Portable Hard Drives?

“I'm looking for a good deal on some portable mass storage, 300-500 Gig.
Who's on top of the best tech deals?”

“What I'm in the market for is something like the Western Digital My Book Essential 320GB or bigger USB 2.0 External Hard Drive.

Anyone have one of these My Book drives and are you happy with it?”

“Wally World has the WD 250 G for $118.”

“I wouldn't get one made by CMS. We got one as a backup drive at work and it died within a year.”

“REI has one built into a backpack (wd 450) with a stove on the side”

“Any useful comments? ;-)”

“Best Buy has a Seagate 300 GB external HD on sale for $129.99. The 400 GB is $209.99. I just bought two of the 300 GB ones for a client for use in backing up their server. They switch them out every day and take them offsite. I've used the Seagate external HDs for several customers and have seen no problems.”

“NOW we are talking!”

“Don't get one based on a Maxtor drive. My Dad and I have had several fairly new Maxtor's die within a year or two of purchase lately. He had 2 die, I had 1. We were both lucky, I had a backup and his 2 drives were readable by a data restoration company.

Is portability more important to you, or the size of the HD? If you go with an external solution based on a 2.5" drive its small enough to put in a pocket and you don't need to haul around a power brick. Most of the larger drives (100 GB is about the biggest you can get lately) do require a "Y" plug adapter since the .5 amp coming from a USB port isn't enough to spin the drive up. The "Y" plugs into 2 ports at once to get enough juice, but the total package is still way smaller and lighter than something based on a 3.5" drive - which requires an external brick. If you go with something based on a 3.5" drive, of course you can get much more storage space.

You can save a few bucks if you buy an el-cheapo empty case and install your own drive in it. The name-brand bundled solutions are more expensive but sometimes have decent warranties to compensate.”

“techntrek, I'm looking for something BIG I can hand to a coworker so he can put 160 G of files on it for me.”

“Ok, then the middle paragraph is answered. 1st and 3rd still stand.”

“StoveStomper, I bought the Seagate 400 GB external drive last week and just installed the CMS backup software that shipped with the drive on a CD. While it will backup the entire drive, it does not allow you to recover individual files. As a result, I'm removing that software in installing Retrospect Express, which came with an old Maxtor external drive. There are many more options with the Retrospect Express. I could have spent $10 and upgraded the CMS backup software to allow for the restore of individual files, but I already have something that will allow me to do that.

As for Maxtor external drives, I have not had a problem with mine, but I've heard many stories of failing drives after a year or two. As a result, I wouldn't buy anything with the Maxtor label on it. BTW, Seagate bought out Maxtor in 2006...maybe things will improve with Maxtor.”

“..or maybe got the other way? ;-)

I like WD drives. Never had any problems with them.”

“But what if you want an ultralight hard drive?”

“I think Seagate said they were going to reserve Maxtor as their value line, so I doubt things will improve. On the other hand I think they also were going to extend the warranties back to where they were 2 years ago, before everyone dropped down to months instead of years.

skiracer - why not just use the Windows Backup app? Backs up the full drive if wanted and also allows individual file restore.

mineralfellow - go with one of the new 32GB flash drives (grin). Only costs a few arms and legs.”