External hard drive opinions?
 

I'm running out of space on my current hard drives.

I was just looking at Amazon's selection and am drawn to either a Western Digital or a Seagte 4TB USB external drive. Is one generally known to be more reliable than another? Is there a brand I should be thinking of instead? Currently, I manually drag folders into the external drives using windows explorer. Don't bother with backup software. Between my phone's pictures, my camera's pictures, and my GoPro's video and pictures, all this digital media adds up fast. We've also got a couple laptops floating around, in addition to the desktop setup, and I should also be bugging family members to back up their shit too. I think a portable USB drive that I can connect to one device after another is a good way to tame the hydra that is spewing out all this digital content.

I used to archive by burning stuff to CDs and then later DVDs, but that is way too time consuming. And who knows how long that media will last without degrading.

Got off on a tangent there. Seagate or WD, or something else?

I don't really know cos I'm not a Windows guy, but you're pretty organized... you should set up one system that is always on, get Windows networking going, then set up automated backups across the network. Walking that one drive around is going to be a pita!

Other than that, for this application you can pretty much pick whichever drive, because it's not going to see a lot of use. I have always gone crazy and bought Western Digital Black because I like the idea of a 5-year warranty.

I've had disappointing experiences with WD drives. My passport 1TB drive died after only about 4,000 hours. I've got another with about 60,000 that is failing. That's a lot better, but most of those hours are idle, it's a manual back-up drive.

Amazon has a Seagate 3 trilobyte ;) drive for 89.00

It got decent reviews.

I'm feeling a little disorganized right now. I need to take a few hours and look at all the drives I have floating around and make sure at least one of them has everything all nice and neat and organized.

And someday you'll say what is this shit and why did I save it.

Nah. My kids will say that, though.

:lol2:

I use Passports from WD to house my music and movie (no, not THAT kind, pervs! ) collections since both would overflow my laptop's internal hd. I do not, however, leave them running idle. I unplug and store them when not in use. No issues to report in three years.

Take that for what it's worth.

You may want to look at a personal cloud in a Drobo or some similar enclosure instead.

Cartman's mom might know...

I'm German, and I approve this folder...

zwei Mädchen eine Tasse

:eek:

Don't put that on your resume. :eek: