External hard drive recommendations ?

jrar

I see Pixmania have one of their frequent promos on hard-drives and it's something I really need to invest in to back up thousands of songs and photos on my iPod 80GB classic.

Question, is, any ones that I should avoid like the pague, or any one that users recommend ? They have a WD My Book II (500GB) for €79 which would suggest that at that price, I can't go wrong, plus there's a similar Iomega drive for €70.....I'm just trying to avoid buying a particular make/model that has caused previous users grief as I've heard all sorts of stories from drives just dying, to ones that burnt out after a short period etc.

I'd like to avoid having to get a 2nd drive to back-up my primary external hard drive if you know what I mean !

J-blk

Well, I've read a lot of negative reviews on WD external drives but I have 6 of them right now and none of them has ever had any issues... 3 of them are MyBook ones (a 320GB MyBook Essential - the first type, a 500GB MyBook Pro - again the first type but with FW400/800 and a 1TB MyBook Studio - essentially the MyBook II for Macs...). All of them have been rock solid so far and the 3 Passport series ones I have are great too so I would most definitely recommend the MyBook series.

That said, if any of the data is really important to you, it should be backed up to at least two places or on some kind of RAID setup that'll mirror it automatically. There actually is a MyBook Mirror edition now but obviously, it comes at a premium:

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=358587

Still, you are getting 2x500GB drives there with built-in redundancy (you'll only get 500GB of space out of such a setup though if mirroring).

Unfortunately, no hard drive manufacturer is bulletproof - you could easily end up with a dud from any manufacturer really.

ewj1978

I've bought quite a few over the while from Maplin ( seagate 320gb and a 500gb).. as above sometimes things break even from trusted Manufacturers..

jrar

Thanks for the responses

Yes, I need to consider the dual back-up whether by mirroring or just using 2 sep. drives etc. The material in question is about 3000 mp3 tracks which I really couldn't even begin to recreate, plus about 1000 photographs which are literally irreplaceable courtesy of the fact that they exist in digital format only !

J-blk

jrar wrote: »

plus about 1000 photographs which are literally irreplaceable courtesy of the fact that they exist in digital format only!

You're going to need 2 separate drives or mirroring then PLUS backup to DVDs or other media and you may want to consider more than one media backups so you can have an off-site copy as well. It may seem a bit paranoid, but just think of all the recent flood damage around the country... if any data is of value to you, unfortunately you need to invest in more than a single external HDD to protect it.

Fazer6

Have you considered a few dual layer DVDs?

Fazer6.