Hardware & Technical External drive recommendations

[Rochester]

Simply put I'm in need of an external drive to store work docs and clear up existing PC hard drive space. My only prerequisites are: 1: Reliability. 2. Cheap (£50 min). 3: No software install / no encryption / no internet 4. Min 1 TB. 5: USB powered.

Not interested in cloud or on-line back ups as work docs are secure / copyrighted

Ideally I'm after something I can plug in when I need it. No need for regular back ups. But it must be reliable.

 

[Shadowdancer]

The WD "Elements Portable" or "MyPassport" lines come to mind; I have an older 1TB Elements that has so far survived several trips in checked luggage and a week in the luggage trailer halfway around Iceland. It's no speed demon, but did its job for casual photo editing involving lots of ~20MB files. I BitLockered it for good measure.

Just remember that it's not backup while it's powered on

 

[cmdr milesred]

Seagate Backup plus drives, similar to the wd variations but made by the more reliable Seagate...2tb usb3.0 powered, very nice drives..I have several and I love them.
Even though they work well with just the included adapter cable, I recommend for any usb powered drive that you also get a usb power Y cable...
Sorry, but my take on wd is the usb 3.0 full size drives are good, but all other types are prone to dying with no warning.

 

[Asp Explorer]

The WD Passport Ultras are quite useful little things. I’ve got a few of them knocking about that have survived a few ordeals.

You just can’t shell them and get to a native SATA interface without serious modifications.

I had some Seagate Expansions. Dead, all of them - either at drive or USB host level.

 

[Morbad]

The only reason I'd get an "external" drive rather than buying my own drive and putting it in a ten dollar enclosure is that the former actually tent to be less expensive per GB.

Personally, I'd get whatever is on sale in the capacity you are looking for. None of them have enough advantages/disadvantages over the others to trump cost. Also, erase them when you get them, all the garbage that tends to come with them is mostly a waste.

 

[Zak Gordon]

I had some Seagate Expansions. Dead, all of them - either at drive or USB host level.

Yeah, it's been a good decade or so since Seagate made reliable Hard Drives (I still have a 160GB drive in an XP machine that is about 15 years old now?). But the new models have been the least reliable for the last 10 years or so, according to stats on failure rates that i usually track here:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-q1-2018/

That is the latest data (and yep Seagate are top of the list in general for %failure rates.) from this years data crunching.

But in general you are not going to be getting 'reliability' for £50. You need something with a 5 year manufacturer warranty to approach the reliability we used to get as standard over a decade ago, and that costs more than £50 now sadly

I've been buying HGST drives over the last 6 years, they all come with that 5 year warranty, and all been fine for that but one that was an Hitachi-HGST has started to fail on 4.5 years. HGST does not exist as of itself anymore, i think WD bought them up? So i'm not sure if they will keep up their reliability ratings?

Now i would be looking at a WD Black (5 year warranty) as a minimum for backup and storage, unless a true successor to HGST comes on the scene?

 

[Asp Explorer]

HDD reliability has been up and down all over the place for years. The market has consolidated and in not a good way, in my opinion. The traditional bathtub curve now looks more like a washboard.

Just today incidently, I had to replace an array of HGST's under preventative maintenance. Not that there was anything with wrong with the array itself (yet), but those drives had been in continuous operation since May 2012.

All hard drives fail though, eventually.

 

[Zak Gordon]

All hard drives fail though, eventually.

Not my pre 2000's era drives (none of them!). I even had a P166 (W98se) that i built especially to run Bethesda's old Daggerfall crpg still going fine as of 5 years back when i let it go. Now during this era i had a friend that did have HDD's die on him, and he would see me cart mine around to LAN meet-ups and was just bemused i never had any HDD failures.

I think if i was to show him my current still running 160GB Seagate in my XP machine he would probably cry But yeah from my experience HDD reliability became an issue somewhere around the turn of the millennium, difficult to pin point exactly when (or what) caused it, but it seemed to be a thing, and now is just the new normal.

That backblaze resource has become a (data) life saver in this new era imho.

 

[Morbad]

Hard drives have probably been getting statistically more reliable over time, not less. Yeah, I have drives that are more than 20 years old that have 60-80k power on hours that still work. I've also filled entire dumpsters with drives that didn't last.

There are always outliers that have unusually high failure rates, Connor Peripherals drives from the mid 90s, the faulty IBM DeskStar 75GXP, and some semi-recent Seagate models stand out. However, failure rates generally aren't so statistically different from brand to brand that they should really influence a purchase decision. All of them are semiprone to failure early on (bathtub curve) and all level off to fairly low failure rates until they nearly all tend to wear out around the 30-50k hour mark.

Have enough drives and you'll inevitably see some fail. Just stay away known defective model numbers and enclosures with power, vibration, or cooling issues. Any data you really want to keep should be backed up, regularly, to multiple devices anyway, so that any single drive failing without warning is never a serious setback.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Oh - and make sure your backup has a backup in another location and in a restorable state on media and devices still available.

One of my earliest gigs was attempting to restore Travan and QIC that had been stored in a cardboard box in a scullery - and had decided to grow pet moulds in colours I never knew existed

 

[Rochester]

Many thanks - its confirmed many if my existing concerns, so I know I'm not being paranoid. Wasn't sure to trust on line reviews, so ta very much this has been comforting.

I know no drive is ever reliable , but just after something that I don't have to update software nor lug another power cable around. Just maybe I'll get one with a 5 yr warranty for archiving and burn some disks too as backups...just I have lots of analogue photography work that ages and digitisation is the only way to successfully store it indefinitely.

Many thanks.

 

[GuruNot]

[REDACTED] Helps if I read all the earlier posts to avoid duplication of Info!!

Edit: With regards to small external drives I have been using a 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim for a while now. I normally dont use Seagate drives, but this was silly cheap and has been reliable so far (18 Months +)

 

[cmdr milesred]

FWIW, in my case my Seagate 2tb and 4tb 3.5" drives are only ever powered when I add stuff to them, so they are likely to last much longer than normal.
Also I am a programmer and a photographer and for all the things that are vital that I do not ever want to lose, at least once a year I take the time to put everything like that onto DVD's, bluerays, flash drives as well as a couple of 4tb Seagate 5.25" drives that are also only ever powered when doing my backups.
I go overboard a lot simply because its all to common for backups to fail too.
And so you are aware, even though dvd's bluerays are supposed to last 20 years, it is very un true, 5 years if you are lucky before they start to degrade.

I do daily backups usually onto flash drives just in case. And because I have no faith in any media to last any rated time, I tend to replace all my computers drives every 1-2 years. which is a huge task as I have over 200tb live hd storage. I used to use tape drives...ugh..
Any flash drive can fail the moment you insert or remove it, but I have loads of patriot and sandisk usb 3.0 drives and do the same as with dvd's...I always put my stuff on 2 at a time...

It can still happen easily even though I go overboard, a static discharge can wipe an entire pc, a flash drive, destroy hd controller cards on the drives...
chances are pretty high though with the amount of dvd's and blurays that I make that I will very likely never lose everything.
when I make dvd's and bluerays, I tend to burn everything twice...why not, the media is dirt cheap...

I have several boxes filled with drives, dvd's, blurays...that have all been used for just this..the good thing in all this is that it all gets cheaper every year.

 

[Morbad]

Edit: With regards to small external drives I have been using a 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim for a while now. I normally dont use Seagate drives, but this was silly cheap and has been reliable so far (18 Months +)

I have several of these, was going to shuck them and stuff them all in a RAID for video recording, but then I switched from raw captures to NVENC and stopped needing multiple gigabyte per minute to record 4k video, so I left them in their enclosures.

Haven't had any trouble with any of them yet.

 

[Chong-su]

MAybe too late but for 50 pounds you can't choose so much. WD is the best choise ( for my personal experience in backup ) . Amazon choise