External hard drive (internal + caddy)

kazakore

kazakore

kazakore

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I know this has been covered a few times and comes up every-so-often but I apologise I don't really have the time to search right now and know things change fairly often.

Anyway I have two external Lacie drives both of which are failing. One doesn't read a lot of the time (and has had niggling problems from day one) and the other is very noisy and has been for quite a while (few years old and on its second power supply so done fairly well.)

So I am looking at making two external hard drives. Currently one is 500GB and the other is 1TB but would consider expanding on this. Don't really want to go with the bother of RAID, even for the added security.

Most important factor to me is reliability, followed by noise. Speed isn't a worry, I would have thought any drive will be able to play a HD movie and transfer at USB2.0 and that is good enough for me.

Last time I was looking the WD Black seemed to be most highly recommended for reasonable price and reliability. Is this still the case? Are they quiet? Will most likely be on 24/7 (my other drives generally have been, one for about 4-5 years, the other 2-3.)

No idea what external caddies are around but something fairly silent and not too expensive. Recommendations please.
 
Nobody have an opinion? On thinking it would probably be worth while getting the Green as do not need the added speed of the Black and every Watt saved helps the planet, right.

OSeems to be few caddies available through OCUK at the moment. Does that mean the IcyBox ones, which are out of stock, are that much more worth getting? is the Akasa Elite the only one that is powered from USB? Will a laptop power it through the USB port?
 
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If it's only USB you want then any drive will fully saturate this. I'd suggest the Samsung F2's over the Greens as they're cheaper and quieter.

If you want to power this from a USB port then you'll need a 2.5" drive and a 2l.5" enclosure; even then there's no guarantee that you won't need to use two USB ports for it but you're usually okay.
 
AbsenceJam said:
If it's only USB you want then any drive will fully saturate this. I'd suggest the Samsung F2's over the Greens as they're cheaper and quieter.

If you want to power this from a USB port then you'll need a 2.5" drive and a 2l.5" enclosure; even then there's no guarantee that you won't need to use two USB ports for it but you're usually okay.
Click to expand...

This says it's powered from USB and it's for a 3.5 (in fact the only one I had seen with the bit of searching on OCUK I had done.) To be honest not too worried about USB bus powered, just thought it could be good as had more problems with external HDD PSUs being on 24/7 and failing than the actual drives themselves.

Thanks for suggesting the Samsungs. Will only be using USB so know speed isn't a worry but noise is so it's good to know if that's a quieter, affordable drive.


Thanks bledd. I swear the Icybox were out of stock when I looked yesterday. The Docking Station version is just a external drive where you can pop out the drives from the front like in server enclosures right? Rather than taking the box apart?
 
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