External hard drive recommendations

I have recently invested in a Synology Diskstation DS210j fitted with two 2TB HDDs. It is configured as a hybrid RAID so that if one disk fails data integrity is maintained.

It acts as a LAN fileserver and has sufficient capacity to back up my desk top computer and all my photo files. It has a lot of extra facilities such as file sharing, a photo gallery available on the internet and other facilities that I have yet to explore.

It is a more expensive solution as the Diskstation cost about £150 and the Western digital hard disks were £90 each making a total cost of about £330.

I am a big fan of Raid - and prefer internal - but if you are looking for an external single disk solution I would consider getting a relatively cheap SATA docker like this that connects to your laptop via a separate eSata card - depending on your system - that should cost no more than £30.

Then buy a basic hard disk such as you would fit inside a standard PC case and use this as a normal hard disk connected to your system.

Even better, if you require less space than the 1tb you mention, I would get a 2.5” laptop drive, specifically a 500Gb Seagate Momentus drive; this isn’t quite small enough to fit in your wallet, but it’s not far off and with a small case easily fits into whatever you happen to be carrying for off site storage. However, if you decide to go for this you might like to take the basic precaution of encrypting the drive with the excellent and free Truecrypt in case you forget it on the bus.

eSata is about 6x faster than USB2 and is the way to go if your laptop has eSata. You can of course get enclosures that will do both so that you can use USB2 for now and then if later you buy a computer that will handle eSata you only need change the lead and you can ZOOOM!!! away

This enclosure on ebay looks good, even comes with a good program to monitor temperature (on USB only sadly). It also has an on/off switch which a lot of ready built enclosures don't have these days. If you want to boot up the computer without the external drive you have to unplug the power supply if there isn't an off/switch (pain). Fitting a drive is simple.

You can buy an eSATA laptop card for very little money, either a PCMCIA card or the new standard the name of which escapes me right now.

DELL now sell their own eSata enclosure for laptops ebay link

I bought one of the Western Digital "Elements" 1TB drives from Tesco a couple of months ago, no complaints so far. £60 was pretty much the going rate at the time and WD are a known brand, so I thought it worth a try.

I wouldn't fancy an internal 1TB drive as I'm not convinced how long they last if running all the time, however for an external drive which is only connected when I'm backing up data or photos it should be ok.

Is that a USB powered one Matt? Can't be bothered with yet another power adapter plug, which is why I've stuck to the WD Passport drives so far.

Nope, it has a mains adapter as it's a 3.5" drive rather than the 2.5" Passport ones (which are also good).

Not necessarily a good idea for use with a laptop: not all of them supply enough power to the USB ports to power such things as hard drives.

ExpressCard is the new one. Would an eSATA PCMCIA card not be slower than USB2? (with PCMCIA as the bottleneck)

Another thing to bear in mind...

Those 2.5" drives are under a fair bit more stress than the 3.5" ones, as to get the same storage in a smaller physical space they have to be made to far tighter specs. Generally laptop drives never seem to live as long as normal PC ones.

I used to sit with the laptop on my lap (as you do lol) and often I would get up and trip over the power cables to my 3.5" drive, sending it flying across the room. After a while of course, it died! Since then I've always gone with USB powered ones that are much tidier. Might get a 1TB one for backing up stuff to though.

Thanks for all the further comments/advice. I definitely need to give this some more thought after reading all the reponses above. Pleased I posted here first though rather than just making an uninformed and possibly unsuitable purchase - thanks for taking the time to respond.

Bingo!
Certainly in terms of theoretical bandwidth for the bus itself, but in terms of real life hard disk usage I have little doubt that it would be - perhaps significantly - faster under eSata.

Without referring to the research I did on this some time ago there is something about the old (ie non USB 3) USB standard as it applies to data transfer that just makes it unsuitable for typical backup read/write operations, where the theoretical interface bandwidth is a mere pipedream.

For example, I have an old external twin drive unit with both a USB 2 and a Firewire 400 connection gathering dust somewhere. Although the USB standard theoretically delivers nearly 2x the Firewire speed the latter is much, much quicker.

Results may vary if you are just copying the odd file but using my preferred - and free - backup software SyncToy to backup large quantities of data I find USB drives dog slow, and quite simply unacceptable.

While I’m on the subject I might as well add that I have also considered external NAS units but have rejected them because the good ones seem far too expensive relative the performance they deliver in everything apart from power consumption.

Instead I’d much rather build a PC from scratch to act as a disk server, either with a very low powered motherboard/cpu ( eg Atom based) or an entry level core2duo that could double up as a home theatre PC for the lounge; you can get some quite tasty looking cases resembling stereo components that take up to six 3.5” drives.

Minimum of two hard drives, mains powered, USB2 is fine, not RAID.

Speed, etc, is only of the essence if you have a time constraint. What's the rush? Once you've transferred the existing photo library across, the rest is incremental. Of course, if eSATA or USB3 comes at the same price as USB2...

Don't have all your eggs in one basket (sorry Hyram - what happens if the drive controller fails?) or rely on RAID (again, if the RAID controller fails you may not be able to access the data.)

KISS rules!

Your as bad as my Microwave It seems to think
I've got ALL MINUTE!!