Portable Hard Drive

[Cudzoziemiec]

I have been recently looking for a new portable hard drive to backup my files on and transfer them to another computer. Since going on Amazon there a few options available, but with misleading or not very useful reviews. Does anyone know if Toshiba, Seagate or WD drives are good? Spefically their 2Tb drives from around £55 and does anyone knows the difference between WDs Elements drive and their My Passport drives. I've also found some other drives from less known makes, I think from Patel and Brytech if that rings any bells. These look good as people are clearly buying them but have no reviews, so I am hesitant to get them without further information.

[Cudzoziemiec]

That was Jnr, by the way.

[Gattopardo]

Spinning discs or SSD?

[Cudzoziemiec]

HDD.

[hubner]

I have been recently looking for a new portable hard drive to backup my files on and transfer them to another computer. Since going on Amazon there a few options available, but with misleading or not very useful reviews. Does anyone know if Toshiba, Seagate or WD drives are good? Spefically their 2Tb drives from around £55 and does anyone knows the difference between WDs Elements drive and their My Passport drives. I've also found some other drives from less known makes, I think from Patel and Brytech if that rings any bells. These look good as people are clearly buying them but have no reviews, so I am hesitant to get them without further information.

I think Toshiba, Seagate and WD are the only manufacturers left, I don't know where the "unbranded" drives originate. Some brands put disks from Toshiba, Seagate or WD inside their own enclosures.

WDs Elements is the cheaper range, My Passport is more expensive. I'm not sure what's the actual difference, I would hope the My Passport is more reliable as I got 2 4TB drives recently!

[nikki]

I'm using a 2TB My Passport for PhD back-ups. I'm on mac, so think I had to do some reformatting. It's now password protected and partitioned to use with TimeMachine and also manually copying files across.

It's super small and quiet compared to external hard drives I've had in the past. Nothing negative to say about it at thisstagepleasedon'tletthatjinxit.

[Kim]

I've got a brick of a 2TB Seagate thing on the shelf beside me, formerly of backups duties, awaiting secure destruction of the hard drive platters next time I have a WEEE sort-out.

It turns out that they don't like being dropped.  But that's hardly surprising for spinning-rust disks, and I wouldn't hold it against them as a manufacturer.  I've got a sever full of Seagate drives behind me, and their reliability has always been ...adequate^[1].

(It also turns out that if you remove the drive from the enclosure, it doesn't function as a normal desktop SATA drive.  Different firmware that only works with the USB-ification board, or something.)


_{[1] Disks fail, that's just what disks do, which is why you have more than one of them.  In recent memory, I've found that Seagate disks mostly out-live their warranty period.}

[Wowbagger]

I have a small 4TB disc sitting on top of my Mac Mini. I have partitioned it into 2 & 2, one of those being the dedicated Time Machine backup. My Mac Mini is sufficiently ancient that its internal HD is spinning rust. My dear wife has a state of the art one, with SSD, also a Mac Mini. She has a 2TB disc sitting on hers for her time machine. Both are WD Elements. I did have one of these fail once, but it was a while back and I can't recall how long it lasted.

[Jaded]

What connector for the disk? USB (2,3,C) Thunderbolt, etc.

[Wowbagger]

USB. The old-fashioned sort that you always have to have two goes at to push in.

Jan's Mac Mini has USB C (I think - with the higher power capacity). Mine dates from 2014 and doesn't.

[Jaded]

That'll be 2 or 3. 3 should have a blue insert inside the plug, but some manufacturers (I'm looking at you, Apple) didn't like prescriptive colours...

[Mr Larrington]

I've got a bunch of Seagate USB3 jobs of various sizes and they have behaved flawlessly to date, including numerous trips to Abroad, whence come the FOREIGNS, in æroplanes.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Thanks all. Looks like he's going for WD or Seagate. 

[Jaded]

Avoid the USB C  La Cie 4TB Porsche design drives. 40% failure rate here...

[Cudzoziemiec]

Avoid the USB C  La Cie 4TB Porsche design drives. 40% failure rate here...

"They're expensive anyway."

[Polar Bear]

Given that USB drives of large capacity can be had at reasonable costs is it worth considering USB sticks instead of HDD/SSD's in terms of portability and economics? 

I can understand external drives for network duties but simply wonder if a USB stick can do the required job in specific instances.

I note that our router/modem has a USB socket and I recall reading that it can be used for USB/ external drives to allow network access.

I am sure that there will be somebody along soon to tell me that USB sticks are far less reliable than HDD/SSD's so I will close with also considering buying an nvme drive and sticking it into a dedicated USB enclosure such as offered by Silverstone and many others.

[Jaded]

Considerations are speed, capacity, connection, price, reliability. I’ll add in design, as good design can bump up the price too.

If you want an esoteric connection, or fast, or high capacity, or industrial reliability, that costs.

[Bledlow]

I have a 2014 Toshiba 1 TB & an older Hitachi 500 GB & both still work flawlessly. Well, apart from the data transfer rate of the Hitachi - but that's because it's USB 2. It's that old.

I've had a few USB sticks fail, one partially & insidiously (partial corruption of some files, e.g. photographs with scrambled bits), & I'm wary of entrusting anything important to them for long.

[ian]

I had a 2TB Western Digital drive die a few months back (started giving odd errors when copying backups, now just fails to mount), despite having a good dozen of the spinning things in the house, that's the only one that's failed since the one in my old mid-2000s Macbook died many moons ago. Considering they're precision devices full of mechanical bits that surely want to go wrong, I'm always impressed they don't fail so often.

The Time Machine backup for this machine is the original 320 GB disk from my early-2009 Mac Mini.