Suggestions for a 1TB ex hdd?

Does any one have any of the products below. All seem to have good rating etc but was wondering if anyone here had one or another to recommend as im quickly running out of storage at the moment? Ideally i want a 1tb so it will last for a while.

Toshiba 1TB External Hard Drive USB2.0 - Retail - Ebuyer

Buffalo Drivestation 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo

Western Digital Elements 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo

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Comments

Jordus

Ive had good luck with all those brands of drives.

I dont use the software that comes with them though, i just format it for its intended purpose and just go from there.

jibbajabba

Neither.
I'd go for a Seagate 1TB ES.2 (ST31000340NS) and any external enclosure. Those "ready made" external drives normally comes with a "cheap" .. or at least "cheaper" model of HDD .. The Seagate 1TB ES.2 are a bit more expensive but rock solid .. and all external enclosures ($5-$50) come with a SATA > USB2 interface so I would rather build my own if I were you .. ESPECIALLY since you want to keep it for a while (the model stated is enterprise aproved hence reliable).

But that is just me

JDMurray

Also be aware that the USB on many laptops and non-powered hubs don't supply enough power to keep external 500GB+ hard drives running reliably.

tiersten

Gomjaba wrote: »

I'd go for a Seagate 1TB ES.2 (ST31000340NS) and any external enclosure. Those "ready made" external drives normally comes with a "cheap" .. or at least "cheaper" model of HDD .. The Seagate 1TB ES.2 are a bit more expensive but rock solid

Only if you update the firmware on them. Otherwise you may find out that the drive mysteriously dies at some random startup in the future.

msteinhilber

tiersten wrote: »

Only if you update the firmware on them. Otherwise you may find out that the drive mysteriously dies at some random startup in the future.

Very important tip, make sure they have the updated firmware as reliability without them is laughable. Even with the firmware update I frankly have experienced a much higher than normal failure rate on them. Yes I am referring to the ES.2 series, not the lesser expensive 7200.11's. We have these in a few Openfiler boxes in RAID 5 arrays for non mission critical storage, primarily for IT department shares that we can get by without as well as for VM storage for test environments. I replace at least a drive every month and a half to two months out of a pool of 10 of these, and they see minimal loads.

Frankly, Seagate's quality for their SATA hard drives has been far below what I typically would expect from Seagate once you surpass the 750GB sizes. Those are just my observations, we generally use Seagate for any desktop drive or server drive that is using lower end SATA disks but we are reconsidering alternatives for beyond 750GB.

jibbajabba

tiersten wrote: »

Only if you update the firmware on them. Otherwise you may find out that the drive mysteriously dies at some random startup in the future.

Very true ... having said that - I never had a disk dying before .. The only problem we had with a shonky firmware depended on the firmware of the raid card and backplane .. And it normally turned out to be the backplane ...

Either way ... I would always go for an enterprise HDD and enclosure rather than a pre-build model.

tiersten

Gomjaba wrote: »

Very true ... having said that - I never had a disk dying before .. The only problem we had with a shonky firmware depended on the firmware of the raid card and backplane .. And it normally turned out to be the backplane ....

I'm talk about this Seagate problem which affected the Barracuda 7200.11, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22 drives. There is a bug in the original firmware where a pointer to the internal drive event log can be set 1 higher than it should be. The drive itself at boot up notices that it is wrong and disables itself to protect your data. Unless you've updated the firmware on the drive, you've got a 1 in 256 chance of the drive just dying at each startup. There isn't any way of repairing it yourself either.