Advice on buying External Hard Drives

[ezytarget]

Hey Cag'ers,

I was hoping you could help me with some suggestions on getting an external hard drive. I'd like to get one that's at least 1TB. Something I can back all my music, photos and video files onto. More importantly I want something that will last. Something that I can trust putting my memories onto as a backup source.

Now I know nothing is even close to 100% when dealing with hard drives, but I'd like to get something that I can safely put on, maybe travel if needed to someone's house or something I can just put up on the shelf and leave be for a few months. Then again maybe I'll just leave it plugged in for constant access.

Any thoughts? Also if I put video on it do you think the 360 will register it so I can stream video off it?

This is the current model I'm thinking about, as you can see it has a lot of negative reviews though. So I'm a bit hesitant on purchasing at WD. Any help would be appreciated guys!

http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digit...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1233130677&sr=1-2

I'm also thinking about this, which I hear can work with the 360...
http://www.amazon.com/LaCie-FireWir...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1233133764&sr=8-2

and then finally this might be a winner as well... the HP Media Vault. Sure it's not 1TB, but it's something I might have to live with. In fact I'm beginning to wonder if the 1TB's typically have a higher failure rate as I can't find any good reviews on them for storage.

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/s...1232&srccode=cii_5766179&cpncode=20-4747711-2

Oh and last question/comment. What is it with Firewire? Is it just dying? It seems hard to find anything with Firewire. Everything is USB 2.0 (which is, well.. not fast)

 

[rabbitt]

I have a WD. It's fine.

 

[naiku]

I have a 250gb WD from 2years ago. its very good. all my internal drives are WD also, never had a problem w/ them(i own 640gb & 2x1tb)

for the 360 just reformat the drive as fat32 or HFS+ and it will show just fine and play back those xvid files just fine.

 

[epobirs]

If you're genuinely concerned about backup integrity, you need an external RAID box that mirrors the data on 2 or more drives. A Buffalo TeraStation, for example. Expensive but it's the real thing.

For less money, there are plenty of choice but don't trust the drive alone to make your backups. Plan to burn discs on a regular basis. Say, once a month for adding new material and quarterly for the whole lot. This avoid the problem of discovering the DVD you burned two years ago are no longer readable.

FireWire never caught on big as a drive connection because Steve Jobs screwed the pooch. He insisted on collecting royalties for apple portion of the involved patents several years ago. This drove the creation of USB 2.0, which had no such licensing costs and was cheaper to implement in general. So the industry for the most part told Steve to go to hell and take his wire with him.

For greater speed than USB 2.0 there is eSATA. You aren't going to do any better than that for any reasonable price. Plenty of external drives support this and many PCs now include at least one eSATA port on the rear panel.

 

[tehweezner]

All hard drives are good.. until they fail. And they all eventually will fail. I had two of mine go bad within weeks of each other (WD and a Seagate) but I have a WD 20GB from a decade or so ago that's still ticking along. Get WD or Seagate or Samsung and cross your finger when you order

 

[jaykrue]

[quote name='tehweezner']All hard drives are good.. until they fail. And they all eventually will fail. I had two of mine go bad within weeks of each other (WD and a Seagate) but I have a WD 20GB from a decade or so ago that's still ticking along. Get WD or Seagate or Samsung and cross your finger when you order [/quote]

This. Just my opinion but I'd still get an enclosure + internal hd vs. a regular external hd. It may seem more expensive but the enclosure is a one-time cost so you can mix & match various internal hds w/ an enclosure.