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Which External Hard Drive ?

2K views 8 replies 6 participants last post by  Dr Constrictor 
#1 ·
Gents,
I'm looking to buy an external hard drive to back up a lot of old photos. I'm running a 10 year old Seagate external drive now. I back up photos about once every six months. But it's an old school drive with moving parts.

I'm thinking about buying a $100 5TB drive to use as a second backup for my photos.

Western Digital has one for $105. Seagate for $115.

Anybody computer nerds out there in ProBro Nation have any other suggestions?
 
#2 ·
It's pretty hard to go wrong with any of the name brand external hard drives, IMHO. you'll see some transfer speed differences between spendy ones and inexpensive ones, but if you just go by the reviews and buy one of those brands you should be fine. If you are really pedantic you can get two 2TB drives for the same price as one 4TB and have a long term backup that you only touch like every 6 months or year and backup a lot to the second one whenever you feel like it--that's just if you are nuts about stuff like that. Having one out all the time means it gets backed up way more often and having one in the gun safe or somewhere put away means you have another copy and one that doesn't get knocked around all the time. Just my $.02
 
#4 ·
The connector for the USB cable ion the WD passport is shit. It will fail with the smallest wiggle. I bought three of these for employees and myself and all the drives have been un-reliable for that reason.
 
#6 ·
Dr Constrictor said:
https://www.amazon.com/Sabrent-Rocket-External-Aluminum-SB-1TB-NANO-BLK/dp/B0899GHX8R?th=1&psc=1

You want a solid state hard drive with no moving parts. I have this one.
Wow. Pricey. But interesting.
 
#8 ·
ohh, and each brand has different "levels" of quality. and the prices reflect that. you can get away with a lot more options if it is long term safety storage of photos and videos etc..not being used often. I have to agree with Steve on solid state but you do not need to pay as much as he did for some rugged micro thing if you you are going to leave it on a shelf. with all hard drives, the data needs to be re-written after so much time to combat the magntization degrading..it is interesting. Solid state and traditional platter drives. most all my drive failures of traditional drives seem to happen at start up. shit spins, heads have to float etc...Ohh and there are all kinds of SSD drives also. Some dont like to hold data for very long with no use.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reli ... han%20HDDs.

exercise that drive:
https://blog.macsales.com/43702-we-bet- ... rcise-too/

I thought this was interesting:
https://blog.macsales.com/43702-we-bet- ... rcise-too/
 
#9 ·
Zamfir said:
ohh, and each brand has different "levels" of quality. and the prices reflect that. you can get away with a lot more options if it is long term safety storage of photos and videos etc..not being used often. I have to agree with Steve on solid state but you do not need to pay as much as he did for some rugged micro thing if you you are going to leave it on a shelf. with all hard drives, the data needs to be re-written after so much time to combat the magntization degrading..it is interesting. Solid state and traditional platter drives. most all my drive failures of traditional drives seem to happen at start up. shit spins, heads have to float etc...Ohh and there are all kinds of SSD drives also. Some dont like to hold data for very long with no use.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-reli ... han%20HDDs.

exercise that drive:
https://blog.macsales.com/43702-we-bet- ... rcise-too/

I thought this was interesting:
https://blog.macsales.com/43702-we-bet- ... rcise-too/
I back up my stuff in 3 locations in case of fire or theft. I have (6) 8tb seagates for 3 years now and have had no problems. (knock on wood) only drives I have had fail so far are a couple non external powered Samsung 1tb drives. Also had several flash drives fail and turn into read only.

Man you gotta love the speeds and reliability of the SSD.
 
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