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General discussion

What brand and size of external hard drive to buy.

Dec 30, 2010 1:44PM PST

I am running a home made systen with Seagate 500 gig internal SATA hard drive, 4 gig memory DDR2, Windows Home Premiun 64 bit. I want to get an external hard drive to back up pictures, music and do a computer image back up. What size would you recommend? I was just thinking about a 500 gig drive since I do not have alot of pictures at this time
Would I need any back up software to use with it?
Was thinking about seagate but see they have problems via the discussion threads. Thanks for all of you suggestions.

Discussion is locked

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external drive
Dec 30, 2010 11:04PM PST

Try Hitachi brand. I just upgraded my laptop drive with a 500GB Hitachi. Chose the 7200rpm version. It made my 3-year-old Toshiba laptop run much faster and gave me room to grow for my digital photos. Hitachi makes a line of external drives, too. I have several older SimpleTech brand external drives that hsve been rock solid peformers. When I went to buy another, it turns out that Hitachi took over that brand. Read the reviews, as I did, and it seems that Hitachi gets pretty good marks.

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Any brand will really do the job.
Jan 16, 2011 11:37AM PST

There are many brands of external hard drives and they all work pretty good. In fact, many external hard drives do not even tell you the actual brand of hard drive inside the enclosure.

If I were you I think I would go for a 1Gb hard drive, They are not very much more expensive and you will likely never have to worry about filling it up.

Something else to consider however is what interface you would like to use. USB 2.0 is pretty darned slow now and there are other faster alternatives available. Check your main board manual and see if you have either eSATA or USB 3.0 connectors on your board. If you do I would recommend you get on of them instead of USB 2.0 as they will run an external hard drive as fast as it's capable of going whereas if you use USB 2.0 you will be restricted to the speed of the port (about 35MB/s).

If you pickup a 7200 RPM hard drive you should be able to get about 100MB/s from either USB 3.0 or eSATA. If you get a 5400 RMP drive you will get rates around the 85 MB/s (Mega Bytes per second). As you can see, eSATA and USB 3.0 are quite a bit faster than USB 2.0.

Note. If you insist in USB 2.0 or do not have eSATA or USB 3.0 ports then just get a 5400 RPM hard drive as it will only run at the speed of USB 2.0 anyway so there's no point in purchasing a more expensive 7200 RPM hard drive.

One more thing. If you do decide to purchase USB 3.0 or eSATA, make sure you get a 3.5" 7200 RPM hard drive and NOT a 2.5" hard drive as the 2.5" drives are much slower.

If you have any further questions please ask. There are still other options if you are interested in hearing about them.