What's the best external HD?

April 20, 2008 2:56 PM

What kind of external hard drive should I buy?

I have a 160GB LaCie external hard drive that recently died on me after 4 years. I am very good about keeping all my data backed up in 2 places, but my laptop was due for replacement and I cleared everything off of it, not expecting that my LaCie would break down just days before I bought a new laptop.

So I'm not in the market for a better quality external drive. I can't afford for this to happen again, so what brand is known for the fewest breakdowns?

posted by missjamielynn to computers & internet (27 comments total)

I meant *now in the market! ;)
posted by missjamielynn at 2:59 PM on April 20

You can buy 500GB USB drives for around $120 these days. Might be worth checking out something like this.
posted by dobie at 3:11 PM on April 20 [1 favorite]

I've always had good experience with Western Digital drives. If you check your weekly circulars, there are usually good deals.
posted by stevechemist at 3:31 PM on April 20

For convenience, I like to use 2.5" (laptop-sized) hard drives, and put them in a bus-powered enclosure. This way I can take the portable hard drive with me and not have to worry about plugging it into an outlet (it's powered by the USB port). I use the Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm thingies (I think they're 7k2000 or something).

They don't typically have as much capacity, so if you're looking for 500gb you're better off with a full-sized drive. I think generally you get more bang for your buck buying an internal drive and putting it in an enclosure -- plus the drive can be swapped out for a larger one easily.
posted by Alabaster at 3:32 PM on April 20 [1 favorite]

My boyfriend has had some awful experience with the Seagate FreeAgent drives - completely fried after ripping over onto the carpet (and he's not the only one [disclaimer: his site is the first result]) - and warns everyone away from them.
posted by rhapsodie at 3:33 PM on April 20

Have you considered online storage in addition to a backup hard drive? I find it's a good way to keep copies of things I don't want to get rid of but also won't be using that frequently.

You can go with a solution like Mozy, or just pay for a webserver through a company like Dreamhost. If you're slightly tech savvy you can also look at Amazon S3 Storage, which is a really cost-effective solution - they charge something about $0.15 per GB a month and smaller fees for the transfer.

One advantage to an online backup is the superior hardware you're likely to end up on. Companies like Amazon and Mozy have a top-notch infrastructure with plenty of redundancy, so you wouldn't have to worry about their drives failing.
posted by georgemandis at 3:34 PM on April 20 [1 favorite]

I have a small 160 GB Seagate FreeAgent Go, which works nicely for me and is very small.
posted by aheckler at 3:35 PM on April 20 [1 favorite]

Reliability is not so much a function of brand as of how you treat the drive. The main thing is to keep them cool. Any drive that's left running while hot for very long periods of time will die on you.

That means don't stack them. If they stand on end, keep space between them. Make sure they don't stay spinning constantly when not in use. (That's usually an OS issue, a function of how flags are set. If you can't control it any other way, turn them off when you don't need them.)
posted by Class Goat at 3:47 PM on April 20

Have to chime in to say that I do not recommend Western Digital. My husband's died days after he'd ripped all his CDs to MP3 and transferred the files to his Western Digital HD, and according to the place we took it to get fixed, there's something about the hardware in these devices that is prone to physically breaking.
posted by LolaGeek at 3:47 PM on April 20

I'm really curious about this one. I've bought at least four different drive *enclosures*, i.e. just boxes with wiring and power to turn an internal drive into an external drive. Every one has been utter crap. One actually couldn't be assembled with a standard IDE drive at all, one roasted itself (overheated, killing the drive), one failed after a month or so for no apparent reason, one works fine but the enclosure doesn't stay in piece (half of the cover is basically just loose), etc, etc, etc. So...beware.
posted by madmethods at 3:58 PM on April 20

I recommend buying an enclosure (I haven't had a bad experience, but I don't keep my drive on for like weeks at a time) and putting a Seagate in it. Seagate's warranty is the *best*.. And, most of the time if you send it back, they'll end up sending you a bigger drive back.. I had a 250gb drive and it died on me.. I sent it back and got a 400gb drive.. Although they are *very* specific on how they want the drive packed.. They want some sort of foam around the drive..
posted by majikstreet at 4:05 PM on April 20

I have had no problems with a variety of LaCie D2 drives that I've used over the past four years, and I've put mine through a lot of use/abuse. I'm not sure what would affect lifespan, but I can say that my usage pattern is something along the lines of "don't plug in for weeks while doing things that don't need the data I have stored on the external, plug in, use for a few weeks, repeat." The intermittent use might work in my favor, but I have no idea.
posted by Alterscape at 4:11 PM on April 20

First off, don't throw away the LaCie just yet. These drives (I have one) are known for a specific type of failure that is associated with overheating of the internal logic board (they don't have a fan, so they run very hot). It may be worth risking $20-$25 on an external hard drive enclosure, swapping the drive, and seeing if it works. Or for free, find a friend with an external HD and swap your drive with theirs (make sure it is the same type - SATA drives do not work in PATA enclosures and vice versa). Your LaCie is a PATA drive.
Secondly, all contemporary makes of hard drive have around the same failure rate. Scan the reviews on Newegg.com and you'll see what I mean. This particular Lacie has a Samsung drive inside it. I have heard equally bad things about WD, Seagate (who I think now own Maxtor), Maxtor, etc. So any hard drive is a risk, but external HDs are more of a risk as they are knocked about more than internal drives. Some people claim that drives over 500GB are higher risk, as they have denser data storage to achieve the same physical size -- but I dare say that these will become more reliable as the initial flaws are ironed out.
Third, don't ever just trust your data to one backup. I have two external hard drives, my PC's internal drive, and LOTS of DVD-Rs, all with the same data on them. I keep backups of the critical data (my work and my music collection!) at home and at work. DVD burners are really cheap nowadays and DVD-Rs can hold 4.7 GB -- enough for a weekly backup.
posted by sgmax at 4:12 PM on April 20

There's no such thing as a hard drive that won't fail. All of them will fail- it's just a matter of when.

There's a million and one things to consider but basically you want to have more than 1 backup of anything at any one time. Also, worst-case scenario says that you should keep a backup offsite (i.e. not in your home.)
posted by gen at 4:33 PM on April 20

What you're asking? You can't have. All the drive die. Seagate, Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM....All the groups putting them into enclosures do too. I've had each of the die. Really.

Now, what you really want, is to see what happens when you're using thousands and thousands of drives. For years. Y'know. Like google does.

Our results find that for drives aged up to two years, this is true, there is no significant correlation between fail-ures and high power cycles count. But for drives 3 yearsand older, higher power cycle counts can increase theabsolute failure rate by over 2%. We believe this is due more to our population mix than to aging effects. More-over, this correlation could be the effect (not the cause)of troubled machines that require many repair iterationsand thus many power cycles to be fixed

So, look, entropy rules the universe. Drives fail. Buy a raid 5, knowing this (or even a RAID 1- full mirroring). But you're getting anecdotal stories here.
posted by filmgeek at 4:34 PM on April 20

Not to sound snarky, the best way to avoid data loss really is just to keep your data redundant at all times, with no exceptions.

Spending more money on an external enclosure doesn't get around the fact that all mechanical hard drives have a high probability of failure. Any claim that brand X is significantly more reliable than brand Y is anecdotal at best -- internally, they all use either Seagate or Western Digital drives, which are by far the most common points of failure.

That said, you want to avoid the $5 no-name enclosures... they're more likely to have heat dissipation problems and/or hardware implementation problems.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 4:42 PM on April 20

Western Digital is on top of the market right now. They offer some of the best warranties in the industry (3 years on most externals, 5 years on enterprise drives). I also read a recent article (can't find it at the moment) that shows Western Digital drives having the highest mean-time-between failure in real-world industry testing.

I can no longer recommend Seagate drives after they bought Maxtor and had a number of issues with their Taiwanese plants (drives from Singapore are usually pretty good still).

Hitachi drives (once IBM) should be avoided at all cost. They didn't get the name "DeathStar" for being reliable...

Also, just so you know, LACIE uses Western Digital drives, at least all of the LACIE drives I've ever used.

Just my $0.02
posted by bumper314 at 4:44 PM on April 20

I have used mostly WD drives, and never had one fail. Maxtor (1) and Seagate (2 drives) failed.
Am I recommending WD? No. Drives are all frangible, and, as you experienced, frange when you need them most not to.

I am comfortable with monthly full backups with burn to DVD, and partial backups (basically, create & copy a zip file) in between.

My last disaster happened two days after a full backup, and was all fixed in under four damn hours.
posted by hexatron at 4:57 PM on April 20

a) definitely get an online backup service like Mozy. I have it and it is AWESOME. I have something like 80Gb backed up (home movies) and it's always fresh. Plus someone else worries about the issue of failing drives.

b) get a WD Passport. I have one and it's great. It comes with Sync software that's good for backing up Outlook data. You can often find them cheap at Costco as well. But it's not indestructible.
posted by GuyZero at 5:05 PM on April 20

Somebody I worked with was so infuriated at losing data from an external drive that he made it his business to visit a number of computer repair outfits in New York as ask them which drives are the most reliable, so he could reduce the probability of it ever happening again.

There was one brand that seemed to get more thumbs up than others : Western Digital.
posted by jacobean at 5:31 PM on April 20

Seconding the WD passport. I just got one of these after a data loss scare at work (everything was fine, fortuantely) and it's great. Longevity is yet to be seen, but a drive I can slide into my pocket, has the sync software and has good speeds works for me.

I also have four other WD Mybook drives, from 250GB to 1TB, all of which are working beautifully. The two Maxtors I had before both died, what killed them I don't know but it kind of soured me to the brand.
posted by tomble at 6:23 PM on April 20

Depending on how many you want to daisy-chain, you can get them with USB hubs built in. Definitely get the sort that is designed to keep the drive inside it running 24/7, ie a "server drive enclosure". Some of these even have network ports as well as USB/Firewire/eSATA/PATA; if you plan to hang your drive off a server box and share it to your network, this wouldn't slow it down any.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 6:49 PM on April 20

I love my Maxtor OneTouch II (300 gb) drive I got a few years back. I haven't quite kept up with the latest external hard drives, but I've put tons and tons of data on this drive for 4 years now and it's running absolutely perfect.

Just based on how well it's worked for me, I'd definitely check out Maxtor's OneTouch drives among whatever you choose.
posted by isoman2kx at 8:33 PM on April 20

When I was researching external hard drives in February, it seemed like problems and praise were spread pretty evenly across all available brands. I ended up buying a Seagate FreeAgent Pro after seeing some previous AskMe praise for the company, but it was a lemon right out of the box. After I saw some Amazon reviews that indicated other people were having the same/similar problems with FreeAgent Pros, I returned it for a Western Digital MyBook, which has been working fine.
posted by brookedel at 1:42 AM on April 21

There are two types of hard drives: Those which have failed, and those which are about to. I personally avoid Maxtor because of a bad experience a while back. I use mostly Western Digitals at home. They fail as often as any other brand, but their S.M.A.R.T. data has always given me enough advance warning to get my data off. I'm an idiot for trusting that, as not all failure modes give hints ahead of time.

Look at a RAID enclosure, which will tolerate a drive failure. Make sure it has some way of telling you when this happens, so you can replace the failed drive and it'll regenerate the redundancy. Some of the cheaper dual-drive enclosures lack any sort of reporting, defeating the purpose.

Or get a Drobo. These have the advantage of not requiring identically-sized drives like RAID, and the disadvantage of being expensive. They are awesomely cool, however. And shiny.
posted by Myself at 2:20 AM on April 21

"Secondly, all contemporary makes of hard drive have around the same failure rate." - sgmax

Repeating this because its true. A lot of the comments you are seeing here are incidental evidence. Not that they dont have value or arent real, but they are biased in that most people dont field test 10 different brands of drives under identical conditions for long periods of time to find true accurate failure rates. Most reputable testing shops have shown that the MTBF for most drives is pretty much identical give or take small variances.

As others have said, your best bet is to either 1.) Keep multiple copies sync'ed in various physical locations, 2.) Pay for some online backup solution, or 3.) spend the money and buy a RAID enclosure so that if one drive fails you wont lose anything.

Depending on single drives is just silly. (I'm as much at fault as anyone, but I use Microsoft SyncToy to duplicate my important data over 3 different drives. The likely hood of all 3 drives failing at one time is pretty low. On the bad side though, I keep all 3 drives in one computer, so if anyone were to steal it, I'd be screwed. )
posted by jmnugent at 4:17 AM on April 21

Choose a drive with USB and eSATA connector. One day the eSATA will save you a lot of time (i.e. when making another backup to a desktop). This should not cost significantly more.

Try to find one with a power button and/or auto-sleep.

Buy 2 cheap 3.5" devices instead of expensive 2.5" devices;
Use one as an off-site backup; Change them monthly.
posted by Akeem at 7:02 AM on April 21