Hard drive recommendations

[didikai]

I'm looking to get an external 2 TB hard drive. Are there any features I should be looking for, or anything I should stay away from.

[jman98]

Every manufacturer has people here who swear by that company's drives and others who say that company makes nothing but junk. You're likely to get very specific recommendations to "only buy drives made by ________" so just keep that in mind.

If you are going to use this with a DVD player to play files on the drive you should be aware that most DVD players don't support the NTFS file system and using FAT32 on a drive this large is pretty ugly.

Finally, this is the best recommendation you are going to get and you would do well to listen to it AND do it - buy a drive enclosure with its own power supply. Do NOT - DO NOT - use a drive enclosure without power. A drive this large has a chance close to zero of working with any standalone playback device as non-PCs almost never have USB connections with sufficient power to operate a 2 TB drive in an unpowered enclosure.

[davideck]

I would also recommend one with a power switch. That way, you can set it online/offline by using the switch instead of plugging/unplugging the USB cable. I have a Verbatim external drive that is discovered and mounted when I switch it on, and it spins down the drive immediately after a "Safely remove hardware" operation. I wish that all of my external drives worked this way.

[fritzi93]

Powered enclosure all the way.

So are your computer details correct? You're using XP? If so, you need to be aware of AFD (advanced format drives), and the importance of proper alignment of the drive. It's likely any new 2 TB drive will be an AF drive. XP won't align an AF drive correctly (except by accident) when formatting and creating partitions. Improper alignment degrades performance because clusters will span sector boundaries.

1) Now, you could simply do the formatting/partitioning on a Vista or Win7 system.
2) You could use a Vista/Win7 install disc to do it.
3) You could do it in XP and check alignment afterward with something like AS-SSD or the drive manufacturer's free tools. If necessary to re-align, a Parted Magic boot disc can do it, for example.

I recall the Seagate 2 TB Green drives and how many savagely negative reviews there were at Newegg and Amazon, et. al. Well, it's an AF drive (I have one and it's been fine), and it seems most of the negative reviewers were on XP. Apparently quite a few failed prematurely. Now that's not the only factor involved, obviously, and some would prefer to say: "eh, made in China" and leave it at that.

Anyway, I have a mix of WD, Seagate and Samsung Spinpoint drives. Whatever is on special when I need one I will consider. I really don't quite understand the vociferous brand loyalty some folks have. Hard drives fail, there are no guarantees as to when, for sure.

Good luck.

[hech54]

I've never had a hard drive failure.....EVER.
I have ZERO brand loyalty.
Right now my present computer has all (3) Samsung drives.

[Slipster]

I've never had a hard drive failure.....EVER.

I've had around 12 fail over the years, but I have been into PCs since the pre-Internet days of 8086 CPUs and MFM hard drives. The failed drives covered pretty much every brand ever made during that time period, so I've no specific loyalties either. They all fail eventually. It's just a matter of owning them long enough for them to fail.

[nic2k4]

Hard drives fail, there are no guarantees as to when, for sure.

Yeah and it's just sad that we're at the point we just take it as a fact of life. This is mature technology, failure rates should be in the single digit range. I've bought many drives over the past 18 years and have some that are over 10 years old and still working. The difference, they were made in America not some third world country and quality control was taken seriously; after all you're trusting your data to this thing.

Just look at any datasheet they used to list MTBF (500 000 power on hours for some drives), now they only list minimum power cycles and can't even make those numbers (300 000 for 500 GB drives). I'm not mentioning any brands, makes no difference when all the manufacturers are located in Thailand.

[hello_hello]

At one stage I was getting an average of two years from a hard drive, but there's an old Pentium PC in this house which is still used daily for surfing and which still has an old 20GB hard drive.
I recently exchanged a pair of Seagate drives under warranty for the fourth time before they finally sent me a pair which look like they might keep working. Another pair of Segate drives, roughly the same age and model have run almost 24/7 for five years.
It really just luck, with a little luck thrown in. All 8 hard drives in my two PCs here are the same age, all just having turned 5.

Me.... I've got around 12 "external" drives these days of various sizes and ages. Not one of them in an enclosure. I used docks. Something like this:

There's a dock permanently attached to my Bluray player, a dual drive dock connected to each PC, and a dock connected to the USB media player in a TV in one of the bedrooms. I just swap the hard drives around. If I was to buy a new drive for external storage it'd be a WD Green drive as they're nice and quiet and have proven to be very reliable.

[hech54]

I've never had a hard drive failure.....EVER.

I've had around 12 fail over the years, but I have been into PCs since the pre-Internet days of 8086 CPUs and MFM hard drives. The failed drives covered pretty much every brand ever made during that time period, so I've no specific loyalties either. They all fail eventually. It's just a matter of owning them long enough for them to fail.

My first "real" modern computer had a whopping 1Gb hard drive.....and my first "hard drives" were cassette tapes connected to a Tandy/Radio Shack computer.

[Slipster]

My first "real" modern computer had a whopping 1Gb hard drive.....and my first "hard drives" were cassette tapes connected to a Tandy/Radio Shack computer.

Haha! These guys who complain about their modern computers being slow need to go back to using a 1K Sinclair ZX81 for a week like I had to for the first year to give them a sense of perspective, dammit!

[TBoneit]

One suggestion for everyone In the future only buy USB3 external drives. Even if you only have USb2 ports right now in the future you will love the speed. I was transferring files Sunday to a USB3 EHD using the USB3 WD PCI Express card. Windows 7 was showing a low of around 60Mb for many small files and up to 100Mb on the large files. Much, much faster than USb2. Future proof yourself. Good Luck TB

[didikai]

Sorry guys, forgot to update my system details. Hope all your replies are still applicable

[TBoneit]

I use Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital externals for USB. I have Seagate and Western Digital NAS drives on the network too. That way my Media player an my computer can both use them with no plugging and unplugging needed.