I am looking for an external hard drive of between 500 GB-1 TB, but not sure which one to get. I see that Western Digital has gotten horrific reviews. I am also looking at Seagate, Maxtor or Simpletech

Any thoughts?

You're generally better off "building" your own.

Buy a harddrive. Buy an enclosure. Screw the drive into the enclosure. Done.

As for drives, buy the cheapest one you can find with the best warranty. Generally you can get 3 year warranty and if the drive dies in that 3 years, youget a replacement (although you lose the data - BACK IT UP!).

If you need recommendations on the enclosures, ask -- I have the Antec Veris, but I haven't used it yet; it's compatable with the DirecTV HR21 though, and was only $20, which is why I bought it.

I am getting it for work- I don't think they would let me do that. There are just so many of my predecessor's archives backed up on the server that I need somewhere to put them. My IPOD sure wasn't big enough

I've had good luck with my WD external, and I typically like Buffalo brand-products.

I was going to say the same thing - I've had a WD external drive for a little over three years and it's worked great since I got it.

I have to go knock on some wood now, since I think I've been infected with some sort of technology gremlins the last few days, and don't want my external HD to die next.

Why would they care....? What do you think the insides are of any of the "external hard drives" you buy?

Here's one - excellent price - can't comment on the "one touch" stuff:
http://www.slickdeals.net/permadeal/13294/...-Hard-Drive-159

My work would be the same way - buying a real one would be one warranty call, versus figuring out which was wrong, etc

Can't comment on the Maxtor, but my WD External HD has the One-Touch setup (and also has scheduling software.) The one-touch button works as advertised, and the scheduling software is pretty easy to use, so I was able to schedule nightly backups with no problems.

Does anyone have a WD Passport hard drive? If so, what do you think of it? Any good alternatives?

I'll be getting a scanner in the near future to get some of my older photos scanned to digital, and I am also trying to go paperless as much as possible, so I'll be looking for a good-sized (capacity-wise) external HD to store all this. The catch is I want something physically small, so I was looking at something along the lines of the WD Passport size.

I do, WD 250GB

I keep it in my laptop bag, one thing to remember is the cable on it is only about 10" long. That's okay sitting on a laptop, but if your home system sits under a desk or out of the way place, keep in mind where you have a free USB port, or buy an USB extension cable.

Thanks for the heads-up. I don't think the cable length would be an issue - I have a laptop that sits on top of a standard desk and has plenty of free space around it.

I had a maxtor one touch and it worked great for about 3 years. Then it simply died one day. I lost everything. Then I replaced it with a d link dns-323 NAS enclosure and I bought two WD 500gb hard drives. The enclosure has a large fan in the back and it shuts down the drives after 30 minutes of inactivity... Not to mention all the NAS functions it delivers as well as its gigabit port, the actual enclosure is very good. The front comes off and the SATA drives just pop in. There's two levers on the back to release the hard drives. I have it set up in a RAID 1 configuration.


If you're going with an external enclosure all in one package like the WD usb drives or the maxtor one touch, be very weary... The one touch did not have a fan and you could almost boil an egg on the enclosure. I'm 100% sure that the heat did in my old drive, not simply time. If you are going the usb or firewire route, make sure that the drive can be read as a local drive and then get an off site backup program. You simply can't count on an external drive without proper passive and/or active heat management to be reliable. However, with that said, my old one touch was blazing fast over firewire and it worked great while I had it... Unfotunately, one day it just wouldn't come on and I temporarily lost my wedding pictures and 10 years worth of accumulated MP3s. I went overboard with my next drive.


As for the total cost, the enclosure cost somewhere around $175 and the hard drives cost roughly $85 each.

I have Mozy Online, so one question is whether the service will recognize an external HD as part of the local disk and not as a network drive.

I also have a one-touch WD that does not have a fan, so the overheating is something that worries me. But going through the ones listed on Newegg and Buy.com I don't see many that have fans installed.

It'll be considered a local drive because that's what it is.

That's what I was hoping you'd say...

I have a 500 Gig WD external drive (USB). Used it for vinyl rips and music and photo backups. Our PC crashed in March, and if we didn't have everything backed up on the WD drive we would have been screwed. Had a co-worker's husband retrieve the data for us. One thing was the Retrospect backup software that came with it saved everything, but we had to jump through hoops to get the data off of there in a usable format. Retrospect bundles the data in packs or whatever (not an IT guy...all I know is they're not packaged like the original file, ie mp3 or jpg). The IT guy and I spent a good 6 hours getting it restored as mp3 and jpg files. It was worth the effort, but if there was a way to avoid that I'd do it diferently.

We moved to a mac, and bought two 500 Gig WD external firewire drives for music and photos.

I've got a WD 320GB Passport and it's worked great since I've been using it. I use it mainly for pictures & music. Nothing too serious, but it's been great for what I'm using it for. I just keep it in my laptop bag and pull it out when I need it. As someone else mentioned above, the cord is short, but perfect for a laptop.