Which External 1Tb Hard Drive Should I Get?

Nexus18

Nexus18

Nexus18

Caporegime
Joined
4 Jun 2009
Posts
32,288
As the title says, looking for a 1Tb external hard drive which will be very reliable, budget approximatley £75. It will be used for storage of videos, pictures etc. Will be sitting on my desk most of the time so don't really need to worry about portability.

I have read about seagate not being very reliable since they bought maxtor and also the customer support not being great, which has put me off buying any of their products, although they have good warranty.

Currently looking at the WD Elements 1TB 3.5 inch External Hard Drive, which I can get for £63 pounds and the delivery is free and it has 2 years warranty, what do you all think of it? Have had a look at the My book serious but can't seem to find them any where at a decent price and then the delivery is pretty dear.

Are there any other external hard drives that I should look at?
 
You could buy a Samsung F3 1TB and an exclosure for about that price? Seems ideal.

One thing to keep in mind is, although some say some brands are more reliable than others etc, its been proven in surveys and through distributors, that all harddisks no matter the brand have similar fail rate.
 
unknownsock said:
You could buy a Samsung F3 1TB and an exclosure for about that price? Seems ideal.

One thing to keep in mind is, although some say some brands are more reliable than others etc, its been proven in surveys and through distributors, that all harddisks no matter the brand have similar fail rate.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply, could you explain to me how that enclosure thing works please, don't quite understand how it connects to the PC i.e. by USB or something etc. On my motherboard I only have 2 sata II connectors and both are being used, so would that affect the enclosure thing at all. Thanks.
 
Last edited:
Well you'd just put your HDD inside of say this:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-008-AK&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=72

And plug it in, the usb/e-sata connector should power it. USB should be fine if you've ran out of sata ports, normally your case should have a firewire port on the outside? (well the newer ones)
Although I've never used one of these so if someone else can confirm?

Probably the best thing is, you can interchange this with other hdd's in the future etc.
 
darkcooleo said:
I go for the superfast E-SATA drive, Seagate Freeagent Extreme. I have the 1TB version and it works great. Would reccomend, also has USB and Firewire so is quite versatile.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-191-SE&groupid=701&catid=1240&subcat=941
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply but I am on quite a strict budget so that is a fair bit too much for me, my brother has the same as you but I can't find it anywhere, don't think they sell the 1Tb version any more.
 
unknownsock said:
Well you'd just put your HDD inside of say this:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-008-AK&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=72

And plug it in, the usb/e-sata connector should power it. USB should be fine if you've ran out of sata ports, normally your case should have a firewire port on the outside? (well the newer ones)
Although I've never used one of these so if someone else can confirm?

Probably the best thing is, you can interchange this with other hdd's in the future etc.
Click to expand...

Thanks, yeah I have the firewire port on the front of my case but my motherboard doesn't have that connection or e-sata.
 
Could someone please confirm if that enclosure thing will work on my pc, here are the specs again:
no e sata or firewire connectors
2 sata II connectors but both are being used
I have got 3 USB ports
 
Nexus18 said:
Thanks for the reply but I am on quite a strict budget so that is a fair bit too much for me, my brother has the same as you but I can't find it anywhere, don't think they sell the 1Tb version any more.
Click to expand...

Yer i just looked and its not easily available ini the 1Tb anymore. I think i paid £110 from ocuk, or around there a few months ago. If you have no free USB's and wanted to use a E-sata ex-HDD you would have to buy a pcsata-esata card ( thats if you have a space pci slot) or else you would have to use USB.
 
darkcooleo said:
I'd go for this 1 then, same as the xtreme but just with no E-sata which is not cost effective atm for you anyways.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-174-SE&groupid=701&catid=1240&subcat=941

The new maxtor drives are using the Seagate software so in my eyes Seagate are as good as they have ever been. 5 year warranty 2, cannot go wrong.
Click to expand...

Yeah was looking at that one, but have read a lot of user reviews and people have said that it wasn't very reliable, that it broke after a month or a few weeks of using etc. and also I don't like the colour white lol, I am quite fussy when it comes to looks and everything lol, plus all of my pc equipment is all black so it would look quite stupid I think. Thanks anyway for the suggestion.
 
darkcooleo said:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-083-LC&groupid=701&catid=1240&subcat=941

I used the have a 500GB Lacie Porche drive, was pretty fast but s/w was useless. That's a good cheap drive though, and its black !
Click to expand...

Sorry for the late reply, been very busy. Sounds like a good hard drive, but I would rather stick with a brand that I am more familiar with, thanks for the suggestion anyway and all the help, but I think I might get the samsung F3 1Tb as my dad has a spare enclosure that I can use. Thanks again for all the help.
 
I have a 1TB WD MyBook Essentials (revision 2 I believe), has been fine for 3 months so far, but I only connect it once a month to do a SyncBackPro run to mirror my current 640gb full of movies/mp3s/app setup files etc. Transfer speed is about 25mb/sec which I'd imagine is limited by USB2 host speeds. Too slow for general usage though, so look into esata support if it's what you need.
 
Thanks for the replies. My dad gave me a docking station and also a brand new western digital hard drive 500Gb caviar green :D
 
Last edited:
Im currently having probs with a Seagate 1TB 32m cache ext drive.

I tried my mates 1TB Western Digital Elements & if its plugged into the USB when booting up it resets my motherboard BIOS, which is a pain because the RAM SPD is 1066 but my board cant use 4 sticks of 1066 at all so I have to remove 1 stick of RAM so I can set the RAM speed at 876.
Oh the motherboard is Gigabyte GA_P35_DQ6 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 1066 with the latest firmware (but all firmware reset the BIOS).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom