Brands of External Hard Drives

So whats everyone's favorite brand of External Hard Drive and why? And does that brand last a long time with heavy use?

A lot of it depends upon how hot the hard drive gets and what abuse it takes. I like external hard drives that are inside external enclosures. You can pull the hard drive out of the enclosure and hook it up inside your desktop computer if you choose to do so.

Take a look at this enclosure for a 3.5 inch Serial ATA hard drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173043

I have been using Western Digital My Book 3.5" Drives for the past 4 years.And till now 2 of the external drives have gone bad.But it was totally because of my fault since all of them have been dropped twice or thrice before stopping working.

I am using one of them as an internal drives now.

Also I have heard good things about Seagate

not sure the longest a external HDD has worked for me is about 6 months ... i have a habbit of droping them ...or running them over...

i have been using a western digital my book world now for near on 4 years, and i must say what a brilliant product never had a single problem with it, its used at least 3 times a week and has been since it was purchased in early 2007, i also use a 1.5tb seagate which has alse been pretty good only problem is that the usb port is starting to come loose, so for me western digital everytime!

2048Megabytes said:

A lot of it depends upon how hot the hard drive gets and what abuse it takes. I like external hard drives that are inside external enclosures. You can pull the hard drive out of the enclosure and hook it up inside your desktop computer if you choose to do so.

Take a look at this enclosure for a 3.5 inch Serial ATA hard drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173043

Click to expand...

thats really cool

I was thinking about buying one of these:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5384379&CatId=4230

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7010640&CatId=136

If I was looking for a reliable storage space external hard drive I would go with these parts:

Rosewill RX-358 V2 SLV (Silver) 3.5" Serial ATA to USB & eSATA External Enclosure with Internal 80mm Fan
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...-na&AID=10521304&PID=4169961&SID=u4wnk21lq7cf

Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640 gigabyte 7200 RPM Serial ATA Hard Drive - $61
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...-na&AID=10521304&PID=4169961&SID=yjpw5kx85c2o

Some models of hard drives are more reliable than others. When you get into the 1.5 terabyte and larger drives there is more of a chance of failure from what I have read. I personally would not want a drive bigger than 750 gigabytes but I do not have a lot of data I need to back up either.

2048Megabytes said:

Take a look at this enclosure for a 3.5 inch Serial ATA hard drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817173043

Click to expand...

I have this ^ one. (USB 3.0 version) There's also an all black model.
My old one had the "on" light on the back where I couldn't see it, and I accidently left it on quite often.
This one has the "on" light and activity light in the front. Has a cooling fan that promotes drive life, and is silent.

I like the WD MyBook drives. However, I prefer to just get the Rosewill enclosure 2048Megabytes recommended, and something like a WD Caviar Blue/Black so I have a longer warranty on the drive itself. (Blue has 3 year, Black has 5 year)