perhaps the most portable as it's the smallest of the three.

IMHO, the best of all solutions is an external NAS RAID system. I chose a 1Tb Netgear ReadyNAS product and use the 1Tb Mybook and 250Gb Freecom disks for unattended backup.

A western digital 500 GB form amazon is around £ 53 ( free delivery) which is a good deal.
I would also suggest to keep a second back up of any external HDD as the average life of hard disk is very short these days.

Vikram

And I would suggest you keep it off site in case of theft or even worse at home.

Michael

I have a Freecom network 500Gb - pretty good. Lots of features (it's running Linux inside), so can do other things. However, it's not as fast as I'd like. I'd definitely recommend Freecom stuff.

At work I've just got a Lacie Quadra. Now that is a lovely piece of kit! Blazingly fast and with multiple interfaces (Firewire 400/800, USB 2, eSATA). Highly recommended!
Matt

I use 1-250GB and 1-500GB Maxtor desktop drives they run cool and quiet, at the momemt you can get here:arrow: www.ebuyer.com are selling 750gb Maxtor at £86, or Freeagent 500GB at £54.99. Hope this helps.

I use a Seagate Freeagent, which works well.

Whatever you do, make some form of back-up, either two hard-drives, or DVDs or something, anything! Hard drives can and do die and although they can sometimes be "recovered" at some expense, not always. We had one which died, in the process of which had scratched the surface of the disk so badly nothing could be retrieved.

Best wishes, Kris.

I have a Freecom drive which is great but I think the Lacie drives are fantastic.

I use two Comstar (Maxtor) 250GB USB drives and just bought a Comstar USB 500GB drive last week. I have had the first two for a couple of years and they are quite fast and reliable. The 500GB was on sale for $94CDN.

Mike

Why not Why not fit a Western Digital Raptor Drive, they are the fastest drives on the market at 10,000 RPM, data transfer is awesome.

I use an 80 Gig Raptor for the operating system,a Seagate Barracuda 200 Gig partioned, and an 80 Gig Seagate Barracuda in a removable ICY Box caddy for my music and pictures,

I don't advise buying anything from Freecom, I've had problems with their components inthe past!

I use a 1TB Samsung SATAII drive, housed in an external e-sataII + USB 2.0 case. Just brilliant, very fast and quiet.

Drive: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143288
Case: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143544
or here (slightly cheaper, but not always in stock): http://svp.co.uk/product/sumvision_apex_plus_35_sata_hard_drive_enclosure_mte013

I also have two (older) Seagate 200GB SATA 1 drives, in the same cases, as archive drives. Not so fast, but fine for archiving.

For those wanting 2.5" external drives with USB 2.0 and e-sata, I recommend the WD Scorpio black (7200 rpm) 320GB housed in an external e-sataII + USB 2.0 case. I use one, works flawlessly.

Drive: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/149432
Case: http://svp.co.uk/product/sumvision_usb20_esata_25_hard_drive_enclosure_mte045

Cheers, Richard