External Hard Drives

[Kurtis]

Hello everyone, I was wondering what your opinions on the current best portable and non portable hard drives are?

I have a Western Digital My Book 3TB desktop external but right now and I like it, but I was wondering if there might be something better that's maybe faster or has more capacity in the same price range? I got it for around $145 tax included.

I don't yet have a portable external and I was looking at some reviews for the WD My Passport and the Seagate Backup Plus, and was also wondering if anyone has used either and what they are like? I saw a lot of bad reviews about them, but also a lot of good ones and some that pointed out why people were having issues so I'm a bit on the fence with the portables. One other thing I noticed was a lot of people said the higher capacity portables tend to fail more often. Is that caused by the amount of data going to and from it, while it being powered by the same cable the data is transferring from?

 

[moondoggy23]

I would go with the WD My Passport. I've had a 50GB WD My Passport for about 7yrs now and it still works well. My wife and I bought one for her grandmother a year or two ago that is 750GB because it's plug and play and transferring files to/from it is easy. She uses it to transfer photos and things of that nature from her PC to her HD and to other's PCs.

I also have a Seagate 1TB NAS with remote back-up for my own PC. I like it and it does well. My qualms with it wouldn't matter to this topic, since my gripes are related to accessing my storage device remotely. I would imagine the UI for this and for their portable HDs would be about the same. In that case, I would probably choose WD over Seagate just because WD is just barebones and simple.

Like I said, the highest capacity portable HD I've dealt with is the 750GB WD My Passport, and it isn't mine so I couldn't really tell you about it's longevity, except that we bought it at least 2 years ago and my wife's grandmother hasn't called to tell us it's stopped working, yet. I know it was working fine as of 6mos ago. My old 50GB WD is still ticking, and I'm using it now as additional storage for my 360.

 

[Kurtis]

I was leaning more towards the WD My Passport actually because I have the WD My Book 3TB and I've never had an issue with it. WD seems to build things that last long-ish which is a big plus for me.

I don't use the software for the drives ever, I just plug it in and copy/paste files to and from it. I like the auto backup software but I find it too annoying to configure the way I want and it's just not worth the hassle.

I'm still going to look around for reviews online but so far I find that a lot of people are bashing the newer Seagates so WD sounds like a good call.