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External Hard Drives - Why pay MORE for them?

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I am glad to hear your no name drive is working fine. But, I don't see a reason to take a chance when name brand drives are so cheap.
Bestbuy.com-
Seagate Free agent Pro (USB 2 and eSATA) 500 G $139.99
Seagate Free Agent (USB 2 only) 500 G 129.99
Costco.com-
Western Digital My Book USB 2 500 G $129.99 less $20 instant coupon=109.99
Seagate Free Agent Pro (eSATA, USB 2 and Firewire) 500 G. $149.99

There are new sales on external drives every weekend in the sale flyers from Bestbuy, Circuit City, Staples, etc.. So, why pay about the same price for a no name brand.
Good luck,

Mike G.
 
Mike G. said:
I am glad to hear your no name drive is working fine. But, I don't
see a reason to take a chance when name brand drives are so cheap.
Bestbuy.com-
Seagate Free agent Pro (USB 2 and eSATA) 500 G $139.99
Seagate Free Agent (USB 2 only) 500 G 129.99
Costco.com-
Western Digital My Book USB 2 500 G $129.99 less $20 instant
coupon=109.99
Click to expand...
Mike, I have noticed on the WD site that there are different models of the My Book drives. Is the model featured at the "Big Box" stores one of the the economy models or possibly the better rated Studio Model with longer Warranty.
Mike G.75791 said:
Seagate Free Agent Pro (eSATA, USB 2 and Firewire) 500 G. $149.99

There are new sales on external drives every weekend in the sale
flyers from Bestbuy, Circuit City, Staples, etc.. So, why pay about
the same price for a no name brand.
Good luck,

Mike G.
Click to expand...
--
Vernon...
 
Thanks Mike G.,

I wonder if my Comstar was made by WD, Seagate or another major
manufacturer??? Seagate can totally suck as I can testify to as I lost
my main new C drive on custom built comp... and all the data.

I'm happy as hell so far with my 500gb drive still ...and the other
brand externals too including mainly WD.

Wayne.
========================
Mike G. said:
I am glad to hear your no name drive is working fine. But, I don't
see a reason to take a chance when name brand drives are so cheap.
Bestbuy.com-
Seagate Free agent Pro (USB 2 and eSATA) 500 G $139.99
Seagate Free Agent (USB 2 only) 500 G 129.99
Costco.com-
Western Digital My Book USB 2 500 G $129.99 less $20 instant
coupon=109.99
Seagate Free Agent Pro (eSATA, USB 2 and Firewire) 500 G. $149.99

There are new sales on external drives every weekend in the sale
flyers from Bestbuy, Circuit City, Staples, etc.. So, why pay about
the same price for a no name brand.
Good luck,

Mike G.
Click to expand...
 
WBirch said:
Does it matter using traditional well known brands versus newer and obsure
Click to expand...
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.

Well, I just looked at a Western Digital 500gig My Book at Circuit City for $139, so I don't know that you got that much of a deal over a "name brand."

But one thing that impressed me about the My Book was that there was half an inch of clear air-flow space around all sides of the drive--and lots of ventilation holes. Poor heat transmission has been the major killer of external hard drives. The My Book design protects the drive even from people who actually jam it into a bookcase with actual books.

And there is where the difference may lie between a WD drive in a cheap enclosure and one in a well-designed enclosure. It's like bicycle helmets. They all have to meet the basic safety requirements, but the high-end helmets are designed to meet the safety requirements AND keep your head cooler

--
RDKirk
'TANSTAAFL: The only unbreakable rule in photography.'
 
... my new drive has worked great so far. (As I write, I'm transferring 118 GB's
of data to it.) It's a great drive and not had a single problem. I use a couple
'My Books' too and they are the same... only more expensive if you can find
them here in the Toronto area anymore??? Western Digital keeps changing
the style of their external HD's too often - I've got 3 altogether different
versions of WD external back-up drives.... which is annoying.

You note that heat is an enemy of HD's and I agree. I don't keep my external
drives plugged in and operational at any time other than when I'm doing a
backup - they sit idle and off 99.9% of the time.

WB.
================
RDKirk said:
RDKirk said:
Does it matter using traditional well known brands versus newer and obsure
Click to expand...
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.

Well, I just looked at a Western Digital 500gig My Book at Circuit
City for $139, so I don't know that you got that much of a deal over
a "name brand."

But one thing that impressed me about the My Book was that there was
half an inch of clear air-flow space around all sides of the
drive--and lots of ventilation holes. Poor heat transmission has
been the major killer of external hard drives. The My Book design
protects the drive even from people who actually jam it into a
bookcase with actual books.

And there is where the difference may lie between a WD drive in a
cheap enclosure and one in a well-designed enclosure. It's like
bicycle helmets. They all have to meet the basic safety
requirements, but the high-end helmets are designed to meet the
safety requirements AND keep your head cooler

--
RDKirk
'TANSTAAFL: The only unbreakable rule in photography.'
Click to expand...
 
Yeah, I just bought the WD 500GB MyBook essential for $142 including tax and shipping. No on/off switch, but it turns itself on and off with the PC.

(I have an Iomega 160GB from a few years ago that was designed/claimed to turn on and off automatically, but it didn't. I had to unplug the USB cable to get it to turn off even using the power button. The MyBook auto power thankfully works.)

Al
 
WBirch said:
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.
Click to expand...
Google did a study of hard drive failures not too long ago. They have an enormous quantity of drives, so they've got a great sample pool. Google something like "Google study of hard Disks" - there are many sites which reference the research and the actual Google document itself is i think at research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf.

--

Joel
http://www.joelsphotoblog.com

 
WBirch said:
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.
====================
Click to expand...
--There are bad models, and occasional failures to spite rigid standards on well made units. Shipping mishaps accounts for few perhaps.

Operator abuse and misuse are the two biggest factors. Poor ventilation, poor power regulation, excess vibration, and worst of all being subjected to impact while spinning. It only takes one kick or little 1 inch drop to do it. Failure isn't immediate many times.

They are also sensitive to ESD, and very few following even the furtherest thing to safe ESD safe handling procedures. It's amazing they are as reliable as they are.

Of coarse all have a limited lifespan and will fail eventually, but with proper treatment a good drive will see many years of service and be retired rather then fail.

-Fortune favors the bold-
 
to make the drive in your enclosure. So, why don't you just find out from the manufacturer of your purchase (enclosure & drive) who made the drive? You can also check in your hardware device manager in Windows or the similar profile in Mac OS to find out the make - sometimes this works and sometimes not.

What I've read and heard over the years is that much of the cost difference between the name brand drives and the "no name" drives is the warranty period. An Hitachi (just grabbing a name here) usually has a three year warranty, but the same Hitachi put into a "no name" enclosure and sold as "Jimbo's El Cheapo External Drive" may only have a one year warranty.

I've had a Fantom external drive for a couple of years now and it's on all of the time (as are a couple of Maxtors and several notebook-sized Hitachis) and have given up trying to find the original manufacturer of the drive, but it works as well as the others and was picked up online at a very, very good price, as were the Maxtors. I have no idea who Fantom is, but they sell a lot of drives and the better stores wouldn't carry them if they had problem-prone drives inside.
 
I'm pretty happy still with my 500GB drive. No problems transferring, saving
and even formatting it. Saved my butt once too after mistakingly deleting
a folder of pics.

WayneB.
=================
nycfonephreak said:
WBirch said:
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.
Click to expand...
Google did a study of hard drive failures not too long ago. They have
an enormous quantity of drives, so they've got a great sample pool.
Google something like "Google study of hard Disks" - there are many
sites which reference the research and the actual Google document
itself is i think at research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf.
--
Joel
Click to expand...
 
I have USB external hard drives all over my studio, the ones that are stand alone with their own power etc. It was getting rather clunky around with all these drives. MY book, Iomega, porshe, etc.

I finally got the solution. I purchased a external hard drive tower. It has 4 slots for bare SATA drive of my choice. I just slide in an internal Terebyte drive and I am ready to go. Its great because I can back up my complete photo archive on a bare drive then put it in my safe deposit box. then slide another one in. this is the way to go if you are doing a lot of photography and to manage you archive.
Rich

http://www.richfrye.com
http://www.richfryephotography.com
http://www.elegantcaliforniaweddings.com
 
Actually, the WD My Book series has some known problems. I bought a 500GB My Book Essential a while back and it worked fine for about a month. It failed after that time and I got to looking into the issue. Turns out they have a problem in the power supplies that fail and sometimes sends a surge through the drive's electronics.

I could get a new disk, but they wouldn't even attempt to recover the data. So I hacked it open and was luckily able to get my data off before the integrated electronics failed a short time later.

So name brand is no gurauntee. Do your research first.
Mike G. said:
I am glad to hear your no name drive is working fine. But, I don't
see a reason to take a chance when name brand drives are so cheap.
Bestbuy.com-
Seagate Free agent Pro (USB 2 and eSATA) 500 G $139.99
Seagate Free Agent (USB 2 only) 500 G 129.99
Costco.com-
Western Digital My Book USB 2 500 G $129.99 less $20 instant
coupon=109.99
Seagate Free Agent Pro (eSATA, USB 2 and Firewire) 500 G. $149.99
Click to expand...
--
Chefziggy
http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/lecream

 
Go with the cheap ones. If you were only making one or even two copies, then go for reliability. With your multiple backup strategy, cheaper drives make more sense.

That's the direction I'm headed right now anyway. But planning on sticking with SATA drives for future redeployment in a NAS or RAID system.
--
Chefziggy
http://www.pbase.com/chefziggy/lecream

 
ChefZiggy said:
Go with the cheap ones. If you were only making one or even two
copies, then go for reliability. With your multiple backup strategy,
cheaper drives make more sense.

That's the direction I'm headed right now anyway. But planning on
sticking with SATA drives for future redeployment in a NAS or RAID
system.
Click to expand...
Backing up all my important stuff in duplicate on multiple seperate drives saved
my butt a few times, despite a fancy expensive or cheaper costing drive.
Both types go sour and duping the data a few times over saves alot of
grief. :-)

Wayne.
 
I'm gonna look into this.
Having to connect lots of seperate USB drives for backing up is a PIA.
How's the cost compared to seperate USB drives?

Thanks.

==============
Rich Frye Photography said:
I have USB external hard drives all over my studio, the ones that are
stand alone with their own power etc. It was getting rather clunky
around with all these drives. MY book, Iomega, porshe, etc.

I finally got the solution. I purchased a external hard drive tower.
It has 4 slots for bare SATA drive of my choice. I just slide in an
internal Terebyte drive and I am ready to go. Its great because I can
back up my complete photo archive on a bare drive then put it in my
safe deposit box. then slide another one in. this is the way to go
if you are doing a lot of photography and to manage you archive.
Rich

http://www.richfrye.com
http://www.richfryephotography.com
http://www.elegantcaliforniaweddings.com
Click to expand...
 
Update:
After months of use, my 500GB Comstar 'bargain' external h-drive is still
working without any lost data down to the "last byte" when copying and
pasting files for back-up. Retrieval of saved data and files, the same thing...
No lost 'bytes' of data ever occured here with it.

I use the simpler USB 2.0 option versus the USB 2.0 LAN drive option this
external has with special cables etc. (on an XP Pro machine). Never tried the
LAN stuff so no opinion as to that. I've been backing up over
380GBs of important files. Still works like my name-brand external drives.

Why pay more for safe backing up of data, I still ask?

Wayne B.
 
It's been brought up a few times, but you are paying more if you simply go out and buy external hard drives all the time. Get an enclosure and start swapping out drives as needed. Then you can buy the actual hard drive you desire: Seagate, WD, Hitachi, and so on. Buying bare bones drives will always be cheaper than getting new externals as needed.

It has also been mentioned that your no-name brand doesn't mean anything. The only thing they make is the enclosure (and probably not that)- they merely assemble the parts, much like Dell. Now of course there can be firmware, bridge, and chipset issues with various. manufacturers.

And the reliability of one drive from one vendor is hardly proof on which to base your storage strategy. On top of that, a hard drive will fail. Period. It is just a matter of when. Hence why the Google study may be of interest.

And to come full circle, if you have a hot swap enclosure from a reputed vendor- less worries. Add internal bare bones drives of YOUR choosing- less worries. And overall, costs less.

Mike
 
same here-

my IBM Deskstar 60GB drives a few years ago are the only drives that have failed me.

I have WD. Seagate & Samsung all without a problem.

Now, I am not doing audio recording and my mind wanders in the quiet, so I cool the heck out of all systems I build. They sound like a plane getting ready for takeoff- but my data is worth it.

Also, I only use top-notch power supplies-typically on a system that I bought $2500 in parts to build, the power supply is $200-400 of the total.

An external drive scares me because of the heat- if i got one, i'd want it to be portable so it leaves the location of the rest of the data- and Id want it to be a drive used to being cramped into a tight space- liek a laptop drive.

Also, I run Spinrite on all my drives every 2 months, and use software to monitor the SMART status of SMART capable drives.
 
ArtZAngel said:
It's been brought up a few times, but you are paying more if you
simply go out and buy external hard drives all the time.
Click to expand...
Not really. I don't buy new externals 'all the time'.
ArtZAngel said:
Get an
enclosure and start swapping out drives as needed. Then you can buy
the actual hard drive you desire: Seagate, WD, Hitachi, and so on.
Buying bare bones drives will always be cheaper than getting new
externals as needed.
Click to expand...
Thats def a solution. I don't use it. I like having seperate externals.
ArtZAngel said:
It has also been mentioned that your no-name brand doesn't mean
anything. The only thing they make is the enclosure (and probably not
that)- they merely assemble the parts, much like Dell. Now of course
there can be firmware, bridge, and chipset issues with various.
manufacturers.
Click to expand...
Well, it works great and thats all that matters.... and for less $$$ than a
more expensive brand name that does the same thing.
ArtZAngel said:
And the reliability of one drive from one vendor is hardly proof on
which to base your storage strategy. On top of that, a hard drive
will fail. Period. It is just a matter of when. Hence why the Google
study may be of interest.
Click to expand...
Never had an external drive fail here because I only use them for backing
up. That said, of course any hard drive will fail eventually. How often they
are used and if left on all the time will wear them out faster. No?
ArtZAngel said:
And to come full circle, if you have a hot swap enclosure from a
reputed vendor- less worries. Add internal bare bones drives of YOUR
choosing- less worries. And overall, costs less.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your opinions, Mike.
I've got 3 seperate internal drives plus the externals.
If I were to start over, I'd consider a hot-swap enclosure.

Wayne.
 
Thanks for the comments. I have a custom built 'better' system myself.
My external drives never get hot nor is there any worry of them
over-heating. I use them only for backing up and never connected all
the time (too many thunderstorms here and just plain wear n' tear on them
when on all the time..).

I wonder how many folks regularly open their computers and do a cleaning
of all the gunk that occurs in there that causes over-heating???

What does "Spin-Rite" do for you every couple of months? (never used
it tho heard of it from the the 'Shields Up' guru)

Regards,
Wayne.
==================
stuart weber said:
same here-
my IBM Deskstar 60GB drives a few years ago are the only drives that
have failed me.

I have WD. Seagate & Samsung all without a problem.

Now, I am not doing audio recording and my mind wanders in the quiet,
so I cool the heck out of all systems I build. They sound like a
plane getting ready for takeoff- but my data is worth it.

Also, I only use top-notch power supplies-typically on a system that
I bought $2500 in parts to build, the power supply is $200-400 of the
total.

An external drive scares me because of the heat- if i got one, i'd
want it to be portable so it leaves the location of the rest of the
data- and Id want it to be a drive used to being cramped into a tight
space- liek a laptop drive.

Also, I run Spinrite on all my drives every 2 months, and use
software to monitor the SMART status of SMART capable drives.
Click to expand...
 
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