I need a bigger external HD. Looking for maybe 1 TB. The one I have is Seagate.
I'm curious if any of y'all own a "Buffalo" brand. These are the only ext. HDs offered by B&H in New York. ( I have bought several cameras from B&H; always good service.)
Any info out there on Buffalo?
Your preferences in desktop ext HD?
TIA
HB
I have a Western, plugged in and powered up for about 8 years. About $80 at WallyWorld. It's only 80 gig or so, which almost makes it a relic. Time to get another to back up my geneology and collection of "stuff".
Higgs Boson wrote in news:e7817d44-6d4d-4a40-a308- snipped-for-privacy@z27g2000prz.googlegroups.com:
I had a Buffalo Network attached storage unit once. It sucked, then it broke, and the free replacement did too. Customer service was a nice girl, but it seemed she was the whole outfit. I will never buy Buffalo again.
One person with one bad experience.
There are very many external HD's to be had as attachments to a computer. That limits their usefulness on a network. The NAS idea is much better, but the software is still a bit cumbersome. I do have a Western digital Worldbook or whatever the newer edition is called. Seems to work fine, with separate "areas" for different computers/people/purposes. I'm not using the full capabilities, but that would mean really reading the manual.
Rather than get an external drive, I recently subscribed to Carbonite. It's $55/yr with 2 months free first year which is cheaper than external drive and backup is automatic. Takes nearly a day the first time but transparent thereafter.
WD, Hitachi, Seagate, Samsung...and stay away from Maxtor (cheap Seagates). If you stick with WD I think you can be sure there is a WD drive "actually" in the box>
personally I bought a bare external HDD case (with no HDD inside) that way I can also use it for data recovery without voiding a warranty. Unfortunately "time marches on" and now IDE is dead, dead, dead so I am going to have to buy a similar SATA product soon.
nate
I have one drive case with a $30 WD SATA drive (NewEgg sale) in it. An
80Gb WD SATA pocket size ext. and a WD IDE ext. that I clone on a regular basis for backing-up the main PC.
I buy an enclosure and drive separately, may cost a bit more. My enclosure can take SATA or IDE drive, USB or Firewire interface, directly plugs into 120V AC. Select drive with higher rpm, bigger cache. My drive is not for the porability.
This is currently probably correct. The HD business goes through major changes every few years. I've had WDs that were beyond terrible and I remember when Maxtor was a good brand. Not anymore.
Long term brand loyalty gets you screwed.
An external case (with an internal drive) can be a good idea, not much money these days. If you don't need the case they have devices that can plug into almost any internal type drive and convert it to USB.
Jeff
Hi, Seagate owns WD. I always have good result with WD Caviar series. For serious application I still use SCSI drives on RAID. And DVD archiving is good and handy.
As I said, Seagate owns Maxtor.
I have thrown away a lit more dead WD Caviar drives than any other brand.
I have a 1.6g Fijitzu that lived in my car for almost 10 years (MP3 player) starting up at 130 degrees or more (Florida summer) and it is still going
Uh, no they don't. Still competitors, from everything I have been able to find online.
Seagate ate Maxtor, which was a shame.
I've had pretty good luck with WDs, both at home and at work. Seagate went through a crappy period, but seems okay recently. After being burned by a batch of IBM(Hitachi?) drives, I stay away from them.
I just don't get the warm and fuzzies about giving all of my data to someone else no matter how much they tell me it is secure.
Caviars a good source of rare earth magnets, other than that they are pretty useless. I have had a lot of bad ones. 3 to one with all other brands and I maintain a lot of computers.
The IBM/Hitachis are not called "Death Star" for nothing. IBM drives have really sucked for years. They have a few good models and a bunch of bad ones. The 5" drives were bullet proof but when they tried making 3" drives it was just one problem after another so they partnered with Hitachi and Hitachi caught the virus.
I bought one that handles SATA and PATA (IDE) on the same adapter - just use different cables.
Likewise, since the Fujitsu fiasco.
When I started in this business there were no fewer than 10 major manufacturers of hard drives, and quite a few smaller ones as well. And many would only work with their own brand of controller.
It is called "lowbuckitis"
Whatever you decide on, if you don't have one already get yourself a fireproof safe box or cabinet in which to put your HD after you do your back-ups. While backing-up in case your computer's HD crashes is one reason, another reason is to still have that data in the event of a catastrophic event such as a flood or fire.
That's also one of the reasons a few of my IT-professional family members use Carbonite for personal back-ups=97if the house goes blooey, at least they have their financial files, household inventory (w/ photos) and the like.
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