All are not the same - external hard drives
All hard drives are not made the same. It is also true that not all hard drive enclosures are made the same.
Over the last two months I have seen a number of external hard drive failures on units purchased within the last 12 months. In most cases, it's the electronics in the enclosure that have failed, not the hard drive or its electronics. And all of the failures have been with third-party enclosures or drives, not those of major hard drive vendors.
While it is economically practical (at first blush) to buy a drive less expensive than the major brands (Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Hitachi, and LaCie), it isn't. A hard drive should last for at least five years, if cared for properly. The enclosure should NEVER fail! (OK, they should last longer than the drive. Do you accept THAT?).
Proper care of an external drive is simply to put it on a decent surge protector along with your PC and keep dust off and out of it. Oh, yeah, you should also put it in a place where it won't get jostled or knocked over.
You can go to any of the big box stores or their respective web sites and buy a drive from one of the majors.
Do yourself a favor, don't buy an off-brand or a store-brand drive. The odds are they skimped on the electronics (which is why it's cheaper) and it won't take much for it to fail.
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11/6/2010 4:25 PM
Computers and Networking for the Home Owner and Small Businesses - by Sid Plait wrote:
A question I have been fielding lately is, "What hard drives do you recommend as external to my computer?"I posted something on this subject two years ago
what's the scoop on external drives? I haven't had any problems, and just added my third external drive (a terabyte, dedicated to my iPod), but I'm wondering if this is something I should be cognizant of?
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It depends on how much you know about computers. I have a external drive (Seagate) in a 3.5" enclosure (Vantec Nextar).
For myself, if the enclosure was to fail, I could easily pop out the drive and hook it up to my computer and get the data off. On the other hand, if the hard drive was to fail, in most cases you can still get the data off, unless it's a major mechanical failure.
External drives are great for adding additional storage, but they, like any mechanical device, will fail in time. Anything that you can't live without, should be backed up. Which leads us to these posts: http://blog.plaitsolutions.com/categories/Backups.aspx
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trying to view your images. The layout isn't working correctly with safari web browser on mac.
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