Looking for a good external hard drive (1 Viewer)

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

I’m looking for a stand-alone USB hard drive that I can use (with my laptop) as a back up for my files. I don’t need anything huge, 20-30 gig would be more than enough. I’d also like for it to be quiet. The Western Digital drive I used to have in my tower made a constant, annoying, high-pitched whine – don’t want to go back to that!

Any recommendations for something reasonably priced and (more importantly) reliable?

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[ThomasC]

I bought an internal Seagate hard drive more than two years ago and it's still completely silent. With hard drives, reliability is a crapshoot - I think no matter what the brand is, you never know when it's going to go out, but I've been lucky so far. I would recommend this hard drive, but it only has a 2MB cache:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148119

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

No specific recommendation but if you can live with a fairly small drive you might want to look at 2.5 inch laptop drives in an enclosure. Those drives are extremely quiet on the whole. In fact, you could even go for a 1.8 inch drive to really keep size down.

However, a 2.5 inch drive with FDB (fluid bearing) will be practically silent, and there are some nice looking little cases for those available. Some even draw their power directly from the USB port eliminating the need for a power brick.

 

[Carl Miller]

I have an external Seagate. It runs very quiet, but the backup software that came with it positively stinks.

 

[angelsmith]

I have an external Seagate. It runs very quiet......

 

[Parker Clack]

I agree with Kimmo about the 2.5 drives. They are very quiet and you can get about the size you are wanting and drive it off your USB.

Here are a few.

Parker

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Basically any of the USB enclosures should work just fine. Pick based on how nice it looks and what it costs. Then just add any 2.5 inch laptop drive, a Toshiba perhaps. You can get an 80-gigger for less than $70, the entire enclosure+drive combo well below $100. The link I added up there goes directly to the 2.5 inch enclosures at Newegg. Just as an example, this enclosure is both cheap and "clean" - and runs directly off the USB port if it is powered. At $9 a pop, we're not talking bank-busting cost either, and it is physically tiny.

 

[Francois Caron]

Our office is now using 2.5" notebook hard drives installed in unpowered aluminum enclosures as the primary backup device for our server.

The only potential hiccup is that unpowered hard drive enclosures typically use the power from two USB ports to operate the drive. A USB port only delivers 2.5 watts of power per USB port, but a notebook hard drive typically requires 5 watts of power to function properly. Drive enclosure manufacturers include a USB cable with two connections on one end so you can plug the unit into two USB ports on your computer and double-up on the power.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work as we've discovered on our server. Even when using two USB ports, the server's power system was just not reliable enough to perform a full backup without the system suffering from a power drop-off and losing contact with the drive. This problem was easily resolved with the addition of a powered USB hub. The backups now work flawlessly, and the hard drives are no more difficult to carry than our old backup tapes.

And yes, the drives are extremely quiet.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone – certainly give me some options.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt