Hi.
This is my first post here, so I apologise if this has been discussed a hundred times before, or if this is more of a question than a discussion. I suspect there isn’t a clear answer, which is why I put it in the discussions section.
Mods – please feel free to move this or point me to a previous thread if necessary.
Right – I need to buy external hard drives on a fairly regular basis – I’m a music recording engineer and also the technical [non-IT] manager of a large venue and arts centre.
I want to know if there is an industry-accepted wisdom that some brands are more or less reliable than others; or even better a website with some kind of soak test results comparing different brands. Or, is it just the case that they’re all broadly as good as each other and they just will eventually die at some point?
Reading the customer comments on Amazon, I can see a fair number of people complaining that Lacie and Western Digital drives die after about a year – this could easily just be disgruntled individuals, as in any product line there will be some that fail earlier than others. Similarly I seem to have picked up positive reports of Seagate/Maxtor and Samsung drives (although Samsung don’t seem to make their own external drives, and I don’t know which other companies use their drives).
I need to buy a load more, with lifespan/reliability a primary concern, then noise, then shape (I want to be able to stack them if possible).
My own experience is that:
* I’ve had two Lacie Porsche drives for about two or three years and they’re fine;
* I had one bog-standard Lacie which died spontaneously after about 6 months;
*I’ve had a WD MyPassport 2.5 inch which has stood up to an extraordinary amount of abuse over the last year;
* and a WD MyBook which died when I plugged my Laptop power supply into it (yes; I know; this however has caused me to avoid buying drives with the same size power connector as my laptop since then).
* I’ve got an internal WD caviar drive in a caddy, which makes a horrific grinding noise but still seems to work, so I use it as my deep backup and only turn it on occasionally;
* in work we have Buffalo 500gb drives but they’re all less than a year old and rarely get used so it’s hard to say.
* many other people I know use Lacies and don’t have problems.
* …and I just bought a Maxtor basics 500gb for ?50 in Tesco’s, which made me start thinking: did I just buy some cheap junk that’s going to fail on me really soon? (Apparently not, according to what I’ve been reading so far).
…all of which made me think I’d go for Lacie’s again, but after reading a few people complaining about their reliability I thought I’d see what I can find out.
Phew. Sorry this is so long. Cheers!
T