I use Maxtor Basics and Seagate range. Both are excellent and can't fault the performance of either.
For outright performance you can't beat internal, but for everything else - external works well.
Dont trust exsternal drives make copys of images on cd or dvd, my seagate drive is no longer reconized by my computer and seagate wants $2,500.00 to retrive my images.
If you are going with an external drive, buy an enclosure with a fan and buy a hard drive and install it yourself. Very easy to do! My thirteen year old daughter does it for me now.
It also gives you the assurance that the hard drive you use is new. Although they may warrantee the units for x years, it doesn't mean the Hard drive isn't a refurb or old stock.
I opened up a failed external to find the drive was manufactured two years prior to purchase.
I have had two WD enterprise class 500GB drives fail in my raid array in the last year. I bought some Samsung spinpoint drives to replace them, and the really interesting thing is, as seen from the information from the SMART info on the the drives is that the Samsung run at a full 10 degrees celsius less than the WD drives.
There is a 5 year warranty on these WD drives and I am RMAing them, but be guaranteed that they will not be set up on any mission critical application like I had them before and I will never buy WD drives again. It's just a good thing they were in a RAID5 array so that I could replace them...
By the way, I have NEVER (knock on wood) had a HD failure before these two WD drives... in all of the computers I have owned for the last 15 years.
I've had one raptor die on me (WD), which I put down to the controller board on it frying. Seagates have been good for me though mostly, with the exception of 7200.9(maybe .8 series?) series, which at one point, I ordered 5x200gb HDD's (IDE). Two of them were dead on arrival, one died shortly after formatting, another died about four days later, and the other still worked a few days on, but was returned for fear of failure.
I started a computer sales & service company back in '87. While running that company we went through 1000's of hard drives. My experience was that EVERY manufacturer had bad batches or bad designs. These days things are better but I still apply that same thought process.
We are now buying 1TB drives for just over a hundred bucks. Technology has advanced but think of the disc or 2 just whirring along at 7200rpm or more. It really does have to shake itself apart after x hours of use. Cold starts exasperate the problem by 'shocking' the electronics with jolts of power. (I never turn my machines off except to work on them)
Backups are essential. Physical devices fail. You pay $10, 20, 30, 40 or more thousand for a vehicle and what do you spend on repairing it? A hard drive is going to fail. It's just a fact of life. Do your backups. Test them.
Buy whatever brand you like. All the manufacturers are doing good work and constantly improving. All have warranties. Do your backups and make use of the warranties and don't lose any sleep over it.
I've almost 2tb on three computers in a network. Can't even remember what drives are in what system. Don't care. I've backups and know the drives are going to fail sometime.
Drives are so cheap these days that you should have at least one for backups as well as your offsite backups on CD/DVD's.
If you like WD or Seagate then buy them. Doesn't really matter. They will fail someday.
In the past 10 years I've never had a HD fail. Almost all of them are WD drives, but, like George said, anything that I can't replace is backed up onto 2 different drives.
dwayne anderso wrote:
Dont trust exsternal drives make copys of images on cd or dvd, my seagate drive is no longer reconized by my computer and seagate wants $2,500.00 to retrive my images.
5 WD5000AAKSs, and a 150 GB Raptor in the computer.
1 WD 750 GB, and 1 1TB Seagate Barracuda in externals.
Also use a Western Digital 250 GB passport (2.5").
Stick to Western Digital, and Seagate, and you'll save yourself a lot of issues down the road.
Nothing is foolproof. I keep my files in 3 different places even though Seagate has been reliable so far. I prefer Lacie firewire external drives to HD chassis with fans because they are silent (those fans drive me nuts). However a big 4 drive eSATA box can be very useful for dumping old harddrives into and are very fast too.
I only turn on the Lacie external drives for backup so they don't get hot. 2 of them died a few years ago which wasn't a biggie because of my double backup system. An email to Lacie and they sent a shipping label, postman came to collect the broken drives and one week later I got a new drive FOC. I think they used Maxtor drives those days. The later models have worked daily for several yrs without a hitch.
