Searching for a 2tb External hard drive

Hi guys need ur help. i m planning to buy an External Hard Drive for my notebook. i was searching through internet and didn't find the 'ideal' drive as i kept getting confused on to whether which ones are the best. However, through my research i have found LaCie and Seagate pretty competitive in terms of quality and price. But again i might be wrong since there are tons of other companies.
My requirements:
2tb external hard drive
Cache or Buffer more than 16 mbs
having atleast 7200rpm
Price: Anything below 250$ (There are exceptiosn though )
Those are the most basic req.

Any replies would be more than appreciated.
THANKS.

 

You have two options,
1) buy a external harddrive with a single 2TB drive, (Western Digital is the only manufacturer, and I think the drive alone is around $300)
or
2) buy an external or a NAS, which has two or more drives in it giving you the 2TB of space. This should be the cheaper of the two options, however it is larger and less portable.

K-TRON

 

What type of connection do you want? USB, FireWire, eSATA, ethernet? Are you moving it around a lot? For external, you don't need the fastest desktop drive or the biggest cache. I actually prefer something like the WD Green drives for power saving since you don't need great access times. 1TB drives are under $100 now, so I think that would be the only way to go. The number of available 1.5 and 2TB drives are very few, Seagate having issues still with their 1.5TB and WD being the only manufacturer with a 2TB drive, and as K-TRON said it's expensive. Then check out Newegg for enclosures with the type of connections you want/need.

 

I must ask, why are you aiming at large cache or fast speeds when you're gonna use it as an external harddrive? Mostly external drives lacks the peformance anyways, so that doesn't come in handy when used via USB2.0 for example.

The most important requierment when searching for an external drive is the connection-type, which you haven't even mentioned?!


However, as the above posters said, WD is the only one with a 2TB single drive. And seagate lacks big reliability with their 7200.11 line-up, so don't go with any of those seagate drives as they will most certainly f-up.

 

I thought Seagate had long since released a firmware fix for their 7200.11 drives? This is the first I've seen someone mention that problem in at least a month.

 

Seagate had long? What?

However, does the latest firmware fix, really fix all issues reported for the 7200.11-drives? All of them? None has reported anything yet?

Why no-one actually mentions it anymore, it all depends on where you look, if you look here, it's because this is a laptop forum, those 7200.11 drives aren't 2.5"

 

The fix has been out since January I believe. This isn't the only site I frequent, and I haven't seen a case of a bricked 7200.11 in a while, or word of continuing problems with them on Daily Tech, Engadget, and other news sites. If I'm wrong then that's really disappointing on Seagate's part, but especially given that their 1.5TB drive is in that line, I'd be shocked if things were this quiet about their still being FW problems.

 

Isn't it better to get two or even four separate drives?... you know
just in case if disk break up...it is expensive but safer.

 

It would actually be cheaper since you pay a premium for larger drives, just compare 2x 1TB drives for less than $100 each vs. 1x 2TB drive for over $200.

 

thanks guys for all your replies..
anyways i have 1394a(Firewire 400) on my laptop and ofcourse USB too..so i m use it accordingly...however i do wanna know that how could we know that i have an eSATA feature on my laptop..I have an HP dv6500t.
THANKS Again.

 

HP dv6500t doesn't have eSATA (it's a type of port like USB/FireWire, you can Google what it looks like). Look for an enclosure with USB/ethernet and if it isn't that much more expensive FireWire as well.

 

One thing else, be careful with large drives like that. If it fails and or crashes you can loose everything in one shot........

 

But what if the Drive comes with a Built-in RAID 1 feature that backs up ur data

 

no drive can do that, you need more than one drive.

best deal right now is these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337

1.5TB for $129 shipped vs about $200+ for a 2tb drive.

Get two of them and then get a drobo, or some sort of nas to hold them that supports raid if you want raid.

If you do not want raid, just get a cheap external enclosure.

Or if you really want to do things right, buy the hp mediasmart server or build your own, the windows home server os has something very similar to raid to protect your files, and allows you do many other things you cant do with just an external drive (view or stream files from remote locations, automatic backup of your hard drive ect.

Oh actually I picked out parts to build my own file server not too long ago I will share that parts list with you, this was my way of building a better version of the hp mediasmart server for a bit less, but you have to use the OEM Windows Home Server software that does not have some of the extras the HP model has, and the HP case is super small and awesome but this case I picked out holds 6 drives instead of 4 and has much more power behind it to handle addons & future upgrades.

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=9880951

 

I have not seen a 2tb external hdd but 1.5 tb, yes there is.

 

They have them, but its not worth the money currently when 1.5tb drives are 130, but even if you cant find one you can get a drive and enclosure separate and make your own.

 

Ok thanks for the info. BTW where do you get 1.5 tb external hdd for 130?
Any link?

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337

and here are enclosures: http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=92&name=External-Enclosures

Get one that is for 3.5" Sata that you like. Shop smart and get one with free shipping if you can. Id personally get one that has e-sata since both my desktop & laptop have it.

 

if you only use it for data at home, you could instead think about some server solution on the net (or a nas, but i hate them with passion). a home server could back up your notebook (and up to 9 other pc's/notebooks around, so you can make a deal with family/neighbours) and can have several disks in => more than 2 tb, and still cheap (as you can buy the disk with biggest bang for the buck, a.k.a. smallest $/gb).

live is great if you know a dying hdd can not kill your data..

on the go, i have a 100gb 1.8" disk just in case i need to usb-style move around some data. i need that around all 3 months or so?

 

you can take the external hard disk as the seagate hard drive which i am using .

you can also take the maxtor which is also the one which i refer to you . because i have seen the service and the performance of the maxtor.
which one would you like to take .you can take it