Storage forum: Reliable USB HDD?

These are external and portable. But, you should not move them while in operation. I must suspect lots of failures are due to folks handling the drive and moving it around while it's spinning. That being said, if you put together your own, the drive should be as reliable as is you put it in your case. My drives are all Western Digital and Seagate models currently. My external enclosures are branded bytech or something similar. They are basic aluminum with external power supplies and worked right out of the box.

I have three of them. These are slightly warm to the touch. Because the cases are aluminum and not plastic, they should conduct heat better. They are not vented or have a fan. Some feature cooling fins or a fan. My reading is that these fans are often a weakness....cheaply made...and I can believe it. My drives feel no warmer than the ones in my case and maybe a bit cooler. The only problem I needed to deal with is that one drive is a little slower to spin up than the rest. It would not always show up in Windows when starting the PC. This was corrected by a BIOS setting which allowed some extra detection time. Hope that helps.

Hi,

I, too, read many horror stories about external USB hard drives. I also agree with Steve that many of the issues were probably user-created, like treating a drive that isn't intended for portability as a portable drive.

For the last 6 months or so, I've used a 120GB "Diskgo" HDD manufactured by Edge Tech Corporation (http://www.edgetechcorp.com/). I've got almost 50GB of MP3 files stored on the drive. To this point (knocking on wood here) I've had no issues with the drive and find myself very happy with it.

Read/write speed is good and the drive has exhibited great reliability to this point. The cost of the drive, especially when coupled with a manufacturer's rebate, was quite reasonable.

Hope this helps!

I've been using the 300GB Maxtor One Touch II and, so far, I've had no problems with it. There were some detection problems in the beginning, but I now turn it on while the computer is booting and turn it off after computer shut down. The aluminum case does feel warm to the touch. I keep it stationary while it is in use. I am planning on getting a new computer soon, and I think this will be a great way to move my files onto the new computer. With all this space, I no longer have any excuse to not backup my computer. I've read some of the horror reviews about this drive, but I just haven't had any problems yet. I hope I didn't just jinx myself...

I hope this won't jinx me too! I have only been using mine for about 6 weeks to back up my new Dell having passed on my 5 year old Dell to my husband ( so girls that is the way to do it! Mine was a special present.) My Maxtor came with Dantz Retrospect Express software for backups. So far everything is working fine here in the UK, but I would like a bit more flexibility than I am getting with Dantz. Can someone tell me it it is o.k. to use one of the other BackUp software programmes around, and if so I would be grateful to know which ones work best with Maxtor One Touch which I find is a neat way to have an external hard drive. I woud not dream of moving it around while it is working...no wonder people have problems.

I see the Genie software getting a recommendation. Has anybody tried AIS backup? I and friends have been using this for a long time before external hard drives took off. AIS can cope with internal, external and CD backups. In Setup you can nominate any type of backup.

I run multiple usb hdd on my system i have 3 units pluged in as we do a lot of mpg files and find this to be a good backup system i have 1x 160gb and 2x 200 gb units on one machine all assigned as drives then when needed i just reassign the appropriate drive to the letter that the software is looking for it

QUESTION ON ext hd care, u shouldn't move it while it's transferring data.... the ext hd should also be set as flat as possible right, or does that not really play a big of a role in operation failures (e.g. parot of it is lying ontop of a coaster or small book so it's angled)

As far as reliability, there's some faith in addition to a good brand. Maxtor IDE hds are supposed to be among the top. My roomate installed a new one, moved (not copied) some stuff over. It crashed shortly!! and this was a brand new hd!! He lost all the stuff he moved, luckily none of which was important. He called Maxtor, they sent him a free replacement, and it's been working fine for years now.

The rule of thumb with all HDD is to make sure they remain in the same orientation (e.g. vertical, horizontal) as the drive was when first formatted.

The story I heard was more about older style 5 1/4 drives. We called them ''Winchesters''. With these you did low and high level formatting during which you adjusted the "interleave" factor which was the number of disk rotations between read/write operations which allowed time for the heads to move into proper position. 1 to 3 interleaving was common with early drives. These were heavier units and the logic was that gravity had an affect on components...especially the heads. It was said that these could sag and tracking could change when turned 90 degrees. Thus, with these drives, you compensated by performing low and high level formatting in the position the drive would be running. With IDE drives, you no longer low level format at end user level and I have heard/read that changing the orientation of the drive is not the issue it once was. However, I still format a drive after installing it permanently just as a habit.

Another good manufacturer is LaCie. They make complete units from 74GB up to 2TB. I've been using the 74GB d2 at work for storage and imaging iMacs and Mac Minis. This drive has been under heavy use and stress for the past 2 years without any problems.