I'm buying an external hard drive for backup purposes. Recommendations?

[Skald the Rhymer]

Seems simple enough

[OneCentStamp]

This thing is what artifex and I bought. It accesses quickly, it holds a shit-ton of stuff (all of our music and all of her thousands of photos don't make a splash in it), and it was like $100. It's also lightweight and portable.

[hatesfreedom]

It is simple enough, ^^^^ suggestion is fine. Seagates are also fine. I mean it's just a harddrive in an enclosure.

[What Exit?]

I really like Seagate and they tend to do well in reviews. You did not indicate a price range so I can point to a specific model.

Here is a page of Seagates from NewEgg.

For strictly backups you will want something larger than your PC hardrive I would think and fairly fast. Small size should not matter.

I would probably go for one of the USB 2.0 with 7200 RPM.

[Feirefiz]

This thing is what artifex and I bought. It accesses quickly, it holds a shit-ton of stuff (all of our music and all of her thousands of photos don't make a splash in it), and it was like $100. It's also lightweight and portable.

I have the same one and I have no complaints.

[Jaglavak]

I have a rack of external hard drives and have had trouble with a lot of them. Opinions, I got.

I started with a 3.5" IDE enclosure from an outfit called Mad Dog. Slow but reliable as dirt.

Then I got a Acomdata 3.5" SATA enclosure. Faster and equally reliable. Approx 20 - 30 GB/hr transfer rate over USB 2.

Then I got a few Kingwin 3.5" SATA enclosures. I actually got 3 of them before the first one started crapping out. The power plug croaks and you would need to be able to solder surface mount attachments to replace it. Coincidentally I don't find that model for sale anymore.

I have a couple random units I can't recall the brands on right now, with mixed success.

But finally I got a WD Elements drive. 60 GB/hr transfer rate over USB 2, nearly silent, heavy duty construction, even powers down when not in use. Best of the lot.


Things that matter on these things:

1) The power plug. I have found that those round 6 prong power plugs just don't hold up over time. And I'm talking like 6 months. Look for a unit that only has a single prong power plug, with all those delicate connections safely hidden inside. Waaaay more reliable.

2) Obnoxious pushy backup software. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Often the backup software is burned into a ROM chip and there's no way to make it fuck off. It's a pain to deal with. Every. Single. Time. You plug the goddam thing in. I actually tossed an enclosure that was still working fine due to extreme repeated aggro.

3) Power management. All the enclosures I have except the WD Elements do not park the hard drive, ever. As far as I can tell there is no way to make them do it. It's really nice to hear that WD spin down after 5 minutes, and the few seconds of spin up delay is no problem in my application.

4) Glaringly bright 'On' lights on the front. Some of those things throw as much light as a small flashlight. I was forced to line them up facing the wall just to get the glare out of my face. The WD has a nice discreet little blue light that's not in the way at all.

I did the externals rather than a NAS because of portability, noise, and I wanted to be able to selectively turn off all but the the drive I'm currently using. Now after all the saga I'm back to looking at a NAS. Hopefully a frikkin silent one with advanced power management. Anybody got any clues on that?