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Gonna Jump off a bridge!!!

L

Laurencia7

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 3, 2009
252
0
Guys

I have been looking for a reliable external/portable hard drive for a year, and cannot get an unbias review from any source.

I was looking at the Toshiba 500gb...and the Seagate Free Agent 500gb, but they both have gotten both bad and good reviews. Though the Seagate has gotten more good.

My eyes are bleeding, I just really want a drive to backup my files on my Mac, in time machine AND put some more storage on without dieing of the price...or because it failed.

I know they all fail sometimes, but overall which fail the least?
And what about ministack are they worth the price?

Sincerely fed up girl, with low hd space!!
 
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First, changing your thread title to something more meaningful would help. To change it, click the
edit.gif
button by your post, then click "Go Advanced".

As far as external hard drives, I've been extremely satisfied with OWC drives, such as the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro, which comes in sizes from 80GB to 2TB. The 500GB model is here. If you want a bus-powered, more portable solution, check out the OWC Mercury On-The-Go Pro, which ranges from 160GB to 500GB.
 
StoneyG said:
My 500 GB Free Agent Go has been treating well thus far.

Four of my five hard drives are Seagates, the other is from LaCie. So far, so good (on all of 'em).
Click to expand...

LaCie don't build own hard disks, they just produce the cases and put commodity Seagates/WD or whatever else they can buy at a good price in there.

Seagate HDDs are louder than WD or Samsung, but they're usually also faster. We use Seagate Barracudas in our servers, so yes, I can confirm that they're reliable. I also have WD and Samsung in my private portfolio, and they haven't let me down either. But Samsung sells the quietest hard disks.

500 GB are not nearly enough capacity though, if you're going to use a default Time Machine setup. I wouldn't buy less than 2 TB these days.
 
thanks for all the info guys,
as for changing my title..it seemed to have worked well.
 
A few points I'd like to make.

1) All hard drives die eventually, and could go at any time, including the one that's in your computer now.
2) If you had some backup solution, then if either drive died (the internal or the backup), you'd still have your data.
3) You currently have no backup so if your drive dies, all of your data is gone

My advice, buy the largest external drive you can afford to buy. Look into drive warranties, not failures. Everyone who's ever purchased an external hard drive has anecdotes about why he/she is glad they bought the one they did and not a competitor's drive.

Just buy something and start backing up your files.

EDIT: Also, Reliability is based on mean time between failures (MTBF). That doesn't necessarily mean that the drive is going to last that long.

EDIT2: Clarity.
 
Laurencia7 said:
Guys

I have been looking for a reliable external/portable hard drive for a year, and cannot get an unbias review from any source.

I was looking at the Toshiba 500gb...and the Seagate Free Agent 500gb, but they both have gotten both bad and good reviews. Though the Seagate has gotten more good.

My eyes are bleeding, I just really want a drive to backup my files on my Mac, in time machine AND put some more storage on without dieing of the price...or because it failed.

I know they all fail sometimes, but overall which fail the least?
And what about ministack are they worth the price?

Sincerely fed up girl, with low hd space!!
Click to expand...

Go with a WD Mybook, and you'll be all set. I too wavered for quite awhile, but that's what I landed on.

Plus, I'd say it's safer to buy even a less-reliable external HDD than to wait a whole year with no protection!

Recently, a close friend lost all of his unbacked up data and had to pay ~$1000 to salvage some of the data. I had a USB flash drive whose USB connector failed too, so I lost some data there. Lesson? Always back up. Always.
 
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for $40 on newegg get a thermaltake hard drive holder. buy any SATA hard drive and use it. when you run out buy another hard drive.
 
Laurencia7 said:
Guys

I have been looking for a reliable external/portable hard drive for a year, and cannot get an unbias review from any source.

I was looking at the Toshiba 500gb...and the Seagate Free Agent 500gb, but they both have gotten both bad and good reviews. Though the Seagate has gotten more good.

My eyes are bleeding, I just really want a drive to backup my files on my Mac, in time machine AND put some more storage on without dieing of the price...or because it failed.

I know they all fail sometimes, but overall which fail the least?
And what about ministack are they worth the price?

Sincerely fed up girl, with low hd space!!
Click to expand...

Looked into iomega Drives? Very happy with the two I have.
 
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