External Hard drive suggestions?

[shanghinunes]

I'm thinking of getting an external hard drive for movies and music. Something I can bring with me, and have it to watch movies instead of bringing a stack of dvds to a friend's house. Any suggestions on brand, size, or anything else?

[One Who Craves Souls]

I can speak for WD and Seagate, all of my WD external HD have worked wonderfully, some of them for years. On the Seagate side both died after a year of using it...  <_<

[HueyTheGod]

I can speak for WD and Seagate, all of my WD external HD have worked wonderfully, some of them for years. On the Seagate side both died after a year of using it...  <_<

I also have had bad experience with Seagate's external Hard Drive's.

[steffen_anywhere]

WD My Passport (or any variation of it). Reliable and fast. Always had a hood experience with it. Just don't use the WDsmartware, it is rather pointless.

[kirashi]

I'm thinking of getting an external hard drive for movies and music. Something I can bring with me, and have it to watch movies instead of bringing a stack of dvds to a friend's house. Any suggestions on brand, size, or anything else?

 

I work in an electronics retailer and can speak from all sides of the round table.

I have had the following drive brands die on me whilst working there over 3 years, and during the 5 years prior when I first got into computers heavily (listed in no particular order):

• Seagate 3.5" internal
• WD 2.5" internal
• Samsung 3.5" & 2.5" internal
• Toshiba 2.5" internal
• IOmega external
• Verbatim external
• Seagate external
• WD external
• LaCiE external
• Toshiba external

As you can see, there is not really a "better" brand per-say, but there definitely are better model numbers and series you can buy. For instance, Seagate got a horrible rap for their 7200.11 series of Desktop 3.5" drives, so bad that 60-80% of their 7200.11 1.5TB drives failed in the first 3 years. (Technically, the drives were perfect. It was the cache firmware that was coded poorly. Seagate attempted to fix it with an update, then promptly abandoned the services when everyone's drives were out of warranty.)

 

Another example is WD's My Passport Portable series of drives. I will NEVER recommend or purchase a WD MyPassport Portable 2.5" drive EVER. Why? Read on... WD uses a soldered on circuit board to save on both cost and space inside their 2.5" portable drive series. This has its' obviously stated PROs, but is a HUGE CON when it comes to having to recover any data from the drive. If the drive doesn't spin up correctly, the soldered on circuit board will not allow it to show up in a device list on a computer, so you can't even try to recover it using the dd command on a Linux distribution. 

I just recently found a really good writeup on Recovering Data from WD's 2.5" My Passport hard drives.

 

I'm not trying to discourage you from getting a hard drive; I mean, storage is storage. But please make sure you get USB3.0 these days, and consider how often you need to carry it around, as although portable drives are smaller, they also tend to fail sooner than 3.5" drives due to people thrashing them about like a flash drive.