portable hard drive brands

I am considering buying a 1tb external hard drive w/ usb 3.0.

This is my first time buying an external hard drive so I really dont know which brands to trust.
From your personal experience, in terms of reliability, durability, and performance, which hard drive would you guys recommend?
So far, seagate and wd seems to be the most common, but I'm very willing to try other brands.
Also, whats the usual life expectancy of hard drives?

 

Western Digital.

I wouldn't trust anything on a Seagate drive.

 

All of my external Toshiba and WD drives have performed flawlessly. I've had 18 of them and only lost one when it fell 4' onto a steel deck. It was a 3.0 WD 1TB and I was still able to recover the files before it finally went kaput. I've never owned a Seagate external.

 

Statistics show all manufacturers have similar failure rates, and are within percentage points of each other. What matters is the warranty, and for that I personally recommend Western Digital. I do own a 4 year old 250 GB Seagate FreeAgent, been kicked around, thrown around still works like a charm.

 

I don't know why there's so much disinformation about Seagate drives. They're perfectly fine.

 

Seagate got ALOT of bad heat for the Barracuda firmware scandal. Personally I never experienced it, but 2-3 years ago they also had really bad QC. My friend ordered 10 1.5TB Barracuda drives, 7 DOA, 2 with issues off the bat, had to be RMA'd and only 1 good drive. The taste in people's mouths after having one bad experience, it stays there permanently.

 

I recommend one based off a notebook (2.5") drive for durability.

Life expectancy is as with any HDD. Can last years, until you bump it when it is running and then it dies.

Here are my suggestions:
1) Get one based on a 2.5" drive if you plan to carry it around.
2) Do not get one that stands up like a miniature tower. Those are just begging to be knocked over and killed.
3) A "backup" is a multiple copy of the important data on multiple media. Do NOT ever put the ONLY copy of very important data on an external drive. That is not a backup. A backup is having the data on your computer, and having a second (or third, or fourth) copy on the external drive.

I wonder how WD escaped that stigma? They've had QC issues so bad that they had to do a recall. However, that was years before Seagate's problems, so maybe people's memories are short. That was back in 1999, and they recalled almost a half million drives.

 

1) I have never had a WD fail...

2) I have had 4 Seagates fail...

3) I've always owned more WD's than Seagates.

4) I believe in active cooling, so, all of my HD's are cool to the touch (except my laptop HD's...)

 

One person's experience hardly makes up an entire company's reputation or reliability. Although I understand your reluctance completely. I've actually had great experience with Seagate and WD in laptop drives. However in desktop, I've had now four WD drives fail in my Windows Home Server. Thankfully the Warranty takes care of it, but it's annoying and irritating.

 

Exactly, as simple statistics principles reveal. Reliability-wise, excluding model-specific issues, all hard drives are pretty much the same. I've never had any problems with the Seagate drives I have, but that doesn't mean Seagate's reliability is exceptional.

I would suggest going with the cheapest option (there are some great deals on WD Element external HDDs), and looking at other manufacturers that make enclosures for HDDs that they source from the major HDD manufacturers (ie: Fantom, Cavalry, etc.). I have a 1TB Cavalry drive (Hitachi inside) that I got for a very low price more than two years back.

 

As of late WD does offer the fastest drives, albeit not the cheapest. So if you want best performance, then WD is probably your best choice. Otherwise pretty much any other brand is fine.