External Hard Disk Drives: Just like cars from the 70’s

I have a distinct memory from my youth of spending time in service stations waiting for our family car to be repaired. This notoriously happened during vacations at the most inopportune times and locations.

I’ve now found the modern day equivalent of the 1970’s sedan; the desktop external hard drive.

In the last week, I’ve had two external disk drives fail … one from Fantom and the other from Western Digital. Both were less than 2 years old and both took all of their data with them. Fortunately, I had backed up both drives (thank you Mozy!) but restoring the information is a major pain.

So a call goes out to the TechDad Central community … does anyone have a reliable external hard drive (500 GB or greater) that they can recommend?

Comments

[Brian]

Wow! Great analogy. I have tried tons of hard drives. I have over 5 TB of images (or 10 TB is you include the the single backups). I loose 1-2 hard drives a year it seems like to me.

I don't think a "reliable" one exists.

[Jennifer, Snapshot]

I just reviewed the F-Secure Online backup. I see something like that as a great option, because my external hard drive failed a couple of years ago, due to user error (I dropped it -- not from that high, but it's so fragile that did it in). This also saves bookmarks and everything else.

It was super-slow to get all the data on my harddrive archived, but now it automatically updates, so I don't have to remember to back it up either (another issue that causes my external harddrive not to work effectively).

People can win one of 10 copies if they want to check out my post:

http://www.5minutesforgiveaways.com/405/f-secure-online-backup/

[Anne-Marie]

I have a Maxtor OneTouch4 500GB, which I upgraded to when my Maxtor OneTouchIII Mini ended up being too small after about a year's use. I've had no problems with either of them. I chose Maxtor because of the online reviews, the price, and that I could use a discount card at my office supply store (can't remember if it was Staples or Office Depot) to buy it. Plus it's a local company that employs many people in my community, so I felt good about supporting them by buying their product, too.

[Cecelia]

I use a Maxtor OneTouch 1TB drive that I love. I had two Western Digital 500 GB ones fail and am pretty fed up with them.

Some of the online options (like Mozy) are good but can be slow to recover the info.

[TechDadCentral]

Sounds like Maxtor is leading the race for reliable external HD's. I will try one and report back on TechDadCentral.

[TechDadCentral]

Buy V:

Some external drives have a built in USB "hub", hence the second connection. You can use the second USB connection to connect to an additional hard drive (to increase storage) or even to a printer.