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External Hard Drives - Why pay MORE for them?

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WBirch

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Hi Folks,

I use external hard drives solely for backing up data.
I back up data 3 or 4 times over on seperate drives.
(Way too much data for DVDs or ha-ha CD's now... I remember 3.5" floppies
too...)

Does it matter using traditional well known brands versus newer and obsure
names for external USB hard drives? I bought a Comstar 500 gig drive today
from Fshop on sale for $139. It offers a LAN network option enabling it to
be used as a central h-drive amongst other comps. I'm using it just as a single
b-up USB drive. I was able to partition it very easily in XP without losing the
guts of it and needing to find a driver like my other 4 Western Digital
h-drives sometimes needed. 465 total gigs available on the Comstar drive.

It even has a real on/off switch out back that actually works!

I've transfered about 350 gigs of data to the new drive and not one "bit"

of data was lost after testing various transfered folders. It's fast and quiet too.

It reads real fast like my better Western D's too.

I'm used to paying more money for the WD's, but this is a pleasant surprise
in an external b-up hard drive for the money. As they say, if it's a dud -
it will fail at the beginning - this one has not. (I'll post later if
this drive does fail...)
~~~~~~~

What's your opinion regarding name brand vs. 'no-name' brand external drives?
Is it worth paying for a "Porsche" or a "My Book"???

Thanks!

WayneB.
==================================
 
You could use disk utility to find out (without dismantling the drive which will void the warrnaty) what's inside. It is one of the few brands out there (usb circuitrly is not that important as can be easilly replaced and bare drive hooked onto the other one). The question is is it A grade or C grade HD from the same manufacturer - you could not tell that anyway looking at the price point (on bare drive again). If over obsessed you could run some burn utility before putting any data on it (though you could still run it to make sure). Often "big" brands are just overpriced same thing wrapped under the name and this brand of yours is no better/worse than Dell.

cheers
--

 
ZorSy said:
You could use disk utility to find out (without dismantling the drive
which will void the warrnaty) what's inside. It is one of the few
brands out there (usb circuitrly is not that important as can be
easilly replaced and bare drive hooked onto the other one). The
question is is it A grade or C grade HD from the same manufacturer -
you could not tell that anyway looking at the price point (on bare
drive again). If over obsessed you could run some burn utility before
putting any data on it (though you could still run it to make sure).
Often "big" brands are just overpriced same thing wrapped under the
name and this brand of yours is no better/worse than Dell.

cheers
Click to expand...
Thanks, but I was actually happy with it, ZorSy.

Wayne.
 
DV GrandC said:
It is worth it to go with the name brand. I have had many friends who
bought the cheap ones and ended up losing all their information. You
get what you pay for so be careful.
Click to expand...
Got any actual quotes or data as to brands that are duds?

I won't lose all my data because as I said, I back the stuff up 3 or 4 times
over on many drives.... name brand and no-name brand now.

BTW, I've had fancy Name brand internal hard drives like the Seagate
Barracuda's go sour where I DID lose all my data.

Thanks.

=======================
 
DV GrandC said:
i don't have any quotes but my friend had three or four no name
brands and they crashed rather quick on him.
Click to expand...
When electronics like hard drives fail initially/early that usually means that they
are duds from the factory and defective, no?

When they don't, it usually means you can get a decent life out of it/them.
Been my experience.

Thanks.
====================
 
The fact is it is not economically viable for anyone just to set up a hard drive manufacturing facility with the idea of making them 'on the cheap'.

Consequently, there are relatively few manufacturers and what would normally happen is that another big company will ask one of these makers to produce a drive to a certain specification. This will then have their label. Obviously, the manufacturer will also sell their own brand but it may be to a different spec.

However, to add to the confusion, the manufacturers themselves will often share components as the processes involved can be prohibitively expensive for many to produce similar items.
This becomes even more muddled depending on the QC applied!

Most people believe a disk without errors is perfect. Far from it. When they are created every disk is mapped to ignore sectors that do not come up to required standards (you can often see a slightly different size reported from one disc to another, if you look behind the scenes).

A famous brand may apply a much higher standard at this point. Indeed, it may be an indication of the overall quality of the platters and mechanism, but not necessarily so. Consequently, when you buy a 'budget' brand it may be a disc that has shown poorer overall performance and more failed sectors, but it is not a measure of reliability over a long period. merely a potentially greater chance of it failing.
 
WBirch said:
Hi Folks,

I use external hard drives solely for backing up data.
I back up data 3 or 4 times over on seperate drives.
Click to expand...
SNIP
WBirch said:
What's your opinion regarding name brand vs. 'no-name' brand external
drives?
Is it worth paying for a "Porsche" or a "My Book"???
Click to expand...
My opinion:

You've gotten a couple of good replies already - there are very few drive makers out there; yours is going to be one of the big 5 - Fujitsu, Maxtor, Seagate, WD, and Hitachi. Hitachi Storage was IBM's division up until a few years ago. Reliability is generally better than 10 years ago, with some dogs and some like a tank, bad disks happen no matter what.

A lot of the difference is going to be in the quality, reliability and durability of the stuff besides the drive; the disk interface and controller and the design of the case itself. It's a complex and delicate piece of engineering that can be flaky even under the best of conditions.

We've owned about a dozen external drive devices of various types in the last 10 years, and many have failed; 2 NetDisks, a WD and 2 no-names are still fine. The failures were mostly due to the electronics in the case going out. The data on the drive was scrambled when the electronics went "poof" only once.

As for the "Cadillac" brands, we had a Porche external drive that some IT guy fooled my spouse into getting a couple years ago (it was 40% more than anything comparable); it would always fail a few GB into a backup because it would overheat - pretty ain't worth much if you haven't designed any airflow into it.

I've only ever had 2 HDD go completely bad on me - both were the IBM Deskstars that were a problem a few years ago, and they both failed inside a computer.

I've had enough of the problems with external drives; I'm going to buy or build a networked RAID 0+1 instead when I upgrade again.
 
Thanks for the information, Aardvark7.
Interesting.

Regards.

========================
aardvark7 said:
The fact is it is not economically viable for anyone just to set up a
hard drive manufacturing facility with the idea of making them 'on
the cheap'.
Consequently, there are relatively few manufacturers and what would
normally happen is that another big company will ask one of these
makers to produce a drive to a certain specification. This will then
have their label. Obviously, the manufacturer will also sell their
own brand but it may be to a different spec.
However, to add to the confusion, the manufacturers themselves will
often share components as the processes involved can be prohibitively
expensive for many to produce similar items.
This becomes even more muddled depending on the QC applied!
Most people believe a disk without errors is perfect. Far from it.
When they are created every disk is mapped to ignore sectors that do
not come up to required standards (you can often see a slightly
different size reported from one disc to another, if you look behind
the scenes).
A famous brand may apply a much higher standard at this point.
Indeed, it may be an indication of the overall quality of the
platters and mechanism, but not necessarily so. Consequently, when
you buy a 'budget' brand it may be a disc that has shown poorer
overall performance and more failed sectors, but it is not a measure
of reliability over a long period. merely a potentially greater
chance of it failing.
Click to expand...
 
Thanks ECM.
Aren't there problems with RAID's if one part goes sour leading to everything
being lost? Something I heard about. There are various types of RAIDs and
they can be tricky to use. I'll stick with the multiple externals for now. 5 for
5 and none gone sour yet. :-)

WayneB.
=====================
ecm said:
WBirch said:
Hi Folks,

I use external hard drives solely for backing up data.
I back up data 3 or 4 times over on seperate drives.
Click to expand...
SNIP
ecm said:
What's your opinion regarding name brand vs. 'no-name' brand external
drives?
Is it worth paying for a "Porsche" or a "My Book"???
Click to expand...
My opinion:

You've gotten a couple of good replies already - there are very few
drive makers out there; yours is going to be one of the big 5 -
Fujitsu, Maxtor, Seagate, WD, and Hitachi. Hitachi Storage was IBM's
division up until a few years ago. Reliability is generally better
than 10 years ago, with some dogs and some like a tank, bad disks
happen no matter what.

A lot of the difference is going to be in the quality, reliability
and durability of the stuff besides the drive; the disk interface and
controller and the design of the case itself. It's a complex and
delicate piece of engineering that can be flaky even under the best
of conditions.

We've owned about a dozen external drive devices of various types in
the last 10 years, and many have failed; 2 NetDisks, a WD and 2
no-names are still fine. The failures were mostly due to the
electronics in the case going out. The data on the drive was
scrambled when the electronics went "poof" only once.

As for the "Cadillac" brands, we had a Porche external drive that
some IT guy fooled my spouse into getting a couple years ago (it was
40% more than anything comparable); it would always fail a few GB
into a backup because it would overheat - pretty ain't worth much if
you haven't designed any airflow into it.

I've only ever had 2 HDD go completely bad on me - both were the IBM
Deskstars that were a problem a few years ago, and they both failed
inside a computer.

I've had enough of the problems with external drives; I'm going to
buy or build a networked RAID 0+1 instead when I upgrade again.
Click to expand...
 
I bought a Comstar 320gb network drive from Futureshop back in the fall and it has functioned flawlessly connected to my network 24/7 for 6 months. The hdd inside it is a Western Digital and shows up as a WD3200AAJB-0. I don't need another one but when I do I would certainly buy one of the Comstar enclocure/drives again. While it uses the NDAS software to access the Network connectivlity, I like it a lot better than the simpler looking NAS drive options. I had two "Name-brand" NAS devices that I shelved because they were constantly disconnecting on me. The NDAS software has been rock solid for me for more than 1 1/2 years with the MEdiagate enclosure I have that I keep connected to my TV allowing me play the 500gb of DVD's I stored in divx format, along with my family digital photo files from the last 4 years.
WBirch said:
Hi Folks,

I use external hard drives solely for backing up data.
I back up data 3 or 4 times over on seperate drives.
(Way too much data for DVDs or ha-ha CD's now... I remember 3.5"
floppies
too...)

Does it matter using traditional well known brands versus newer and
obsure
names for external USB hard drives? I bought a Comstar 500 gig drive
today
from Fshop on sale for $139. It offers a LAN network option enabling
it to
be used as a central h-drive amongst other comps. I'm using it just
as a single
b-up USB drive. I was able to partition it very easily in XP without
losing the
guts of it and needing to find a driver like my other 4 Western Digital
h-drives sometimes needed. 465 total gigs available on the Comstar
drive.

It even has a real on/off switch out back that actually works!

I've transfered about 350 gigs of data to the new drive and not one
"bit"
of data was lost after testing various transfered folders. It's fast
and quiet too.

It reads real fast like my better Western D's too.

I'm used to paying more money for the WD's, but this is a pleasant
surprise
in an external b-up hard drive for the money. As they say, if it's a
dud -
it will fail at the beginning - this one has not. (I'll post later if
this drive does fail...)
~~~~~~~

What's your opinion regarding name brand vs. 'no-name' brand external
drives?
Is it worth paying for a "Porsche" or a "My Book"???

Thanks!

WayneB.
==================================
Click to expand...
--
http://www.jamesthompsonconsultingengineer.com
 
WBirch said:
Thanks ECM.
Aren't there problems with RAID's if one part goes sour leading to
everything
being lost? Something I heard about. There are various types of RAIDs
and
they can be tricky to use. I'll stick with the multiple externals for
now. 5 for
5 and none gone sour yet. :-)

WayneB.
Click to expand...
Only RAID 0 results in a total loss of data in the event of a hardware failure of a single drive in the RAID. That's because the single copy of the data is distributed across multiple drives without any redundancy or parity. This configuration should only be used when data transfer speed is imperative for application performance, like video encoding, rendering, and gameplay. Anything other than that and yes, you're playing with fire.

Pretty much every other RAID configuration incorporates some method of fault tolerance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

striderx
 
--If your using SATA interfaces it's easy to install a Kingwin HDD Mobile Rack in an open bay.

Use any 3.5" HD you please, they trays are cheap, and the SATA ones are hot swappable.

I have a SATA and IDE one on all my machines. It also benefits by running the data as fast as the SATA/IDE post is capable of.

-tyrants and cowards hide behind censorship-
 
Here is my take, external drives are great, I prefer to buy enclosures and add larger internal Sata drives . I recover crashed drives all the time and this is what I recommend because in the event of a crash it is the easiest way to recover the data. Always having at least 2 redundant sources of storage is a great idea. too many people don't do any type of back up and end up losing a lot of valuable data. Enclosures run as little as 20$ then you just add a drive, typically you pay less for this model.
 
striderx said:
WBirch said:
Thanks ECM.
Aren't there problems with RAID's if one part goes sour leading to
everything
being lost? Something I heard about. There are various types of RAIDs
and
they can be tricky to use. I'll stick with the multiple externals for
now. 5 for
5 and none gone sour yet. :-)

WayneB.
Click to expand...
Only RAID 0 results in a total loss of data in the event of a
hardware failure of a single drive in the RAID. That's because the
single copy of the data is distributed across multiple drives without
any redundancy or parity. This configuration should only be used
when data transfer speed is imperative for application performance,
like video encoding, rendering, and gameplay. Anything other than
that and yes, you're playing with fire.

Pretty much every other RAID configuration incorporates some method
of fault tolerance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

striderx
Click to expand...
 
My new 500GB ComStar drive is still working great and have not lost
a single "bit/byte" when backing up so far. Repeatedly saving about 350 gigs
here and there that get over-written. I back up manually.

WayneB.

====================
WBirch said:
Hi Folks,

I use external hard drives solely for backing up data.
I back up data 3 or 4 times over on seperate drives.
(Way too much data for DVDs or ha-ha CD's now... I remember 3.5"
floppies
too...)

Does it matter using traditional well known brands versus newer and
obsure
names for external USB hard drives? I bought a Comstar 500 gig drive
today
from Fshop on sale for $139. It offers a LAN network option enabling
it to
be used as a central h-drive amongst other comps. I'm using it just
as a single
b-up USB drive. I was able to partition it very easily in XP without
losing the
guts of it and needing to find a driver like my other 4 Western Digital
h-drives sometimes needed. 465 total gigs available on the Comstar
drive.

It even has a real on/off switch out back that actually works!

I've transfered about 350 gigs of data to the new drive and not one
"bit"
of data was lost after testing various transfered folders. It's fast
and quiet too.

It reads real fast like my better Western D's too.

I'm used to paying more money for the WD's, but this is a pleasant
surprise
in an external b-up hard drive for the money. As they say, if it's a
dud -
it will fail at the beginning - this one has not. (I'll post later if
this drive does fail...)
~~~~~~~

What's your opinion regarding name brand vs. 'no-name' brand external
drives?
Is it worth paying for a "Porsche" or a "My Book"???

Thanks!

WayneB.
==================================
Click to expand...
 
Buy hard drive enclosures, then choose your own hard drives.
I have a Vantec Nexstar 3 and a WD5000AAKS(500GB). Total is CAD160 at ncix.
It's fast(22MB/s) for a USB2.0 interface device. It has a eSata port too.

----------------
Insufficient data.
 
aardvark7 said:
The fact is it is not economically viable for anyone just to set up a
hard drive manufacturing facility with the idea of making them 'on
the cheap'.
Consequently, there are relatively few manufacturers and what would
normally happen is that another big company will ask one of these
makers to produce a drive to a certain specification. This will then
have their label. Obviously, the manufacturer will also sell their
own brand but it may be to a different spec.
However, to add to the confusion, the manufacturers themselves will
often share components as the processes involved can be prohibitively
expensive for many to produce similar items.
This becomes even more muddled depending on the QC applied!
Most people believe a disk without errors is perfect. Far from it.
When they are created every disk is mapped to ignore sectors that do
not come up to required standards (you can often see a slightly
different size reported from one disc to another, if you look behind
the scenes).
A famous brand may apply a much higher standard at this point.
Indeed, it may be an indication of the overall quality of the
platters and mechanism, but not necessarily so. Consequently, when
you buy a 'budget' brand it may be a disc that has shown poorer
overall performance and more failed sectors, but it is not a measure
of reliability over a long period. merely a potentially greater
chance of it failing.
Click to expand...
You saved me a lot of typing. thanks.
 
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