A Review of the Top Four External Hard Drives

Lucas123 writes "There's a really good, detailed review at the Computerworld site on the top four external hard drives with more than 500GB of capacity. The story reveals some big flaws in the external drives, like malfunctioning one-touch backup buttons, USB 2.0 ports that don't recognize the drives, and drives coming out of the boxes unformatted. It's also an eye opener with regard to actual backup speeds. 'Broadband connections, peer-to-peer networks and larger media files coupled with new regulations that require diligence in backing up files have clearly affected the external hard drive market as drive capacities expand to 1TB and beyond. Meanwhile, the prices of those drives continue to drop, making them ever more attractive, particularly with the ease of deployment -- literally a two-minute installation, and you're ready to go. We put four of the leading external hard drives to the test. Our criteria were simple: The drives had to have multiple connection technologies (USB 2.0 plus FireWire 400 or FireWire 800 or both), include backup software and have a capacity of at least 500GB.'"

Comments

Why not just do it yourself?

[Coopjust]

Why not just do it yourself? All you have to do is buy an enclosure and a drive...

-It's cheaper to buy the two separately.
-You get to pick your drive case (color, features, etc.)
-You get to pick your drive (WD, Maxtor, Seagate).
-While OEM drives often come with more than a year warranty (SG is 5 years, I believe WD is three), regular external drives often come with a one year warranty.

While you do lose a few features (I'm dying for a good enclosure w/ one button backup), it's cheaper and you have more selection. Plus, the software that comes with external hard drives is such crap anyways (Seagate and BounceBack Crippled/Express Edition).

Of course, as a slashdotter, I may not be representative of the average computer user (OK, I'm not).

Re:Why not just do it yourself?

[Hokie06]

Why use a one button backup when it's pretty trivial to write a shell script that'll do an Rsync backup?
Trivial to many slashdotters? Yes. Trivial to the average user? No.
Average user's response. What's a shell script? What the hell is rsync?

Re:here is my favorite external hard drive

[Doctor-Optimal]

Sure, the I/O speed is great but the retention? Not so good...

Review flaws

[michaelmalak]

1. They didn't review Buffalo (which uses Linux for its firmware on some/all of its drives)
2. They didn't review any NAS drives, which eliminate the need for another computer and are "always on" for WiFi laptops
3. They didn't need to open the review with excuses for larger hard drives. Parkinson's Law is sufficient for that. 500+ GB hard drives are great for storing a bunch of ripped CDs and DVDs. But we lived for a decade or two without needing to do that. Now that hard drives of that size are available, we want to do that.

Cheaper than $135?

[justthinkit]

Cheaper than $135 for a 500GB USB 2 drive? That is how much my Maxtor One Touch III 500GB USB2 drive cost. And by the way, why wasn't Maxtor included in this lineup? Even though it was bought up, it still produces a different (and apparently cheaper) product.

Multiple Drive USB Enclosure

[Doc Ruby]

USB+Power enclosures for IDE and SATA drives cost about $25; USB adapters alone cost about $15. Why doesn't a single enclosure for 8 or 12 drives (with appropriate mounting screws to avoid vibration that wears drives), including a USB hub and adapters and a single sufficient powersupply, cost $50, or maybe $100? They seem to cost $300-500.

Why doesn't an 12 drive enclosure with powersupply, PIII motherboard with nothing but IDE/SATA and Gb-ethernet running Linux/RAID cost under $200?

Firewire still beat out USB

[pammon]

The most interesting aspect of the review is that Firewire outperformed USB for every drive in every aspect of the testing. I guess some things don't change.

Re:Firewire still beat out USB

[Anonymous Coward]

no shit, sherlock! in other news, CDs are still beating every aspect of floppies.
did you really expect USB to beat firewire? how? why? wtf?

Re:Firewire still beat out USB

[metamatic]

For every superior piece of technology, there's an inferior one that's far more popular.

For Mac OS X, there's Windows.
For Firefire, there's USB.
For PostgreSQL, there's MySQL.
For Ruby|Python, there's Perl.
For Rails|Java, there's PHP.
And so on.

What about power use and noise ??

[Qwavel]

As usual, endless details on speed, and next to nothing about noise levels, power usage, and whether they have the ability to spin down when not in use.

FreeNAS

[COMON$]

I have been looking into a nice repository for my house for a while. Even with all the cheap external drives, I still cannot beat the price of buying 4 500GB drives for $150 a piece at http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 2E16822148136. Then plug them into an old box and install Freenas. As a geek it seems to be the way to go unless you need to take the storage with you. Even then I have a VPN but now we are getting more technical than ol mom and pop would enjoy.