Portable Drive

I would like a new 1 TB portable drive - plenty around at varying price points across the brands.

Any suggestions on the better ones to consider and those to be avoided.

I am very happy with my 2 2tb Western Digital Passport drives. I use them as alternate backups of important files. One lives in the car, so in theory a backup is always external to the house.

Are they rated for the temperature extremes you might get in a car in summer/winter?

May be worth considering - I wonder what the difference is between those and the HGST Touro drives which I currently use? HGST are owned by WD!

Beware of some of the 2.5" drives from the likes of WD. On some models, the enclosure and drive connections are non standard and therefore cannot accommodate a standard SATA drive.
I've had a standard metal enclosure for years and just pop in standard drives as and when they need to be changed. I paid about a fiver for it from Amazon.

Not an issue for me ... I want mine cased with just a USB connector. When I upgrade the old one will continue in use.

No Idea, however they are still working

If reliability is the most important factor and you don't mind 3.5" drives, take a look at Backblaze's hard drive comparison. The HGST drives have the lowest failure rates. Buy your own case if you can't find one ready-cased.

If you want extreme portability, then take a look at Seagate's Backup Plus Slim series. I have two 2TB drives that I rotate just in case one fails, and I shall probably add another. WD do similar drives. I wouldn't use just one of these drives for backups since they are really pushing hard drive technology. You only have to read the sob-stories on Amazon to realise how unwise this is.

Edited by deleted (Fri 13-May-16 17:43:23)

In reply to a post by MHC:

... I want mine cased with just a USB connector...

That's what mine is. Very similar to this.

I currently have HGST Touros ... One per machine and occasionally copy to the other.