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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.'"
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=printArticleBasic&articleId=9015945
I've never heard of this brand, and for the price and all of the tests it spanked the pants off of all the rest of the drives.. I see he didn't like the quirks but it smoked the rest of them.
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).
I've purchased a few WD Passports (they're up to 160GB now), and while they seem to be meant more for personal "sync up your stuff!" use, they're not bad for backups. In their favor are the facts that they're powered by USB (you can just plug one in and go, sans supply) and that they're relatively small. The tradeoff is the modest capacity (I really like that we can call 160,000 megabytes "modest" -- simple pleasures for a simple mind, I suppose) and the price-for-storage (they're much more expensive per gig than the WD My Books).
TFA reviews the My Book Pro, but they also have a USB-only My Book "Essential" (read: Cheaper!) version; anyone tried those?
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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.
I come here for the love
Well, if it's designed for a Mac, it's possible that it's not formatted on purpose: first, because it's trivial to format a drive when you connect it up the first time (plug drive in, dialog comes up saying that it's not formatted, would you like to format it, click yes ... etc.), and also because there are a few filesystems that people might want.
Apple's Disk Utility offers six options to format a disk into: Mac OS Extended (HFS+), Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Journaled, Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Case-Sensitive, Mac OS Extended (HFS+) Case-Sensitive Journaled, MS-DOS File System (FAT32), UNIX File System (EXT2?).
I guess I would assume that a "high end" HW manufacturer like Lacie would pre-format the drives to Mac OS Extended Journaled, because that's what Apple recommends as a default these days, but particularly if it's a product that's being aimed at non-clueless users, they might have just decided it wasn't worth it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Incompatibilities aside, I've got to ask: How the heck do you manage to bottle a bear?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Very carefully?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
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.
Before you commit to your shiny new USB/Firewire storage device, be sure you test it thoroughly. I've had several devices for whatever reason fail file checksum tests over multi-gigabytes of data. The most likely culprit is the USB interface and the drivers for them. Copy a very large multi-gigabyte tree of files back and fourth several times, checking against the master file checksums (MD5, etc). Also remember, proper checksum'ing requires that you eliminate any cache'ing that the OS may be doing, so unplug the device, then plug it back in, before running the checksum. Checksum'ing is especially important if you've formatted NTFS and the device is USB powered.
Also, even if you've verified the data is good on your storage device, moving it to another machine and connecting it up may leave you unhappy if the storage interface on the new machine isn't working properly.
You have been warned.