What external 1tb hard drive?

Looking for an external back up for pics and music, and seems like the pricepoint is right for the 1TB section, but want to know the pluses and minuses for anything anyone actually uses.

Been warned not to buy Seagate for longivity, but the reviews seem to differ.

What amout http://www.buy.com/prod/iomega-1tb-p...208648393.htmlI-omega? The price and capacity seems right, no?

Not terrible worried about transfer rates etc, just would like to back up tunes and pics and not worry about them being deleted.

Thanks in advance.

samsung spinpoint f1

Should add I'm a total non-comp person, I watch G4 but have very little knowledge as to what the hell they are talking about.
I 'm thinking plug and play USB external. Or am I oversimplifing my very limited capabilities?

I've always heard good things/have had good experiences with Seagate. They used to offer a 5 year warranty, but I just read its been backed of to 3 years. Western Digitals tend to be pretty good too, I've not had the greatest luck with Maxtor or IBM (honestly I'm not sure if they even make 5.25" drives anymore though), but it's been years since I've owned either brand, times may have changed.

If you are talking full enclosures though, unless you buy from one of those of brands, you may not know what you are getting inside. Buying a drive and simple enclosure is always an option too, sometimes cheaper, especially if you have drives sitting around or find a killer deal. I will however steer you away from a DIY RAID enclosure, I've not had good luck with these. Luckily the drives were fine, but the $90 enclosure is now a paper weight. Really sucks since I purposefully went with a RAID (RAID1) to have redundancy to avoid the headaches of drive failures. The drives have certainly outlived the enclosure.


Some food for thought, hard drives, regardless of brand do fail. Something like Mozy or a similar service is a good option if you need backup not additional storage. It's slow to get everything backed up and you can't easily pull down files on demand, but if you truly need to back up, it's the safest bet. If my house burned down or was broken into, theres a good chance I could lose an external hard drive, now everything is offsite, if shit totally hits the fan, I'm covered. Plus you can restore several points, if I delete something and then decide I want it or a virus wipes out some files, I can still recover them.
I signed up for a year and IIRC it ran me about $60 for unlimited. Took around 2 weeks to get 100Gb backed up, now I just run an update whenever I go out and shoot. I get it going before bed and it's done by the morning.

Anyone played with the hard drive docks? Apparently having a bare drive keeps it cooler better than most enclosures, plus with all the repair stuff I end up doing it seems to make a bunch of sense for future expansion.

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Originally Posted by Fenris

Anyone played with the hard drive docks? Apparently having a bare drive keeps it cooler better than most enclosures, plus with all the repair stuff I end up doing it seems to make a bunch of sense for future expansion.

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We use them at work. Well sort of, we have one of the docks for SATA and a homemade dock (aka an enclosure's guts, but not the case) for IDE. We pretty much just use them to transfer data from old/failing HDs. They work well for this purpose, so I'm assuming they would work well as a semi-longterm solution.

It's really no different than an enclosure, except the drive isn't enclosed.

spend a little extra money and get an OWC. best externals i've had (much better than lacie, western digital and seagate). great customer service (i'm an idiot and ordered the wrong thing, took it back no questions).

i got drives with 32mb cache and quad interface (eSATA/firewire800&400/usb2) to use for rendering and editing, but a 16mb cache and dual interface (firewire 400/usb2) would be just fine for simple backup. if you get the drive and decide the transfer speed is too slow, call 'em up and tell them you want the quad interface and/or 32mb cache.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...W800_FW400_USB

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Originally Posted by smalls

spend a little extra money and get an OWC. best externals i've had (much better than lacie, western digital and seagate). great customer service (i'm an idiot and ordered the wrong thing, took it back no questions).

i got drives with 32mb cache and quad interface (eSATA/firewire800&400/usb2) to use for rendering and editing, but a 16mb cache and dual interface (firewire 400/usb2) would be just fine for simple backup. if you get the drive and decide the transfer speed is too slow, call 'em up and tell them you want the quad interface and/or 32mb cache.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew...W800_FW400_USB

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Love mine.. only have the half tera... I fried it but it was user error, probably just a fuse, sending it in tomorrow.