I'm shopping for a new external hard drive. Does anybody have any recommendations on a brand that won't die on you in a few months or as soon as the warranty is up?

I got a Toshiba one that still alive after four years and about half a year ago I got a brandless one. So far so good but I cant tell much about it yet. The Toshiba one is pretty decent though, never had any problems with it.

i have a few external usb hdd's "My Passport Essential" from Western Digital
also pretty good
the first one i got (500GB) i use for torrent downloading and pretty much runs for 2 years straight now as i hardly ever turn my comp off
the other 2 are more recent later model and bigger GB'ed and i use those for final storage

dropped one sucker on the floor last week when i was busy hooking it up to my TV, partly split open , but still runs like nothing ever happend , after i was able to click the housing back together again
scary shit when that happens and pretty stupid to drop it

Do you need a very small and portable one?



I have good experiences with Western Digital.
edit: what enterlexx said!

If you don't need something small, then try one of these docks where you can put any kind of regular hard drives:

hey that's cool such a dock! didn't know about those.
a hdd toaster
nice solution and bit cheaper on the hdd's i guess once you got the dock

They support USB, firewire and e-sata. I have a quite a few older drives (200 to 300GBs) and I can still use them all thanks to one of these docks.

Thanks for the recommendations guys.

I'm really looking to get two of them. One for back up my computer and one to be used with our WD media player. I want both to be 1TB or maybe 2 TB in size.
Does the "My passport essentials" have a power adapter or is it powered through the USB connection?

USB, so no adapter needed, just plug in to your WD media player usb slot and off you go
1 minus though: if you keep it hooked up after you turn of your player,the hdd will still be in standby mode, so it doesn't shut off completely, the little light stays on.
but i think about all brands do that.
i always unplug it once i am done.

I have a western digital my book that i have had for a few years now and it still works great. i need to reformat it so it can work on my mac though

I have 5 lacies & a maxtor (the last being the oldest, 7+ years old), they all still work, but one lacie, but I destroyed that one myself

as long you dont use these external hard drives 24/7, they will last a life time. fill it up and the max usage will be a couple of times per year when you want 'that' file... then buy a new one and start filling it up... fuck i got so many external hard drives now that its more easier to download the file than go searching through the hds, hahaha... i sometimes think i have drained the whole internet becouse i cant find much of interest to grab, ha ha ha ha(dry dracula laughter).. anyway one important thing is that the external hard drives case have an on/off power switch, i dont like these that is without and start up when you plug in the power... scary shit when i have 1tb with my precious.. just tellin..

If it's seagate, it's a bag of shit, I've had numerous fails with them. The UK enquiries is fucking awful, I've generally had bad experiences with them.

WD all day long for me, I've had one of my Raptor's (internal and external) going on 4 and half years now and it's never failed, ever. Plus the build quality is super IMO.

Looks like I'm gonna go with the WD My Passport Essentials.

Thanks guys.

i have had the oppsite experience wd fail all the time but seagates hold its numbers... i haven looked for it but it maybe wd and seagate have had a bad runs of a spesific serie of their hds.. just tellin..

I have a WD 1TB My Book for ~ 1 year now. It's in everyday heavy use with my WD TV player and it shows no signs of problems (of course, they never do until it's too late ). It's very quiet, as a matter of fact, I never heard it.

Also, it has very cool blueish-white LEDs matching the ones on WD TV, so my wife also likes it

i do hear mine vibrating when it's on my wooden tv cabinet
but i have passport essential
when not on the cabinet i don't hear it

Overhere its the other way round, she really dislikes lights on for instance the TV or my comp

i just hate blueish-white LEDs, its the most annoying shit ever...

You sound like my gf

She may sound like him, but at least she doesn't look like him, so consider yourself lucky

we don't know that...

Nah, if Pure was blind he would have made much more typos

Braille keyboard

Here is what we went with. Bought two of them.



http://www.frys.com/product/6067238?sit ... IN_RSLT_PG

They are tiny little things.

Do I need that preloaded software that's on there? Can I just delete it?

i reformatted the whole thing, i said bye bye to all that WD stuff that allows you to browse on comp etc (forgot what it all does to be honest )
i just use it as external hdd and that's it
still am stuck with a ~ 600MB partitian though that shows on "My Computer" it has manuals and "WD Smartware" perhaps can delete that stuff too but i just let it be

The stuff on there doesn't take up much space but every time I connect the drive to a computer it tries to install the software. I think it's for creating automatic backups off the computer.
I guess I should have reformatted it before putting the entire Jackie Chan collection on it.

omg is it full allready??

Not even close. It's 1TB in size and the Jackie Chan collection I found is about 60GB in size.