One drive better than the other?

I'm going to buy a 1TB portable drive to copy things onto a notebook computer which I have as a back up/alternative. Both machines are Windows 7.

I see two with good reviews that seem a very similar decent price (approx £55 & £52), and wonder if either one is better than the other:
Samsung 1TB M3 Portable USB 3.0 Hard Drive Black (3yr warranty)
HGST 1TB Touro Mobile MX3 USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive (2yr warranty)

The Samsung has marginally better reviews than the Touro. The only concern between them both is the reliability, never use a single external hard drive as a single point of storage for valuable data.

Thanks. I'll get the Samsung
I'm assuming the reliability applies to most of the better makes, not just these two.

I do a full Macrium back up on my desktop drive each week, so just want the portable to copy selected items, files/folders to the notebook as and when needed, and it'll be useful when the day comes that I need a new desktop.

Sometimes manufacturers come out with models of HDDs which can only be described as nasty - diabolical reliability and no forewarning of failure. The Samsung seems to be the best of breed at the moment (along with the Western Digital ones) so you probably won't go far wrong. I recommend those Samsung drives to people (because of the recommendations) and have had good reports back.

Thanks! - that's very reassuring

On a similar vein, what 1TB 3.5" drive would you recommend these days?

To be used externally but I don't want it USB powered. Can be an internal one that I'll mount in a caddy, or one already mounted as an external one; my concern with the latter is that you don't necessarily know exactly what HDD is inside. No software needed or wanted.

Reliability is more important than cost.

Edit: to add last line

Edited by cheshire_man (Sun 08-Sep-13 22:42:46)

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

The Samsung seems to be the best of breed at the moment (along with the Western Digital ones)

User of VelociRaptor drives here, and I have a Samsung F1 as backup. For me the warrantee is a crucial aspect of drive choice. If a manufacturer doesn't guarantee the quality of their product for at least three years, I won't touch them.

I'm probably a bit out of date with this but as of about 2 years ago -- the Samsung drives were generally regarded best of breed. Seagate came close with a new barracuda model however some reviews reported they just suddenly lost all data due to a firmware issue - put me off using them. Samsung drives definitely are noisier than others - if that is a concern, we have about 100 computers at work with Samsung drives and they can be considerably noisy - doesn't seem to affect them though. My server at home has 2 Samsung 1TB drives and 2 Seagate and the Samsung have become quite noisy now.

Given you want it as an external drive though I'd just buy a Samsung external and make use of USB powered, it really does save a lot of faff - it no longer makes sense to buy internal drives and put them in your own caddy imho. I would be willing to bet reliability is worse by buying an internal drive and putting it in your own caddy.

I don't want USB powered as the drive is only powered up once or twice a week. If it's USB powered then it's always on and I don't want that.

FWIW I have three 3.5" external drives, all 250GB; 1 Maxtor external bought in May 2005, and 2 Maxtor internal drives which I mounted in caddies, they were both bought in April 2008. I also have a Samsung 2.5" 750GB, some 18 months old, which is USB powered and always on being the backup drive used by Genie Timeline.

I'm looking to replace one or more of the 3.5" due to running out of capacity. Though clearly with 3.5" drives that old I realise that they may well be coming close to end of life.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

I don't want USB powered as the drive is only powered up once or twice a week. If it's USB powered then it's always on and I don't want that.

I have two desktop drives (LaCie and Samsung Story) with power switches which I turn on/off as needed.
Both are 2 years old, but another year and I'll likely change the LaCie as it's my weekly back up drive. I always look for ones with a power switch.