Topic: Shopping for an external hard drive?

[sunjan]

Hi all,

I need to get an external hard drive and find myself bewildered by the various models on the market.
This is not for archive or storage. The main purpose is to bring along flac files when visiting other tapers, and copying other recordings from them. After returning home, I'd transfer the files to other media.

So my requirements are:
1-2TB space (seems like the sweet spot is around 2TB these days)
USB2.0, maybe firewire would be nice too but isn't crucial. I (or my taper pals) don't have any USB3.0 devices yet, and I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.
Reasonably durable, can be carried around to other friends' house at least (I don't intent to go mountain climbing or anything)
3,5" or 2,5"? I guess bigger form factor is cheaper, but less portable and might not stand shocks as much as the 2,5". What's your take on this?
USB powering not really required.
Longer guarantee would be nice, but I don't know if it's crucial to have?
Brand? I've heard good things about WD and Seagate, less so about Samsung and LaCie. But I guess each brand has budget models as well as more durable high-end gear.
I don't really care about transfer speed factors (cache size, 5400 vs. 7200rpm etc), I reckon I have time to fiddle with other things while transfering. Unless there are other benefits to performance that I'm unaware of.

Based on this, could you point me in the right direction?!

[JackoRoses]

myself I would go to newegg and browse their external drives and look through the ones rated the highest and go from there.
Not saying you need to buy it from newegg, they just have decent reviews to go off of.

[gkatz]

I think a good route to go would involve ordering a bare drive and an aftermarket enclosure. Since you said you want to take this traveling with you to give and receive FLAC, I think having a bus powered drive would be key, so you wouldnt need a wall outlet. I took an old IDE hard drive from an old laptop that had supposedly failed, put it in a 10$ enclosure with 2 USB ends that is bus powered, formatted and it worked fine. Still have it 1 year later, no problems. I also had a WD Passport 2.5" sata drive that I originally bought used, about 3! years ago, and just recently it was "beginning" to fail (mounting and transfer issues). I bought a  rocketfish enclosure with E-Sata connectivity, although it requires a wallwart, and my transfer speeds have never been better, along with all "failing" symptoms gone.

As far as warranties go, unless you have a 5 year one or something, I doubt it would last long enough to until the drive fails. I am not the one to talk to about drive failures (lucky!!)

I would recommend WD, and even toshiba, just because I was able to salvage a toshiba drive from a laptop. Seagate I hear are pretty good. A friend of mine has had a small portable one for over 4 years. But as with any company, there are always lemons. If you go onto amazon or some place with reviews, there will always be 1 star ratings because people got lemons and had bad experiences with customer service.

just my $0.02, good luck on your search

[rastasean]

I like what gkatz mentioned! A bare drive in an external enclosure is the way to do it for a couple reasons: you can buy multiple bare drives and swap it out with the external enclosure and be able to access the data, and the second reason is that it is usually cheaper and easier to upgrade.

I have had very good experiences with newegg and tigerdirect. Once I bought a used 80gig IDE hdd from newegg and it didn't work so I just sent it back for a refund. It was applied and I happily bought something else.

 

[DigiGal]

Other World Computing has multiple options including these linked flavors.

On-The-Go Bus Powered

Do It Yourself Kits

[Fried Chicken Boy]

I think a good route to go would involve ordering a bare drive and an aftermarket enclosure...  [snip]
... I think having a bus powered drive would be key, so you wouldnt need a wall outlet.

Absolutely 100% agreed with the first statement.  I've been putting together my own external harddrive enclosures for years and they're all still ticking (knock on wood ).  This way you can choose the best hd you want/can afford along with the best enclosure.  If your mechanical skills are limited to even using a screwdriver, you can build your own external storage drive.  Newegg.com and Tigerdirect.com, among others, have many options.

As for the second statement, a bus-powered drive (powered solely by the USB or Firewire connection) might be the best for your uses in terms of portability.  But, AFAIK, there aren't any 3.5" harddrives (ie: desktop size) enclosures that are bus-powered so I believe you'll have to go the 2.5" (ie: laptop size) harddrive and enclosure route.  In that realm, I don't think there are many (or any) 2.5" hd's pushing 1TB so you'll have to decide what's more important to you: portability or capacity?

[notlance]

Oyen Digital drives and enclosures generally get good reviews.  Here is what they have in 2.5" drives:

http://oyendigital.com/2.5-portable-hard-drives.html

They sell drive with both Firewire and USB up to 1 TB.  At this state of the art, 2 TB 2.5" drives are difficult, but not impossible, to find.

Buying an enclosure and HD separately is a fine idea, especially if you have an unused HD lying around.  But if you do buy an enclosure + HD together there is nothing preventing you from swapping out the HD at a later time.  I have not seen a complete HD that cannot be taken apart to swap out the drive.

[Brian Skalinder]

But if you do buy an enclosure + HD together there is nothing preventing you from swapping out the HD at a later time.  I have not seen a complete HD that cannot be taken apart to swap out the drive.

What about external enclosures containing 2 HDDs in a proprietary array?  Some of the bigger capacity enclosures have used this approach for some time, though I'm not sure how many these days.

[sunjan]

Thanks all for great advice!
I went for a no-name enclosure and a smaller 320Gb 2.5" drive for now. Should be able to carry a few hundred concerts along at least. 
Like you suggested, if I feel too constricted it's easy to get a bigger drive later on, and leaving the options open for upgrading to a faster enclosure too.

[dnsacks]

you might find it easier to just get a new router that has a usb port for attaching external drives/printers.  Frequently, one can plug a usb hub into the router usb port and connect multiple drives/printers and make all available over the network.

[rastasean]

You don't have to buy a network enclosure, you could connect it to your computer via esata or usb and share it on the network with samba or NFS. An alternative to password protection would be read/write/execute permissions on the drive and on different directories on the drive, you could prevent people from opening files/directories or deleting files/directories.

Another alternative may be your router. Some of the newer ones have a USB port or two for printing and file sharing...maybe your router has this.

Are you backups going to be automatic or manual by the way of copying data to the drive?
If you want auto, check out
unison- http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unison_(file_synchronizer)

and also rsync:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync