help with external hdd's. are they reliable?

[hazza2805]

hi guys! ive come to the point in my life where i feel i need to give my pooter a fresh install lol. the deal is, i need some more storage anyways, due to having just over 60gb lol. i was going to buy a nice big internal hdd, but then it came to me that an external one would be handy, so i am swayed towards this now. so my plan was to buy a nice big (not too big lol) external hdd, put all my crap on it, and the clean install windows xp, vista, and kubuntu on my internal hdd, leaving the external for useless rubbish that i dont need but cant bare to delete :-). so after making the brilliant plan in my head i started searching for externals, it seems that you can pick up good one up for quite cheap these days, all was going well until i asked my step dad what his external was like. he STRONGLY advised me not to trust one as he did the same as me one day, putting all data on it and installing windows freshly, and lost all of his data on it. it just dissappeared! he safely removed it every time so we have no clue where the data went!
so my question is, has anyone ever had any problems with externals? has anyone got any better ideas? anyone got anything they can advise me on?


thanks hazza

[ỒĊBłůē]

I think it depends on where you get them from; I think the ones on eBay are a bit of a lottery (if that's where you are thinking of looking).

I've never used one myself, but know quite a few people who have with no problems. Then there's one of the guys at work who's had exactly the same problems your step Dad has.

Has he seen whether the data is still there using GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/)?

It's free to try and will tell you if there is data that can be recovered; you'd have to pay for the program before it will recover anything, though.

[MTJAPF]

I have and use two externals, and have had no issues with them. One has even been shipped a few times with data to others, and come back same as it left.

I think it is like any other data holding device, it is all in the name and how you maintain the device. Make sure you get a reputable brand from a retailer or e-tailer you can trust.

[kurabii]

i bought an IDE 160gb HDD and an enclosure.
i have to be honest i go Seagate when dealing with IDE and Western digital with my sata drives, but seagate is comming back with their new 750 /500 gb Sata 3.0 drives. i just might go all Seagate soon :).

my external hdd is a whore. i lend it out all the time to give data to friends cause who would wanna use bandwidth :).

2- 320gb Sata WD
2- 250gb Sata WD
2- 200gb SATA Maxtors

2- 160gb EIDE Seagates.

so much disc space, y do i have doubles? cause every time i get a hdd i think in pairs. i work on server with my dad cause he is the LAN admin for the Unified Courts and overseas all of NY. so im always thinking ahead of time on RAID configs.

19 years of age now. and my dad has had me working on tens of hundreds of half a million dollar servers from IBM, SUN, and WICKED WICKED amounts of Dell xeon servers (my first dell server i worked on was the dell 1650's 2U racks i had to do a top down rebuilt with clustering for a groupwise database server :). ( having novell, and some SuSE OS. servers since i was about 14) Hes been training me alllll the time haha.

depending on the size you want, and peref u want.
example state if u want EIDE or SATA.
and my answers would be how much hdd space do you want?
if u said 500-750 id say SATA SEAGATES,
if u said 250-400 id say WD SATA drives
and anything lower in EIDE id say seagates.

--- y do i say this? cause its my job and i replace hdd's like i get paid to do it. no seriously i do.
and the space does correlate with the brand id recommend. in my eyes.

if anyone disagrees its their pref but i see what i see.
and i hope this helps sir.
ESA

[Da_Rude_Baboon]

I use an ICY box enclosure for my external HDDs and i have never had a problem.

[jaguarking11]

carefull with the type of controller you use on the hdd. Do your reaserch on the chip (there are about 3 or 4 manufacturers of chips). Make shure you get the correct one as a bad chip can eventuialy currupt the date on your hdd or kill the hdd all together.

I have a feiw lacie tb bricks at work and I can tell you they are not very portable.