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On 28/07/2010 13:54, Paul Sutton wrote:
Most drives are about the same these days. Some drives support eSATA or Firewire in addition to USB 2 which can be handy and some of the new drives support USB 3 for faster speeds (I believe they're still backwards compatible with USB 2 and USB 1.1).Hi Anyone got any recommendations regarding usb external hard disks, size about 500 to 1 tb would work fine for me, as a back up tool
Is it going to be something you're going to want to leave on a desk plugged in or something you want to carry around with you?
If you want up to a 1TB drive then you'd probably be looking at a 3.5" drive (1TB 2.5" drives are very very expensive at the moment).
I picked up a couple of 1TB drives (Western Digital USB 2 drives) from PC World in Torquay a couple of months ago for work, they were about £60 a piece IIRC (if you're going to go to PC World, reserve whatever you want to get online first, then you can get the web only price but still pick them up from the store).
Most drives tend to come with a 1 year warranty, some may have a 2 or 3 year warranty. If you desperately want a longer warranty then your other option is to buy an internal 3.5" SATA hard drive and an external SATA to USB case and put the drive in yourself. That way you can not only choose the drive you have (maybe specifying a faster drive, bigger cache etc) you also have a better chance of getting a longer warranty. The only drawback is you have to send the drive back to the manufacturer etc (not sure if this is the case with a retail boxed external drive).
Larger drives will probably be pre-formatted as NTFS (older drives tended to be formatted as FAT32). The drives I recently picked up advised that they need re-formatting for Macs. On Linux you could use them as NTFS drives (to maintain compatibility with Windows) or re-partition and format them as EXT3/EXT4. Easy way of doing this is with GParted.I take it most of these devices should just work with Linux, i see on boxes it says designed for PC / MAC.
Just wondered what experiences people and if any should be avoided due to being poor quality build.
Well I had a Sandisk drive a few years back, it had a Samsung 160GB IDE drive in it and it failed after a year. Some manufacturers (Iomega, Philips, Sandisk to name a few) will probably buy bulk drives from the large drive manufacturers so you might not be able to find out what drive is internally in the case. With Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor you're more likely to get one of their drives in the box.
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq