1TB external hard drive question.
 

Hello one and all!

I have been thinking of getting a larger external hard drive as my 250gb lacie is down to it's last mb's....I was thinking about 'future-proofing' my storage needs and getting a 1TB hard drive and have more or less narrowed the choice down to Iomega and 2 of their offerings.

The customer reviews have been VERY polarised, either 'stay away' or "never had a problem, go for it!' Have any of you had any experiences with this size of drive ? Or perhaps very positive experiences with any other storage options ? I'd hate to lose my data if a problem should occur.

Any thoughts would be appreciated

Thanks


SHJ

Iomega always used to be very highly regarded, don't know about current opinion though.

I read a review a year or so ago that put Iomega in the "top bracket", with Maxtor firmly in the "avoid" list. So I bought a 500GB Iomega USB external. It didn't work well, which I put down to my PC's USB. I didn't think to look to see what Control Panel says it is.

Then I dropped it (not from a great height) and the top came off. The drive inside said Maxtor - even though the case said Iomega. It's now in my bottom drawer - I can't bring myself to throw it out yet.

I bought a new 500GB one from a well-known store: it's a "book" format one, with Western Digital on the box, and the drive identifies as Western Digital in Control Panel. It works flawlessly. The price wasn't bad, either.

not much you can do to future proof it, within a couple of years the standard will probably be 5-10Tb. Just make sure it does what you need out of the box. That is it should support media streaming etc.

Two decisions you need to make.

1. Do you want to make sure the data isn't lost? if so you want a box containing at least 3 x 500Gb disks and supporting RAID 5. In which case go for something like a Buffalo Terastation.

2. Do you want to be able to stream media to internet radios, music players etc without having to run a PC in the background? if so you want something like a QNAP TS-109.

I have one of each of the above (the Buffalo being the older model without media streaming).

You can, of course, get models which support both, but the price goes up.

Thanks for the replies gents!

I have been using Lacie HD's for the last 3 years and thus far have had zero problems with them. At the moment my various files are split between the internal HD and 3 other smaller external HD's and after thinking that a 250GB drive would take care of my needs for the next few years :hmm: it would appear to be woefully inadequate....

The dressing of one manufacturers' HD with the clothing of another is in my view cheating the customer, especially if the drive within is of a kind that suffers from a bad reputation and storage wasn't exactly cheap until the last year of so was it ?

My needs are fairly simple, no streaming planned for the moment, but you never know....:cool:
Basically photos, films, documents, text files etc with enough space to get them all in order and accessible. The amount of safety is a moot point, i'd be pretty upset if certain things were 'lost' due to disk failure, but would prefer if things weren't too complicated. I belong to the Mac tribe so that perhaps limits my choices. I have been thus far blessed with my computing purchases and have had no problems (touch virtual wood):)