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Re: [LUG] External Hard Drives - any to avoid?

 

Simon Waters wrote:
> Looking to get a disk to store backups of various things on, not least
> whilst I finally get around to a long overdue reinstall of my desktop box.
> 
> I'm thinking the local Tesco's last few Maxtor 500GB hard drives look
> good value, and barely more than one would pay retail for a comparable
> SATA drive.
> 
> Call me a skeptic but anyone seeing issues with the very high density
> disks available? Anyone recommend for or against any devices. I mean the
> important data I can also burn to CD, that which isn't already on two
> computers, both with mirroring.....
> 
> Otherwise it looks like yet another trip to Tesco's.
> 

I have about 4 Maxtor drives in my desktop PCs and they're all fine. 
Maxtor is now owned by Seagate so you'd probably find that an external 
Maxtor drive would be fine.  In fact we have a 1TB drive at work and it 
seems pretty good apart from the fact it was formatted for quick removal 
and didn't like lots of small files.  A quick reformat fixed that.

I have a funny feeling though that the 1GB Seagate FreeAgent drives have 
some sort of DRM enabled in them.

I'd also recommend Western Digital.  I'd avoid Sandisk (the one I had 
died after a year - had a Samsung 160GB drive in it, funnily enough I 
had an identical Samsung 160GB internally and that died in the same way 
- now I won't touch Samsung hard drives).

I'd check too and see what warranty is offered.  You might be lucky 
enough to find on that gives you a 3 year warranty.

Rob


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