1TB external 2.5 notebook drives unreliable ?

Are the current crop of 1TB external 2.5 notebook drives unreliable ?
The satisfaction rating of these drives on amazon.com seems to be lower than the 500GB counterparts.

 

Dunno, and nobody here can actually answer that regardless of what they say. That information is not publicly available and nobody outside of large OEMs would know.

 

I'm waiting till they have per-platter density of at least 500GB, that way 1TB can fit in a regular 9.5mm drive. Once that happens, reliability will improve because they will be mass produced.

 

If only NAND prices would decrease a lot more, they can already fit 1+TB in 2.5" 9.5mm drive (of course it would cost more than most computers...)

 

Computers? I think you mean Volkswagens!

 

Mine seems OK, but that's not exactly scientific.

 

Posting an actual link to comments might be more useful...

But unless I am mistaken traditionally it always seems as if there are more problems with higher capacity drives.

 

Things are always more unstable when you push the limits.

 

This, 10char.

 

You could check the Newegg reviews, see if the assumption holds true.

 

I believe a more realistic question would be; do you really want a 5200RPM drive with only 8mb cache ? That being said, WD I find has begun to start on the cycle of less is more. Their desktop drives don't support some critical raid functions(unless you buy their drives specifically with TLER to support it, which of course, are more expensive.), so I can't imagine where else they may have decided to cut costs. If you can look past that, 3 year warranty is sufficient for the expected life cycle of any HDD imo.

The 750GB Blue drive on newegg should yield more reviews and a more clear view of people's impression of the high capacity Scorpio blue WD drives as well.

 

On a cursory glance, I didnt find (except for one) insightful reviews; just "this drive failed after a month" type reviews.

As you and ZaZ pointed out, its dicey when limits are pushed, and that is what concerns me.

See this review for WD 1TB (read his update in the posted discussion too):
Amazon.com: Ellery Davies "Ellery...'s review of Western Digital My Passport Essential SE 1...

 

There is a reason they call it "Bleeding Edge", every once in a while, sometimes even often, you WILL BLEED.............

 

On Newegg, WD 500GB, 640GB and 1TB all have 4 out of 5 stars.

However the WD 1TB only has 31% 5 star ratings while 500GB and 640GB have 74% 5 star ratings.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136540
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136473
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136388

 

If you buy the WD 1tb 2.5 12mm external hdd already in the enclosure it comes with a 2 year warranty.

But if you buy the bare drive it comes with a 3 year warranty, does the enclosure reduce the hdd`s reliability.

 

The enclosure is probably less reliable than the drive. The enclosure shouldnt make any difference to the drive insides reliability though.

 

I had a WD 500gb external and the power supply died, the power plug was one of those multi-pin ones, so i just bought a cheap enclosure of ebay.

 

My WD had same problem.. but don't u loose all data if u take it out of enclousure? That's what i read so i just waited for replacement power plug..

 

My data was fine, but this was a year or two ago, I don't know if WD has changed things now.

It was one of these.

http://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgu...=wd+500gb+external&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&tbs=isch:1

 

no, you do not. I haven't hear of an enclosure where this is the case. 99% of them are just desktop drives in a fancy case anyway.

 

More like 100%. There is nothing magical about the drives in external enclosures.

 

hehe yeah, more like 100%.

 

ok no more googling for me .. i'm comming here always for info

 

Once Upon A Time (say up to three or so months ago), Seagate, Hitachi, and WD all sold external drives that could NOT be disassembled to reuse the enclosure or to move the drive into a 'real' computer.

The usual controller/IF board on the disk drive itself was replaced by a specialized I/O board in the enclosure. The external drive was electrically/mechanically integrated with the enclosure; it either worked as a unit or not at all.

Roughly 7 years ago Hitachi & Seagate started this with their microdrives once people figured out that their cheap microdrive-based external USB storage held generic compact-flash microdrives. The second generation of those products were re-worked so that if you pulled the microdrive out, it would refuse to work as a standard CF device.

I have no idea if any of the current external drive offerings still do this. But as recently as last winter there were still products in the sales pipeline that worked this way.

 

Are you sure you're talking about mechanical drives? As I type this, I have a WD enclosure housing a Samsung drive connected to my laptop.

 

what? I've never heard of this. I've never, ever seen a external drive backup drive, or anything HDD based use a proprietary board for the hard disc. Even the HDD's in my 2 seagate 500GB storage units have real desktop drives in them(and I'm using one in my desktop now), so does my Apple Time capsule, and apple TV.

 

Yes, real drives with the 'regular' disk controller board stripped off and replaced with a NEW controller card that is part of the enclosure. The usb/network, disk controller, and power interfaces are on the new board. A small ribbon cable connects the two.

Disassemble a (broken) hard drive. Just take the controller board off. Notice the small connector that the controller card interfaces with. Now imagine a different kind of controller card with all of the extra interfaces necessary to run that bare drive in an external enclosure.

Instead of having two or three circuit boards in an external enclosure (the actual disk controller card, a USB controller, a network controller, ghods know what else), the manufacturers now get by with one do-it-all card. Parts count is lowered, production costs go down, reliability is improved (fewer connectors). The manufacturer gain pricing flexibility because the enclosures can no longer be cannibalized by the consumer for working disk drives.

 

All my experience in this is with hardware from a year ago or older and I agree with Lozz, I've never seen or heard of that ever. The WD enclosure I have a Samsung drive in is from about a year ago and it has a simple generic usb-sata interface inside and the drive that was in it was a regular desktop drive. I do have an external WD Elements 2TB I bought a month ago I'll check out if I can.

 

Alright, I'm looking on youtube at disassembly videos of external drives and I'm not seeing what you are talking about. All the 2.5" and 3.5" drives only have the standard sata connections on them and are plugged into the interface and power boards just like in the drives I've opened up. In addition, most of the people posting the videos are saying that they are identical to the desktop drives and can be swapped or used as an internal drive.

 

Guys, hard drive tech and sales seem to pre-date your experience by some 15 years and many billions of units sold. As it does mine. And I did say that I've not seen any of these drive/enclosure pairs for sale recently.

I'm neither advocating for or against the tech, just mentioning that it existed.

Google/Bing is not the Internet and the Internet is not the industry.

 

What? Do you have any more info? And you said as of 3 months ago. I bought my first external 5 years ago and my most recent a month ago. I just have never heard or seen this and your post is the only info I can find.

 

I've opened about 4 dozen HDD encloses for friends/family/ ect.. all were at least a year or two, or three old. I've never seen this technology in use. The widespread use of USB HDD encloses does no go back 15 years, so I'm fairly sure our experience is relevant. If you can provide evidence of it's existence and nearly market wide use beyond your word and experience, it would be appreciated.

 

I can vouch for him. I've personally seen what he's talking about. I was dissasembling a 1TB 2.5 seagate pocket drive, and everything inside it was proprietary, along with another Seagate desktop external I saw not too long ago. I took them both back for a return, because if my data were on one and the USB interface controller board got fried, I would be SOL, short of paying Seagate $$$ to fix my drive and return it. I like the old model, but I see this becoming more commonplace everyday. I think it may have to do with cutting costs, somehow. Don't know how that cuts costs, but it maybe a possible revenue stream for Seagate as well. If things go bad out of warranty, it would be close to impossible to salvage on one's own, thereby causing the customer to call Seagate and set up repairs and data-migration for $.

 

Didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

My interest in this is transitory. How many examples would each of you like to see. One, a dozen, a hundred?

I'll see what I can find, but the Seagate and WD products I've seen don't lend themselves to user disassembly and likely won't have too many popular YouTube vids for your satisfaction.

 

100,000 images of hail marry proprietary PCB boards or ye burn @ the stake!


Just never seen it before, and I tend to prefer physical evidence rather than someone's word, nothing personal.

 

Heh, thanks for that image! You can never, ever have too much Python when working in IT.

Let the Punnery Begin!

 

A quick google for WD external drives seems to say that it was some models of the 500 GB Passport and the 1 TB Passport that had this issue of using a straight USB connection into the hard drive as opposed to a SATA connector. Website here ( WD Passport 1TB drives not SATA - can't swap into laptop).

 

Thanks for bringing this out !

This sucks I dont want to give $$$$ to recover data instead of just swapping the drive. I've had one enclosure fail in the past and it was just nice to put the HDD in a different one.

EDIT: The external drives "made" by Iomega, Transcend (ie not WD and not Seagate) etc should be swappable right ?

 

My external drives from WD are completely swappable. These include my 500GB drives I bought a year ago and the 2TB elements I bought less than a month ago.