Replacing external drive(s)

One of my external drives are getting on a bit, it's >7 years old, the others are > 4 years so should be ok a while yet. The oldest was bought as an external drive, the others are internal drives that I mounted into external enclosures.

There's nothing to suggest that any of them are actually dying but...

Assuming I do decide to buy new, is it better to buy an external drive complete, or to buy an internal drive and put it into an enclosure myself. The latter has the advantage that I know exactly what drive it is, not necessarily clear when buying an external drive.

Given the various mergers and takeovers in the market in recent months, I've lost track of how many truly separate companies there are making HDDs now.

My drives are Maxtor 250GB, as well as a 750GB Samsung 2.5" and 500GB Buffalo 2.5" external drives on another system. I'd tend to steer clear of 'green' drives, apart from that I have no real views on the good, bad and ugly.

Thoughts and comments appreciated.

For some reason external drives seems to be cheaper than internal at the moment. Only two makes mechanical drives now I think, seagate who got Samsung drives and Western Digital who now got Hitachi drives.


i need to get a new internal drive, but I need to wait for the prices to come down a bit more, problem is I have no idea which one to get, Seagate is certainly out, but I have never been a fan of WD either,

I too need 2TB of additional space and the decision seems to be between Seagate and WD. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Ditto... I'll probably go for WD, purely because I've already got several and at least they'll match each other.

There doesn't really seem much to choose between them, if you're unlucky and get a bad one, such is life

In reply to a post by billford:

Ditto... I'll probably go for WD, purely because I've already got several and at least they'll match each other.

Mine are Maxtor , which is now Seagate. Hmm.

In reply to a post by billford:

There doesn't really seem much to choose between them, if you're unlucky and get a bad one, such is life

I think that just about sums it up.

My 3.5" drives are only switched on once or twice a week so they don't clock up as many powered-on hours as might be expected.

I'd always go with Seagate in the future.

I have a 500GB WD and a 500GB Seagate SATA II drive and when copying files or casually using the system on the WD drive, it seems to die very quickly. Doesn't seem to like multitasking, whereas the Seagate just copes with everything I throw at it with hardly any difference in performance.

Have never really liked WD drives either. Have had 3 fail on me in the past. Never had a Seagate Drive die on me yet (Touch wood).

Edited by chris6273 (Fri 09-Nov-12 18:45:59)

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

My 3.5" drives are only switched on once or twice a week so they don't clock up as many powered-on hours as might be expected.

My WDs are on pretty much 24/7 unless the computer decides to "sleep" them so they certainly rack up the hours but then, they don't get the cold starts... you pays you money and take your chances

@Chris- I've had a couple of Seagates fail on me out of four or five, tho' that was back in the days when 250MB was a large drive. I've had one WD failure out of about 6 or 7, and I think that's probably the interface (it's an external 500GB), it's still on the shelf waiting to be checked

So I think my opinion that it's the luck of the draw is still valid

Mentioning the old drives made me think... the first HDD I bought as a separate unit was 200MB and cost me over £200, now I can get 10,000 times the storage for a third of the price (and that's ignoring inflation!). It's hard to complain about modern HDDs...

If you are pre-empting HDD failure by replacing a working HDD you could do worse than pay more for a solid state drive. You could use this to replace your main internal drive thus releasing it for pure storage.

Solid state drives (£140 for 250Gb) are so much quicker, quieter and energy efficient. Most commentators say they are more reliable too. They are ideal for speeding up your system, especially if you just use them for applications. My boot up speed and application opening rate has been transformed even without a clean install. I cloned my existing main drive. I keep current working files on it too, just a handful. These open in a blink of an eye.
............................................................................................................................................................................
I tried western digital 1TB Network MyBookWorld with WD 1Tb saddled through USB. Not very satisfactory. The Twonkie media server couldn't read media through its own USB. I have since added 2Tb Iomega. The media server can serve files from my WD USB even though it isn't directly attached!

This all gives me 4Tb external; stored securely in my attic. Never-the-less I never trust hardware, so I store everything via Livedrive too, which gives me the added advantage of being able to access files from anywhere including by ftp using XBMC.

Edited by deleted (Fri 09-Nov-12 21:48:27)

I remain to be convinced that in the "more GB for your £" ofover the past few years that reliability hasn't suffered in the process.

I hope I can be proved wrong, except that proof can be tricky given the variability of usage and environmental conditions.

Ultimately I think it means that don't rely on a single back-up.Either have two back-ups separately created or use RAID to give increased resilience.

Well, I bought one of these... cheap as chips, seems OK, just needed a quick re-format for the Mac and partitioning the way I wanted it. It doesn't have USB-3, but then neither does my iMac

A nice change was no useless software included with it... and installation instructions that brought a whole new shade of meaning to "minimal"