Reliable external hard drives?

I've gotten tired of backing up my data to DVDs and would like to try an external hard drive. It should be no less than 500 GB (1 TB is better) and preferably not very long, wide or tall (though it won't be moving around much so this isn't an absolute necessity). I can pay on the order of $100 (i.e. $120 is OK, $150 is pushing it, $200 is too expensive).

Problem is, every hard drive I've looked at on Amazon or Newegg has a bunch of reviews that essentially say "This stopped working after X days/weeks/months". I would like mine to last for a few years -- until its capacity makes it obsolete or until SSDs become ubiquitous enough to be used as backup storage (whichever comes first). Can anyone recommend me such a hard drive?

 

Look for an exteranl which uses ESATA
The SATA to USB or SATA to firewire adaptors usually burn out after a few months time. With esata, it is a direct connection to the drive. One less part to break.

I recommend the WD My Book external drives. The are pretty nice drives.

K-TRON

 

Unfortunately, neither my laptop nor the antique desktop I would also like to back up have eSATA ports so I'm pretty much limited to USB. If the adaptor is the only thing that breaks, can it be replaced?

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145249

640GB 7200RPM Hitachi external drive; $59.99; free shipping; good reviews (just need to reformat to NTFS if you don't like FAT32).

 

The SATA to USB adaptors can be replaced. However you need an identical adaptor in order for it to fit in your enclosure.

You can also search ebay for broken externals. Chances are the harddrive is dead and the adaptor is still good.
At least that is what happened when my friend broke his My Book enclosure. It fell off the desk while on. The harddrive died, and the adaptor worked. I have the adaptor in my homemade enclosure and it is working fine.

K-TRON

 

Your best bet is to stop basing your purchase decisions off the reviews you read on Newegg or Amazon. Usually, the only time someone takes the time to post a "review" on these sites is when they encounter an issue with the product they bought and want to flame the crap out of it or the manufacturer.

Find yourself a reputable, compentent review site that you trust (God forbid you go to Tom's), and read some of the reviews they have there. Leave the whiny, complaining reviewers on Newegg and Amazon for chumps who don't know any better.

 

Just look around for an drive (2.5" or 3.5") that has an internal drop sensor and head parking. Then go look for a case with the connections you want/need and some kind of rubber coating and internal rubber suspension/shock mounting.

Most, but not all, laptops are able to power an external enclosure & 2.5" drive from a USB port. This is very dependant on the laptop, enclosure, and drive. No laptop will be able to power an external 3.5" drive/enclosure from a USB port.

So when choosing a 2.5" drive, pay close attention to the power drain as well as the reliablity numbers & engineering. The enclosure has it's own power draw as well. A USB port can supply 500mah of current. This is the number you're shooting for in terms of power draw.

If your laptop has a POWERED 6 wire firewire plug you can get past the USB power limitations. These kinds of connections are few and far between. 4 wire firewire and PCCard/ExpressCard adapters generally do NOT offer true powered connections regardless of what kind of connector is used.

And after all that, don't expect more than 2 years out of your drive. Disk drives happen to be one of the most complex & precise technical products out there. They are, even after all of the safeguards and engineering built in, still prone to failure 'just because'. For every user that claims to have gotten 5 years+ out of an external drive you'll find another user (or 5 or ??) that got less than a year out of their drive.

Also, backup everything to a drive that you DON'T carry all over. If it's portable, it will get stolen or become lost. If it's portable, you are going to drop it. If it's portable, it will fail.

Running TrueCrypt on your laptop and encrypting the external drive will reasonably take care of the lost/stolen problem. The droppage problem can only be managed with care on your part.

 

I'm not quite sure what hard drives you're buying, but I've never had a hard drive die on me within two years. I'm curious though. Where did you get your information that you will not get more than two years of use out of a hard drive? Quite frankly, that is the most ridiculous thing I've read.

Now it's less than ONE year? Did you not just say that two years was the max for any hard drive? I guess I'm confused then.

In any case, I encourage you to check out the following link. It offers information on Western Digital HDD's which some boast 1.2 million hours MTBF at 100% work load. I don't need to mention that there are about 8,600 hours in a year total. I'll let you do the math in computing how many days 1.2 million hours are. I assure you that it's well over two years though.

Western Digital Internal Products Summer 2007

 

Thanks for the replies. The drive will be stationary in my house and powered off most of the time so I don't think that theft or damage from motion are a significant problem (unless of course someone breaks in, but then I've got bigger problems than that). That said, I would prefer it to be small so I was thinking of the 500 GB Western Digital Passport. The reviews on NBR and elsewhere seem pretty positive. Does anyone have any experiences with this drive?

 

I said "don't expect". When a drive gets older, the bearings wear, the hda spindle gets a little wobbly, etc.

MTBF gets averaged across a whole production pool of drives (or whatever). For every drive that lives to 1.2 million hours and more, there are many that do not including the 30-day wonders. What MTBF does NOT do is to imply that any particular drive will get that kind of service life. Your 8600 hours of work in a year adds up to a hair over 25000 hours in three years, the length of a typical consumer warranty. Where are the other 1.1 million+ hours? Gone and disappeared into the entire production pool of drives as an average.

And it doesn't take a pool of a million drives to average out the million hour MTBF either. Having a pool of say, 50 drives means that in the course of a year you'll experience an average of one failure a month. I'll leave it to you to dig up what MTBF means and it's impact on multi-drive and single-drive installations. Don't forget to do that math yourself either.

Hauling a precision device whose edge is spinning at around 750 mph doesn't exactly translate into longer service times.

The point is to be prepared and do your backups. The unspoken point is to NOT depend on semi-mythical MTBF hours betting that you've got one of the high-average drives when the chances are just as good that you don't.

 

The point is that you have made two statements with which you have no factual proof to assert your position. The MTBF discussion is nothing more but an unwelcome distraction from getting to the real meat of the matter. Which is, simply stated, that you cannot make broad generalizations on hard drives that die within two years of use (you also went as far as to state one year) without having the proof to back it up.