Five year old Maxtor is bust despite buying a new power supply.

Are these all much of a muchness? Any recommendations please?

As always, thanks. 🙂

Pretty much. Some come with software to help manage backups, but if you don’t care about that, they’re all just disks. Pay attention to the connection options mac vs pc.

You could go for NAS if you want a more resilient option, but that’s more £££

Thanks for your reply jsm. It’s for a Dell PC so don’t need portable storage. Just expected it to last longer than 5 years!

I wouldn’t buy an ‘external’ drive, I’d buy a dock and an internal hard drive to go with it. The best you can afford.

Just expected it to last longer than 5 years!

Why? IT kit tends to be superseded extremely quickly, and would normally be outdate/too small in the time scale your talking about. So why would they be built for long term? It’s really quite sophisticated internally with no serviceable parts, I’d suggest your expectations are too high.
When ppl ask, I’d suggest offhand that I’d expect the life of an piece of IT equipment (if it doesn’t break initially) to be around 3 years if used daily. This is based on experience of work laptops. Yes stuff does last longer, ‘this’ pc is at least 5 years old but hasn’t been used daily and the drives are a lot younger.

I’m not trying to be argumentative, just realistic.
Can I ask, why you need an external drive, if not for storage?
IME more external drive die due to overheating (dust clogs vents/fans) and the drive eventually overheats and then dies.

CG id expect them to last longer than 5 years unfortunately the way things are going drives are getting bigger and faster but warranty periods are becoming shorter. but you can get drives with 5 year warranty.

check out the WD black series, they have 5 years warranty. no personnel experience so check out some reviews

zippy – not long replaced a 5 year old monitor hence moaning! I do understand what you are saying though. 🙂

dobo – hadn’t noticed a 5 year warranty, just assumed everything would be for a year. I ordered before I saw your post. 🙁

I have to say, I’m very pleased with my WD My Passport drive. Very small, no external power supply and quite cheap. I can back up my MAC and PC’s to it onto seperate partitions and it’s been faultless so far.

It depends what you want it for?

If you’re going to access files regularly then 7,200rpm and USB 3.0 for when your PC’s replaced.

If it’s more for keeping a back up every week or two then a slower drive and less cache.

If you don’t need it to be portable, then you’ll get more Gbs for your money buying internal. Don’t be afraid of fitting a drive inside your PC. A 3 minute job. If you need it to be portable then a dock / internal drive will be cheaper although often the docks aren’t as high a quality as if you bought a purpose built drive.

I’ve got 3 x docks with internal drives in them (functioning as external drives) only because I’ve used all 8 internal sata ports!

Get Western Digital / Seagate. They have warranties far longer than many people imagine. My WD had five years. Posted it off and got an upgraded, new model sent back within a week.

If you’re storing important data then remember, the bigger the drive, the more you’ll lose. Losing 500Gb sucks. Losing 3Tb makes you want to cry.

If your drive’s dying, unplug it, wait until you have a replacemernt and you should be able to save a lot of its data.

I have to say, I’m very pleased with my WD My Passport drive. Very small, no external power supply and quite cheap. I can back up my MAC and PC’s to it onto seperate partitions and it’s been faultless so far.

I was pleased with mine right up until it failed and then a few months later its replacement failed too, had a LaCie D2 go as well. I still buy LaCie and WD drives though as those failures are not a guide to reliability. I go on length of warranty and how easy it is to claim. I would never buy anything from Iomega though.
I generate about 50-150gb a month in images and video so buy drives quite often, never lost any data though as a back-up is not a back-up if its not on at least 3 drives and one of those is off-site.