Hi All. Booting up my Mac Mini this morning it tells me the external eye wateringly expensive Glyph hard drive has errors and needs to be reformatted. Happily I have a backup so the data is safe, but I realise my backup drive is old and quite small and I think the time has come to replace it. Recommendations for a 2tb USB 3 external drive? Seagate? Samsung?
Thanks all
PS My bid for most boring post of the day….but will help with my stress….
I recently bought this for my iMac:
Very good value for 4 Tb. I’m using it to store media separate to the internal 2Tb drive. I have also been using a Seagate 3Tb drive for local Time Machine Backups for about 3.5 years and it hasn’t failed me yet.
I have a Seagate 3TB & 4TB. The 4 TB I`ve had for a month storing movies no issues whatsoever. The 3 TB I`ve had for much longer with no probs.
How noisy is it Doc?
Get a decent quality large-capacity drive (I use the Western Digital “Caviar” Green series, myself. Reliable, quiet and relatively inexpensive) and put it in an enclosure yourself. The Dynamode USB3.0 ones are good. I have 3 of them. One for my music library and 2 backups.
http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/components-upgrades/internal-hard-drives/enclosures/dynamode-usb-hd3-5s-3-0-3-5-usb-hdd-enclosure-black-17563634-pdt.html
Whenever I used to buy off-the-shelf external drives, I always found either the enclosures were flimsy and unreliable or the drives inside got really hot and were fault-prone.
This is what I did. Thanks Mike. Feels really substantial with the metal case, and following the @vulpes-Vulpes rule there’s an on/off switch. l fancied a Seagate but there’s no switch and PC World didn’t have the recommended 3tb one. For under 100 sovs I’m very happy with it.
I asked here when I needed a NAS drive for the Sonos and was recommended a Western Digital which has been very good. I’m now thinking of upgrading to a RAID drive so I don’t have to worry about backing up. This seems to fit the bill for me and possibly for you too.
Hmm. Just trawled through the (mixed) reviews on Amazon. Slow data transfer seems to be the main complaint. Anyone had any experience?
If you can run to it, the smart money over the past three or four years has been spent buying a Synology NAS drive. Flexible and well supported. There have been some recent reports of the latest firmware slowing down transfer rates but I’m sure that’ll be sorted very quickly. Swapping out a faulty drive (yes, it happens) is a doddle.
How difficult is it to get up and running out of the box? Part of the appeal of WD is that it’s all assembled and pretty much ready to go.
It’s very easy indeed to get it up and running. All you need to do is to put a couple of drives in and decide which configuration you prefer (eg RAID1, RAID2 etc – that may not mean anything to you but it only takes a few minutes to decide). Once you’ve done that it does everything else itself. Once you’ve set it up, you can fiddle as much or as little as you want. If you only want to fiddle a little bit, it may be that it’s not worth the extra money.
Thanks John
Be aware that the drives optimised for NAS use are a bit more expensive than the USB types – they’re expected to see more action over a network. My Synology NAS has WD Red drives. Synology publish a list of approved drives on their website so check before you buy.
You’re right about checking the list but it is a fairly extensive one. The drives I’ve got in mine now were pulled out of a Seagate USB drive as that was the cheapest way to buy the drives at the time and they’re on the list.
I’ve got a LaCie Rugged and it’s aces.
I did a bit of research on this yesterday prompted by offers in the staples catalogue with Sats guardian – oh the excitement. A Nas drive even with two-way mirror (which i understand as being like two hard drives in one box that copy over to each other) doesn’t actually back up to anything offsite. The term ‘personal cloud’ which they all use about these is a bit misleading. Yes its in the cloud in the sense that you can access your drive from your home or tokyo. No its not in the cloud at all in the sense that your data is stored under a mountain in Norway with redundancies around the world. So if your box is stolen, or damaged etc your data is still lost as it’s in that little box.
Anything people can recommend that puts a box on your desk and backs it up offsite?
If you have a friend with the same problem, one of the best things to do is to get two NAS drives each and put one in each house. Set the automated backup to work overnight and you’ll both be pretty much secure.
I have WD Elements for local backup 2TB £66, 3TB £88. I choose WD because I used to deal with them in a professional capacity and was impressed.
Consider also NAS, Synology DS214 or DS414 if you need more storage. Excellent.
I work for Seagate, so guess what I will recommend 🙂
Btw, Seagate and Samsung are one and the same – Seagate bought Samsung’s hard disk drive division a couple of years ago. The main reason that Samsung still exist as a brand is due to some government anti competitive requirements. Also worth noting is that LaCie is also a Seagate owned company – the brand is kept to position them as more “high end” and “designer”.
Basically most of the external drives out there are pretty good and there is not much between them in terms of performance. If you are looking for reliability, then I would go with a 3TB in the 3.5″ / desktop form factor (you can get 2TB in the 2.5″ / portable form factor but they are more cutting edge). The internal drives on the 3TB are very mature and reliable products.
I’ve got a desk full of the things – 3x 2Tb, 1x1Tb and the latest baby is 3Tb. Three of them are buy-a-box-and-fill-it jobbies, and two are readymades.
Capacity aside, for me the most important feature is whether or not there is an on/off switch. The adverts rarley tell you, and you may need to do a bit of research, but the better ones have an independent switch, so that the drive doesn’t get powered on the instant you boot the machine it’s connected to.
They are (mostly) for backups, so I only want the thing to spin up when it’s going to get a new wodge of data. The spin-up time is a few seconds only, so why so many of them need to be powered all of the time is beyond me. Caveat emptor old boy!
I believe they spin up to prevent the bearings from seizing.
PS The 3Tb one was from Verbatim, and cost a hundred notes from the dodgers.
It has a manual on/off switch, and has the added benefit of powering off properly independently of the switch when you close down the machine to which it’s connected. So power up the PC and the drive stays off until you throw the switch as required. Power down the PC and the drive switches itself off automatically, leaving the switch in the on position by default, but with the drive light out and the disk parked.
Doesn’t look like the Seagate has an on off switch. Off to PC World tomorrow I think.
All up in a cloud and on Western Digital hard drives 1Tb jobs, three of them because I’m paranoid. Also have a few smaller ones from various places because having lots of them makes me feel secure. Did I mention that I’m paranoid? They are out to get us. All of us just because they can.
@twang It’s not that noisy. Spins and whirrs when it’s doing its thing, but i don’t really notice it.
Can I just say I love these IG* threads? An undervaunted core value of the Afterword brand.
(*Informed Geekiness)
You may feel it’s the most boring post of the day, but this has helped me with my research into this very subject.
Time saved, so thank you kindly.
I can think of something more boring than deciding on a backup regime. That’s feeding in DVD after DVD after CD after USB drives to try and reassemble as much missing data as you can when something goes wrong before you sorted yourself out!
No problem old boy. My pleasure.