Need help deciding on new external drive

The time has come for me to get a new external hard drive and since I already have a FreeAgent Go I am now looking for something that focuses on capacity rather than portability. After some searching, two drives that have caught my eye are the 2TB Seagate GoFlex Desk and the 2TB Western Digital My Book Elite. I don't have much experience or knowledge in this area so could anyone give me some insight on these two drives, or recommend a different one altogether if I've missed the mark in narrowing it down to these.

The main difference I see is the GoFlex's ability to upgrade to USB 3.0. I'll be using this drive with my XPS M1330 which doesn't have that technology, but it looks like I'd have the option to upgrade to it with a kit that includes an ExpressCard accessory. At $80, though, this would bring the GoFlex to the $230 range rather than $150 if I wanted to take advantage of USB 3.0, which is quite a difference (and makes it comparable in price to the WD My Book 3.0 if I decide to go that route). Also, the Western Digital has a longer warranty (3 years as opposed to 2) and a customizable display, which is pretty cool, but none of these are deal breakers for me.

So other than the things I've mentioned, could anyone tell me the pros and cons of these two models? Which one is better when it comes to software, reliability, performance, etc? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

if the mybook has e-SATA it will be more realistic to get that.. e-SATA uses similar bandwidth to USB3.0 and is sometimes actually faster... so i would say Mybook is much better.. also it will be more reliable than seagate as seagate drives seem to have lower and lower quality nowadays.. so I say mybook.. after e-SATA is still much more used in laptops compared to USB3.0

 

I have never, ever, ever had a problem with Seagate Desktop drives. EVAR. Meanwhile I've had 3 WD's go "clink, clink, clink", and some old Maxtor drives go the same way. Otherwise I agree, e-SATA is much more widely speed than USB3 and there is a noticeable speed increase over USB2.

 

thanks for the responses so far. it doesn't look like the my book elite has esata, and neither is it an option for the goflex desk (for some reason only the portable version can upgrade to esata, so maybe an adapter will be a future accessory for the desk).

i guess what the question boils down to then is this: given the fact that with the goflex one has the option (albeit a costly one) to upgrade connections if so desired, is there any reason to opt for the elite instead? also relevant may be the fact that i'll likely never use that option, at least not anytime in the near future. any response from someone who has experience with one or both of these drives would be especially helpful.

alternatively, if there are better options in the same price range, please recommend.

 

I would highly recommend you to either try to buy a different drive with eSata or get the USB 3.0 one. USB 2.0 even before all of the overhead simply is way too slow to transfer files fast enough for me.

I have a 640GB USB 2.0 drive connected to my laptop and sometimes when I'm doing multiple things on that drive ie watching a 1080p video file while unraring a big file or something along those lines, I actually hit the USB 2.0 bottleneck and the video has to stop and buffer. Furthermore, some of the transfer times actually get pretty ridiculously long.

 

e-SATA is actually perfect that why i recommended the mybook.. its seems to be beating USB3.0 in hard drives as the drives are just too slow.. external SSD's are just different.