External Hardrives
I have been thinking about one of these for a while now as the volume of music and photos stored on my PC must be slowing it down, however, all of the models reviewed always seem to be the disc type and not the solid state ones, the latter appeals more as the lack of moving parts must surly add to the longterm reliability?
Can anyone recommend one through ownership rather than a review
Thanks
Solid state drives are much more expensive per GB which is probably why there aren't many customer reviews!
I have a 160GB western digital external HD that is still going and I have had that for 7 years, so no issues with reliability there. I've recently bought a LaCie 1TB hard drive and inbetween them I had a 320GB. So far I haven't had any problems with any of them.
I'm really pleased with my LaCie 'designed by Neil Poulton' and you can get it in a range of sizes and importantly for me has an on/off switch and it looks good plugged in alongside the rest of my stuff!
Thanks I will look at these options
Having an SSD drive is no guarantee of reliability, a friend of mine bought an SSD equipped laptop, the drive failed in the first week! He was somewhat miffed, to say the least.
That kind of thing can happen to any technology, HDDs might have more moving parts but they're a much more mature technology, compared to SSDs, so it probably evens out for now.
SSD's require some modifications to the operating system to work efficiently and ensure long life. If you run XP don't even go there as it is not fully compatible and the life will be a lot shorter due to the way XP accesses the drive.
Is your PC a laptop of tower?
If it's a tower then you would benefit from having a main C: drive for programs and a second internal drive for data. Alternatively you can look at USB or Network storage, though I'd recommend looking at Western Digital where possible as these have always proved to be 100% reliable to me.
Stick to 7,200rpm as these are much faster than 5,400rpm ones.
Finally, any installation will always suffer a degredation of speed due to fragmentation. I'd suggest using CCleaner and Defraggler on a regular basis or you could buy Diskeeper for a continuous defrag routine.
Well I bought a Hitachi 2TB Simpledrive external hard drive for £145 on Amazon to store all my music on in i-Tunes and it's been great. No complaints and i've put a lot of my cd's on there in lossless format but it's hardly made a dent in the available space.
Plug and play, switches on and off with the computer does exactly what it says on the tin.
The Buffalo Drive Station2share was simplicity itself to set up. Well, I did it!
Just got a new secondary 1.5TB internal HDD to replace my old 250GB drive. It's chugging away now as the data is being copied onto it.
As someone said above, it's best to use one drive (C:) as your SYSTEM drive, where you install your applications, and the second as a DATA drive for media, files and such like.
The advantage of an internal (SATA) HDD over an external (USB) drive, is the speed of the connection.
Oh and I tend to go for Seagate. Don't know why just always have done...and the drive I've just bought has had excellent reviews with access/transfer speeds faster than the 10K RPM WD Raptor!
The most secure and cost effective way of storing your precious data is using an external HDD box configured for RAID operation.
Simply put, there are two separate harddisks in the box, let's say 2 x 1 Terrabyte, but the PC or whatever device is accessing the external box only sees the storage as ONE terrabyte of space.
This is because whatever file is sent to the box is copied on both drives.
Which means if you are unlucky enough to have a catastrophic failure on one drive for whatever reason, all your data is still available on the mirrored drive.
All you have to do then is obtain a replacement drive, remove the defect unit, slot in the fresh one and the box will copy the contents of the good drive over to the fresh drive and you have your backup system fully restored again.
The price of drives are so cheap these days that it would be rather falsely optomistic not use a RAID configured backup system.
Audio/video engineer based in Norway 
But you still need to backup to another drive.
The main advantage of using a solid state drive is that you can use it in a rough enviroment as it can withstand knocks and bumps.
- Login to post comments
I've looked at this too. SSD's are prohibitively expensive. The cheapest I've seen work out at more than 2GBP per GB and seem to be limited in size.. A good usb2 external drive can be as little as 6p per GB (check out WD Elements on Amazon) at 57GBP for a 1 TB model.
In my experience, samsung or western digital seem to be better than seagate or maxtor for reliability.
LOUNGE: SONY KDL-46W4000; STR-DA2400ES & BDP-S350; SKY+; TOSH SD3010 DVD; PIO PD-F1009 MULTI CD; WII; KEF CRESTA 2 fronts,CRESTA 1 rears CRESTA CENTRE; BUDGET INTERCONNECTS & 79/42 STRAND OFC SPEAKER CABLES BEDROOM: PANA TH42P-WD6;