Recommendations for reliable, external, USB-only hard drive?
Digital music takes up so much space, and my collection is rather large. I've filled the 160GB external drive I've been using for years, and need an upgrade. The current drive is failing and ran out of space a year ago.
Since 2004, I have been using the same 80GB and 160GB external FireLite drives offered by SmartDisk. 6 years for a constant-use drive is amazing, and I know that I got what I paid for and more out of them. They were excellent because they came with solid aluminum cases and built-in cooling - sturdy and reliable. I pretty much only use them for photo storage and music storage, so mostly just reading data rather than writing it. The 80GB died around 5 months ago with no warning after being left all-night plugged into my Wii. This happened a number of times, so I'm not really surprised it died, just sad. The second is still working - but just barely. It's giving me read/write errors more and more frequently. Fortunately, I format with ext4 so I'm not as boned as I would be if I was on Windows.
My needs are this:
- 400+GB of space. Again, I've only increased my space by 20-40GB at a time, and this time I need a nice boost. I think a TB is a bit much, but who knows?
- External. Internal is out of the question.
- USB-only power. I need to be able to transfer files from multiple computers, so carrying around an AC adapter is not really viable.
- Reliable. I don't want it to fail in 4-5 months with my entire music collection from the past 6 years on it.
Do any of you have a recommendation? Perhaps a drive that has worked especially well for you.
The 2 that I was considering were the Western Digital Elements 500GB and the SeaGate FreeAgent GO 500GB. But after a bit more searching, it seems that with both, the number of "My drive died in 4 months" stories is around 1/5 of the total reviews. Those are NOT good numbers. I found this to be true on the 4-5 different electronics shopping sites I scoured. Not good. I need this to last.
Any help from the tech-savvy?
Posted 3 minutes ago
