What to buy?

[2009019]

Hey, I need to buy an external hard drive. I am willing to spend in excess of $400. I need this to be as reliable as possible.

Any advice on what to buy?

 

[attrofy]

What features are you looking for with this hard drive? will ii be portability, One Touch backups, Networked Attached Storage? Also, will the data be used frequently, or mostly just act as an archive repository? Presumably on a Windows XP system?

 

[paparazi]

The Lacie externals are particulary well built and come with active cooling, we have had a 160gig Firewire version running as dump storage on a Mac network, it must be 3 years now and it's never turned off.

http://www.lacie.com/

Martin

We like members to GIVE and not just TAKE.
Participate and help others.

 

[attrofy]

I have two Seagate 300GB SATA internal HDD wired in the Venus DS3 active cooling cases, connected via USB to Linksys NSL2u (slugs). These have been up 24-7 for over 7 1/2 months now with no hic-ups, doing daily backups. I had specific reason for using the slugs as I was doing "push" and "pull" backups on these devices - plus the added ability to have network storage anywhere there was a CAT5 connection was a bonus. But, it could be done away with, and the USB connected direct to a server or PC (especially if EXT 2/3 file formats will cause some issues). However, these are not used for portability, even though quite compact, they are made out of heavy ABS plastic, and whould not be my first choice for rough-and-tumble on-the-road abuse. Not that I don't think they could handle it, just something about plastic enclosures being dropped seems to be asking for chips, holes and cracks.