Whats a reliable external hard drive?

Niir

Niir

Niir

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Joined
3 Nov 2008
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351
looking for about 500g external harddrive to back up all the important crap on my computer photos/music/uni work/gfs uni work that kinda stuff/ parents stuff

for preference black would be good (its all about the looks lol)

im looking for reliability and not a ridiculous price £100ish i guess but not really to bothered.

thanks
 
£100 could get you a 1TB external HDD easily. Either way, I've heard good things about the Western Digital MyBook drives. I know you can get the 500GB ones in black.
 
Western Digital are at the bottom of my hard drive reliabilitometer... They do great drives, but really, about 4 out of 5 dead hard drives I replace (I work in a local computer shop, so that's a lot) have the WD logo on them.
I've also RMA'd about four WD external drives in the past six months.

IMHO, the five year warranty on seagate drives speaks for itself... they're the only brand of external drive we sell.
 
SlyReaper said:
Heat wouldn't really be an issue for mass storage and backups though?
Click to expand...

Mines was a backup, the web is full of horror stories about them and the new models (I had the older round Round LED one but RMA is new Straight Line LED one) go to sleep all the time and its a major PIA and the firmware wont even update.
 
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Nethesem said:
Western Digital are at the bottom of my hard drive reliabilitometer... They do great drives, but really, about 4 out of 5 dead hard drives I replace (I work in a local computer shop, so that's a lot) have the WD logo on them.
I've also RMA'd about four WD external drives in the past six months.

IMHO, the five year warranty on seagate drives speaks for itself... they're the only brand of external drive we sell.
Click to expand...

I've a 150GB Raptor I've been meaning to RMA. Now that I'm going to go Vista I may as well install onto that. If you don't mind me asking, how fast of a turn around do Western Digital have?
 
Nethesem said:
Western Digital are at the bottom of my hard drive reliabilitometer... They do great drives, but really, about 4 out of 5 dead hard drives I replace (I work in a local computer shop, so that's a lot) have the WD logo on them.
I've also RMA'd about four WD external drives in the past six months.

IMHO, the five year warranty on seagate drives speaks for itself... they're the only brand of external drive we sell.
Click to expand...

That is no way to measure reliability it could just be that western digital are very popular so that's why you see more duds.

Personally I have found WD drives bullet proof never had one die on me since 1998.
 
The Halk said:
I've a 150GB Raptor I've been meaning to RMA. Now that I'm going to go Vista I may as well install onto that. If you don't mind me asking, how fast of a turn around do Western Digital have?
Click to expand...

No more than 10 working days I think... but it varies... I think their small print covers them up to 30 working days or something.

But most RMAs for hard drives, laptops, or anything, are nearly always very fast when there's no question that the device is dead.
So as long as it's not an intermittent fault, I'd estimate a week, but don't quote me on that.

C64- That's true, but it doesn't contradict the fact that lots and lots of WD drives fail.
Don't get me wrong, I've got a Raptor in my gaming rig, but that being said, I back up my computer religiously, because once a week I call people up telling them their WD hard drive failed and took all their family photos with it.
 
Cheers Nethesem. I got around to going to their site. They have a long and nasty looking set of T&C regarding the condition of boxes when returning drives, so I went for their Advanced RMA. That way I'll have the packaging they send me a drive in to return the broken one in :P
 
Yea, most companies are pretty anal in the T&C to cover themselves. I've posted laptops in less than stellar packaging before and it hasn't been a problem, but when they offer to send you appropriate packaging, it's worth going for it to avoid any possible aggro.
It a lot easier than taping together some MacGyver packing job too ;)
 
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