Best External Hard Drive

Nemanja91

I'm now reluctant to get an external hard drive as i've just stupidly deleted my whole college folder:mad:, Would you please recommend me some good hard drives please, I would prefer if they were around the 100 euro mark, I've been looking at these 2 so far

Western Digital My Book 1TB

Western Digital My Passport essential 500GB

I've heard western digital are the best but going by the reviews of 3.5 stars on Amazon they seem only mediocre. Would most hard drives be able to run on Mac or would I have to get a Mac Edition please, Please recommend me some good hard drives to run on an iMac please

Thank You

ondarack

i'm in a similar position.... was looking at this in aldi and was wondering is it any good?? http://www.aldi.ie/ie/html/offers/special_buys3_12413.htm

RolandIRL

western digital are the best brand by far. if you're going to be bringing in the hard drive into college to get notes and stuff, go with a passport style one, as they've the power adaptor built into the usb lead. bigger hard drives require a seperate AC adaptor, as i'd say that there doesn't be any free sockets in the college comp suites. but if you're only using it for backup and not going to be moving it about much, go with the 1TB. also consider whether you could just go with a big usb stick.

you should see if you could use a file undelete program to recover the college folder. if it was stored on a usb stick, chances are that it's been overwritten, but if it's on your laptop/desktop and you haven't maxed out your hard drive space, you could recover the files. Recuva and Glary Utilities can be used to recover files.

ondarack, i'd say that those aldi hard drives are sold out by now. but you could always check.

Nemanja91

whiteman19 wrote: »

western digital are the best brand by far. if you're going to be bringing in the hard drive into college to get notes and stuff, go with a passport style one, as they've the power adaptor built into the usb lead. bigger hard drives require a seperate AC adaptor, as i'd say that there doesn't be any free sockets in the college comp suites. but if you're only using it for backup and not going to be moving it about much, go with the 1TB. also consider whether you could just go with a big usb stick.

you should see if you could use a file undelete program to recover the college folder. if it was stored on a usb stick, chances are that it's been overwritten, but if it's on your laptop/desktop and you haven't maxed out your hard drive space, you could recover the files. Recuva and Glary Utilities can be used to recover files.

ondarack, i'd say that those aldi hard drives are sold out by now. but you could always check.

Thanks very much, I think I will go with the 1TB as im running on a iMac and there is no apple computers in college so the compatibility is out of the question, There is 2 types ofwestern digital MyBook though there is the Mac Edition and the Normal one, Do i habe to get the Mac Edition one or would the normal one do

RolandIRL

Thanks very much, I think I will go with the 1TB as im running on a iMac and there is no apple computers in college so the compatibility is out of the question, There is 2 types ofwestern digital MyBook though there is the Mac Edition and the Normal one, Do i habe to get the Mac Edition one or would the normal one do

unfortunately, i'm not a mac person. never had any experience with them, so i can't say for sure. you should check what file system is on each of the hard drives (FAT32/NTFS/HFS plus or others). if its NTFS/FAT32 you should check if they're compatiable with macs (i'm not sure, ask in the mac forum) and whether HFS plus is compatiable with windows (for the college comps). try googling or wikipediaing it.
there may be other file systems used by macs. i only just googled it.

HFS+
NTFS
FAT32

Nemanja91

Thanks Very much, you have been really helpful.

Whatever you do Nemanja, I recommend buying it from somewhere reputable and holding on to the receipt. Hard drives tend to die and if you lose 500GB or 1TB of data in one go it can be quite painful.

A 1TB drive I had filled before died on me. Thankfully a program called GetDataBack recovered everything I had lost and with Argos' insurance it was a clean swap over for another drive.

RolandIRL

i saw argos in your post. :eek: i wouldn't trust anything out of argos! i got my 1TB WD Elements hard drive in PC World for ~€80 and it's working a dream.
i don't buy much electronics so i can't recommend any reputable seller but stay away from argos! (i know it seems like i have a grudge against argos, but I DO!!!)

as long as you don't move it about much (unless it's a passport style one), the life of a hard drive can be waaayyy longer.

bonzodog2

Hard disks can fail, and it seems with todays bigger drives, it can happen sooner than later sometimes. If you have content you have created yourself (Masters thesis in Word, your next album in FruityLoops,videos of friends/kids,etc,etc......i.e. stuff you can't download again)..........BACK...IT.....UP

petermijackson

You'll have to get two drives, one for a backup of your backup in case the 1st one fails. It happens!!!

Maybe I'm just a freak but don't wanna loose all my data :-)

Nemanja91

If I am to but locally I'd say PcWorld will be almost my only option, Does anyone know of any other store in Cork which would sell hard drives.

Capt'n Midnight

if you deleted the folder then there is a chance you can undelete it

photorec will pull files back, but you need another drive to copy files too

there are lots of file utils out there too.




forget the brand name on the box, you are interested in the drive,
all decent external 2.5" drives (withoug a power supply) these days have a g-shock protection to park the heads if the drive is dropped.
the bad news is that the drive will fall about 40cm before the head is safe and if it falls more than a metre on to a tiled or concrete surface it may excede the g limits anyway - moral treat an external drive like eggs.

padz

buffalo do a good 250/360gb external hardrives there fairly slinky:) also get a western digtal media player, super thing plays mkv & _ts dvd rips plus a lot of others:)

Noxin

WD are pretty much your safe way to go. By and far the better hard drive manufacturer.

I just got myself a 1.5tb WD elements from Komplett for about €105.
http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=500766

So far I love it. Not a sound from it whatsoever. Great transfer speeds. Using it as a link to my media player so already has a lot of music / films / tv shows transferred over without problems.

WD all the way imho.

ondarack

i'm a complete newbie so bear with me..... i need a hard drive to back up photos and music,i have bout 9gb of music alone. also if i want to download movies and save them onto my hard drive do i still need a media player to play them on my tv?? also my tv only has a scart connection so is that a problem? i hav an xbox and that has usb connection on the front so maybe i could use that.

RolandIRL

for the xbox thing, you won't be able to use the hard drive with it if the file system on it is NTFS. xbox only supports FAT32, dunno about the media player thing.
or you could just use a usb stick to plug into the xbox and play music off that. it's what i do.

ondarack

dont really wanna play music on my tv, just wondering bout movies, thanks anyway

Vim Fuego

ondarack wrote: »

dont really wanna play music on my tv, just wondering bout movies, thanks anyway

Yeah, just stick the videos on the HD, plug it into into xbox. If you go:

Dashboard > Video Library > Portable Device

You should be able to see and play your movies. It might prompt you to download an update, you will need this to play most formats.

If nothing is showing under portable device, this probably means that your HDD is in the wrong format but try it out and see anyway.

RolandIRL

the file system matters regardless of what you're using it for. if you want to plug in anything to an xbox, it has to be FAT32, but if you set up streaming from PC to xbox with windows media player 11, i think it should work (never tried it though). it's a shame if you have files over 4GB (max limit of FAT32) but if you don't, don't heed anything i say (except that you need FAT32 for xbox :P)

cavangirl

hi all
can anybody tell me how to put photos in my external hard drive?

ED E

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTg3MzI0NTg5

On the topic of backups and lost important data, Dropbox is a great service to checkout. You can store that project or thesis in the drop folder, and as you change it the cloud(online) version does too, along with any copies on other machines(eg. your desktop at home). I know I'll be using it a lot from September.

Note: The above link is a referral, it adds an additional 250MB to both my account and yours. The stock free account give you 2GB, and you can pay for more if so choose.

Blong!hahaha

Hey guys,

I'm looking for an external HDD to store .WAV files for music production. I was thinking about one powered by USB - are there any particular drawbacks to those 'passport' style drives? Reliability is my first priority... maybe someone could recommend a drive for my purpose?