External Hard Drives

[nacho]

Hell, that's the computer world.  People say Dell is shit, but all of my Dell's have run for 5-10 years.  There's no winning.  But, from my research, Iomega and Seagate seem to stand above Western Digital.

[Matt]

I can definitively say that Compaq is shit and Lenovo (formerly IBM) Thinkpads are solid. But beyond that, meh.

[Tatertots]

Iomega doesn't make hard drives. They make hard drive cases.

Basically, any hard drive other than Maxtor is good enough.

[nacho]

So what's inside my Iomega?  China Special Assembly 7.2?

[monkey!]

Yeah, and what about my Iomega usb portable hard-drive? Pixies and fairy dust?

[Matt]

Do those pixies and fairy dust take care of your data real good? 'cause i tihnk that's all cass wants, even if it means he has to clap his hands every time he wants to watch a movie

[monkey!]

They're little cunts.

[Tatertots]

So what's inside my Iomega?  China Special Assembly 7.2?

Probably Seagate or Western Digital. Hard drives are like monitors. Tons of brands sell them, but only a few companies make them. The LCDs in your Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. monitors are all made by the same company.

[Cassander]

i just don't want to spend $100 on something that's going to burn out in a year or two.

[Nubbins]

Hey, I've got 3 external HDs, two of which are at least 3 years old.  I'm sure they'll crap out eventually, but unless you're hauling the thing around every day, it should be fine.

I can't wait for everything to be solid state.

[nacho]

Over a year later! I'm in the market for another hard drive... Going for the 1tb this time. I got the Nubbins-recommended 500mb HD in 09 or whatever, and it's held up just fine. Been great, actually. But it's packed to the gills with movies, music, books, TV, business stuff, and general backups.

So a second, bigger one for both a little bit of redundancy and because I need more space for my million gigs of tentacle porn.

I'm sitting on a $150 Amazon gift certificate (given to me as a "tip" at last week's event), so I'm debating between brand loyalty:
http://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Desktop-External-Drive-34836/dp/B0035J7XG2

And cheaper (so I can spend the rest on Dr. Who DVD's and inflatable sheep):
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Elements-Desktop-External/dp/B002QEBMB4

As is the theme of this thread -- there's no comfortable consensus with either. There are enough detractors to put doubt in my head...

I'll probably go with Iomega since I've been happy with them going back to the comically clumsy zip drives in the late 90's. But I figured I'd throw this post up to see if anyone had any new thoughts/experiences.

[nacho]

I'll bump this for Cass (who treats his hard drive like it's a baseball, so I'd like some thoughts on what he ended up with and how he's enjoyed it) and Reggie (who I believe knows everything about computers because he's a spy). And because nobody looks in sub-forums that were created after 2006.

[RottingCorpse]

I'm still Seagate man.

[Reginald McGraw]

I bought one of these in September:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101176

Just a dock with slots for your standard internal hard drives...you just slide them in. It comes with a 1TB drive.

Yes you can't throw it across the room, but I have two kids under 7 and no harm has come to it.

Works great and you can get another drive if you fill that first with porn.

[nacho]

Hot swappable bays!

Too much of that and I'll end up with two kids as well!