Looking for reliable external hard drive for backup. Any suggestions - anywhere from 750Gig -2 -Terabyte Thanks - Stephen

Give serious thought to the Drobo system.

There is a special for a 2 TB system through NAPP.

I'm happy with mine. It is a snap to set up.

www.drobo.com

That drobo system looks very nice, are there any other systems out their similar to that. Doesn't have to be as advanced :P.

decide if you want a direct attach (via usb, firewire, sata) or you want a network attach system.

direct attach is a no-brainer in that you get a drive in an external 'shoe box'

Thanks for your replies - I want a direct attach

I have 4 of the 500s. It's the only externals I buy now. Tried Maxtor and WD My Books. Nice warranty. I have everything backed up to two seperate drives.

E

Seagate bought Maxtor recently. Might be some growing pains. Western Digital is very highly rated. I have several of their Caviar series drives.

when I got a 4bay QNAP (qnap.com) system a while back, I used 750G Seagate ES drives.

A friend of mine has had three WD drives fail in the past 6 months. Each time they have replaced the failed drive (with a bigger one). It's been a real pain for him.

I buy seagate barracuda drives pretty regularly (internal ones). They come with a 5 year warranty when most other companies have scaled back warranties to 3 years or the now standard one year. I do beleive the external cases come with 5 year warranties as well.

Although I do get western digital mybooks from my work and have had no problems with them, if I bought my own external it would probably be a drive with a 5 yer warranty.

Heat kills hard drives, and externals often got much hotter when running for hours. Keep them cool and should be much less likely to fail.

I was just about to post the same question.

I want to go with internal, SATA (either I or II), and small-ish, like 250-320GB so I can have a few and if one fails it's not as big of a deal.

I'm looking for models specifically. I currently use two Seagate Baracudas for 500gb total running RAID 0 for speed, but I want to start getting drives in there for backup besides just burning DVD's. I noticed there are now Western Digital Caviar RE2's out there which are basically 7200 rpm versions of the famed Raptors. It's more of a network storage type of drive but seems to get some nice reviews.

Read the reviews for the Drobo on Amazon.com. You'll think thrice about buying one. Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital are all good brands. I do have to say I ran into some problems with my 1TB Western Digital MyBook but there was no loss of data involved.

I have a Freeagent 750Gh Seagate ($199at Costco) plus a Trueimage home
I do a backup (Image) every Monday and a differential every night in automatic
So far so good (tested )

I've owned a LaCie 250 GB firewire drive for three years without a glitch. When I decided to add an external 750 GB firewire drive I checked out the current LaCie lineup and ended up buying a "LaCie 301826U d2 Quadra 750 GB eSATA/FireWire800/FireWire400/USB 2.0 External Hard Disk" for $192.39 from Amazon... no tax and free shipping. LaCie has a nicely designed aluminum case WITHOUT a fan. I've no idea what kind of drive they put in the case, but I've had great experience with Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital, so I'm not too concerned. It comes with a 3 year warranty, so if I have a problem I should be covered.

Incidentally, I also bought recently two internal 750 GB Hitachi drives with 32 MB cache for $127.99 BEFORE a $20 rebate on each. They are SATA drives. The rebate is limited to the reseller, Macsales. I'm sure they'll sell drives to PC owners as well...

I have 2x Seagate 400GB externals, ( http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-External-FireWire-Drive-Backup/dp/B0006FS2FY ) , owned both for over two years and not a problem, one even did a one metre desk dive with somersault and half pike and didn't miss a beat. Three colleagues have also bought the same model and are happy campers!

I have an external 2 bay NAS with two 1 TB Seagates

I love Seagate!!!

The lady I shared space with lost a WD drive including an undelivered job, she cried.

I go with Seagate simply because they have a 5 year warranty. I just lost a 7200 rpm/100 gig Seagate Momentus in my Pbook, but it was replaced under warranty.

Any drive will fail, so you have to be backed up all the time, which is why OS 10.5 w/ Time Machine is good. You're always backed up if you have an external drive.

Cementjungle wrote:
A friend of mine has had three WD drives fail in the past 6 months. Each time they have replaced the failed drive (with a bigger one). It's been a real pain for him.

That seems strangely like user error. Hard drives don't usually (read: rarely if ever) fail 3 consecutive times in 6 months.

I have a 400gig WD external that currently works great as a book end. It's the most expensive book I've purchased and it lasted about a year. Since then I've stuck to internals as I've never had one die on me. I run one drive for the OS and two seperate drives for photo storage which mirror each other. I have room for up to 6 more drives for expansion. Everyone that I know who uses external drives has had them fail and most had been the WD My Book series drives (google for info about the fan flaw in these). I'll never waste any more money on anouther external drive.

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.

*steve

I've been using Seagate drives because of the 5 year warranty and I put them in enclosures. No problems thus far.