Advice on external Hard Drive.

LeftRightLeft

LeftRightLeft

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I'm looking for a external Hard Drive, but I have no idea what is good. Right now there are two drives I am looking at, the WD My Passport and the Seagate Expansion Portable Hard Drive. Both are 2TB because that's all I can afford right now. Which is better between WD and Seagate?
 
Little Mac said:
I can tell you that I have both a Seagate (much older 3.5" external 2Tb - at least 4-5 years old) and very recently (in the last year) bought a 2.5" WD My Passport 4Tb. The WD was replaced under warranty in the first year and this replacement one is showing signs of redirected blocks already just out of warranty. One of the issues with the WD is the length of the cable it comes with - definitely replace that with a more flexible and longer cable otherwise it's going to get yanked / bumped if you are more portable like me and like working off your lap.

I can't tell you much about the Seagate expansion portable unfortunately other than to say I would pick that one if I were choosing because of my experience with the previous Seagate. Unfortunately my view may be biased because the Seagate I have sits still and is plugged into a Pi so I never have to cart it anywhere while the WD was moved around a lot and was dropped once (before it was replaced).
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Solid State Drive is best option if you can afford it.. I would go with Seagate
 
I have a 4TB Western Digital that has died, taking my music collection with it.

Not sure what to get, as a replacement.
 
Raptor_ZA said:
Solid State Drive is best option if you can afford it.. I would go with Seagate
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Unfortunately SSD's are stupidly expensive in South Africa. Over R3000 for only 1TB. No thanks. I don't care if that thing is a billion times the speed of light, that price is stupid for a measly 1TB of storage, and 1TB is nothing today with how big everything is now, especially video games.
 
LeftRightLeft said:
Unfortunately SSD's are stupidly expensive in South Africa. Over R3000 for only 1TB. No thanks. I don't care if that thing is a billion times the speed of light, that price is stupid for a measly 1TB of storage, and 1TB is nothing today with how big everything is now, especially video games.
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Yeah, that is bad, I just lost my flac music collection, over 40 years of collected music - which topped out at about 3.6 Terrabytes of data. So R12000.00 for SSD capacity to hold it. Ridiculous.

When I manage to buy another drive, I am going to have a crap load of CD's to rip, and Lord alone knows how many LP's to record.
 
elf_lord_ZC5 said:
Yeah, that is bad, I just lost my flac music collection, over 40 years of collected music - which topped out at about 3.6 Terrabytes of data. So R12000.00 for SSD capacity to hold it. Ridiculous.

When I manage to buy another drive, I am going to have a crap load of CD's to rip, and Lord alone knows how many LP's to record.
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Might be worth looking into getting it recovered, if you haven't already?
 
Toshiba is really good but the thing is, if it's going to be in your bag a lot that will reduce its life due to bangs etc.

If it's going to be on your desk its whole life then it will be fine, also disable USB suspend so it stays on the while time, constant stopping and starting will wear it out.
 
SouthBit said:
Might be worth looking into getting it recovered, if you haven't already?
Click to expand...

The Bloke I knew, who was very good at data recovery, has become a Covid statistic, unfortunately, and he would not charge me both arms and a leg, for the task.
 
Rickster said:
Toshiba is really good but the thing is, if it's going to be in your bag a lot that will reduce its life due to bangs etc.

If it's going to be on your desk its whole life then it will be fine, also disable USB suspend so it stays on the while time, constant stopping and starting will wear it out.
Click to expand...

It was only plugged into my Laptop, along with my audio interface, when playing music. I will look into the USB suspend function tho.
 
ponder said:
What do you mean by died?

Internal or external?
2.5" or 3.5"?
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4 Terra Byte 3.5" Western Digital Blue HDD in an external enclosure. Putting it in my computer changes nothing.

Full content of HDD, cannot be accessed, after much battling, formatted the drive.

Windows sees drive, but after copying around 500 gig, to drive it just stalls and nothing progress, accessing the content that has been written is slow, the writing to drive is also very slow.

Cannot copy anything else to HDD

Impression is that something on the controller board has gone eratic, or possibly the partion has gone.

.
 
elf_lord_ZC5 said:
4 Terra Byte 3.5" Western Digital Blue HDD in an external enclosure. Putting it in my computer changes nothing.

Full content of HDD, cannot be accessed, after much battling, formatted the drive.

Windows sees drive, but after copying around 500 gig, to drive it just stalls and nothing progress, accessing the content that has been written is slow, the writing to drive is also very slow.

Cannot copy anything else to HDD

Impression is that something on the controller board has gone eratic, or possibly the partion has gone.

.
Click to expand...

Ah ok, thought maybe it was totally dead as in does not power up at all which could have an easy 'fix'.
 
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