External hard drive suggestions?

[owequitit]

Good luck with that. I used to love WD, but have had 3 failures in a year from them. As such, I have started to heavily favor Seagate.

[deevergote]

After seeing the condition of this one, I may opt for something else. The box was undamaged, so I don't thing it was thrown around... probably more of a quality control issue.

I've heard horror stories about EVERY manufacturer, though... in the end, all of the well known brands are probably about the same in terms of reliability.

Maxtor is actually the one company that has never failed me, as far as internal drives go. I know they're a lower-end company compared to many others.

[Leung]

I refuse to buy Maxtor ,even though Seagate bought them out a while back, because i help this one guy repair computers for our coworkers and it seems like all the Maxtor internal drive's arm fails inside of it.

I'll only use Samsung, WD or Hitachi.

[TheFirstNutZo]

Bah, they all have the same problems. Especially the 1.5 and 2tb drives, and the "Green" drives. Seems to be a bit of a game of Russian Roulette these days as to whether you've bought yourself a brick or a perfectly good 8+ year long-lasting drive.

I bought 3 of the WD 1.5TB externals on Black Friday for $120 each. All the drives work, but unfortunately they're "Green" drives that don't work for shit in a RAID configuration so I'm going to have to return them. I own two other WD MyBook's and they have been great, but I wasn't trying to RAID them. Their build quality (along with my three new ones) have been very good as well, so you might've just gotten a stinker.

I have bought WD, Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi, Samsung, and IBM drives over the years and some of them have been great and some have failed. It is pretty much a crapshoot as to whether you've got a winner or a loser, and each manufacturer tends to release a crap drive from time to time (Hitachi drives in Macbooks a few years ago, early Seagate 1.5TBs, 1+ TB "Green" drives from WD, etc.).

[deevergote]

I got a new MyBook to replace the busted one. So far, so good. Everything has been backed up (50,000 files)

I'm not a fan of their software... as I had initially just thought to use the drive as I would any other drive... just plop the files onto it. I guess I probably could... but I figured I'd use their system to be safe. I don't want to find that I've corrupted something by doing it incorrectly! This is all new to me...

[TheFirstNutZo]

I got a new MyBook to replace the busted one. So far, so good. Everything has been backed up (50,000 files)

I'm not a fan of their software... as I had initially just thought to use the drive as I would any other drive... just plop the files onto it. I guess I probably could... but I figured I'd use their system to be safe. I don't want to find that I've corrupted something by doing it incorrectly! This is all new to me...

It is just a drive as far as Windows is concerned. You can use their software if you like, but it won't corrupt anything if you just do it manually.

[deevergote]

Cool. Since it holds so much, maybe I'll dump something on there manually as well.

As I explore the file structure created by their software, it makes no sense. I couldn't navigate that crap traditionally if I wanted to!

[GHOST 2.2]

is it me or 1tb external hard drives are not fully 1tb?

i bought one i forgot what brand but i didnt get the full 1tb out of the hard drive.

my external drive is my back up for pictures, music and heh heh movies. im probably gonna pick up another internal hard drive so i can have a back up for my back up. my collection is gold and accumilated since i moved on from windows 98, so if i lose all of it id probably jump off a bridge.

[deevergote]

It says right on the packaging that some of the storage space is taken up by formatting, necessary files and applications, etc...

Mine was about 970gb... so somewhere in there is 30gb of other stuff...

But I don't think I've amassed 1tb worth of data... EVER... so I'm not all that concerned. Plus, if I fill up this $120 1tb drive anytime soon (yes, I know I overpaid), then finding another one for a similar price, probably larger by that time, won't be too difficult.



I remember the first time I ever even heard of a 1tb drive. Legacy Accord told me about it. He said he had a computer with 2tb of storage, I think... and I thought that was absolutely insane. This was in 2005 or so, I think. Now, I have the "small" 1tb drive.

[TheFirstNutZo]

is it me or 1tb external hard drives are not fully 1tb?

i bought one i forgot what brand but i didnt get the full 1tb out of the hard drive.

my external drive is my back up for pictures, music and heh heh movies. im probably gonna pick up another internal hard drive so i can have a back up for my back up. my collection is gold and accumilated since i moved on from windows 98, so if i lose all of it id probably jump off a bridge.

Here's the issue. Hard drive manufacturer's say that one thousand is 1000 (metric 1000). The computer world disagrees and says that one thousand is 1024 (binary 2^10). So one KILObyte is 1024 bytes. 1 megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. 1 gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. 1 terabyte is 1024 megabytes. And so on.

When a hard drive manufacturer SAYS they are selling you a 1TB HDD, they're really selling you 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Windows/Mac/Linux/etc. disagree and say that 1TB is actually 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. Which means that the 1,000,000,000,000 bytes you just bought is really only 931.32GB, as far as computers are concerned.

[cvc7chris]

Here's the issue. Hard drive manufacturer's say that one thousand is 1000 (metric 1000). The computer world disagrees and says that one thousand is 1024 (binary 2^10). So one KILObyte is 1024 bytes. 1 megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. 1 gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. 1 terabyte is 1024 megabytes. And so on.

When a hard drive manufacturer SAYS they are selling you a 1TB HDD, they're really selling you 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Windows/Mac/Linux/etc. disagree and say that 1TB is actually 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. Which means that the 1,000,000,000,000 bytes you just bought is really only 931.32GB, as far as computers are concerned.

werd

[GHOST 2.2]

It says right on the packaging that some of the storage space is taken up by formatting, necessary files and applications, etc...

Mine was about 970gb... so somewhere in there is 30gb of other stuff...

But I don't think I've amassed 1tb worth of data... EVER... so I'm not all that concerned. Plus, if I fill up this $120 1tb drive anytime soon (yes, I know I overpaid), then finding another one for a similar price, probably larger by that time, won't be too difficult.



I remember the first time I ever even heard of a 1tb drive. Legacy Accord told me about it. He said he had a computer with 2tb of storage, I think... and I thought that was absolutely insane. This was in 2005 or so, I think. Now, I have the "small" 1tb drive.

back in 94 i thought my 300mb hard drive was good. 500mb was big and in 97 1gb hard drive was insane. hell i thought when i had a pentium 150 in 97 i was god. haha.

now im saying to myself, what am i gonna fill 1tb with? apparently i did fill it up with movies and blu-ray movies.

[Leung]

back in 94 i thought my 300mb hard drive was good. 500mb was big and in 97 1gb hard drive was insane. hell i thought when i had a pentium 150 in 97 i was god. haha.

now im saying to myself, what am i gonna fill 1tb with? apparently i did fill it up with movies and blu-ray movies.

anime and japanese porn for me

[WilliamW]

Get a 256 GB solid state. You'll be transferring faster than you've ever known.

[deevergote]

Already purchased and used...

Plus, I thought solid state was slower than disc...