This may send you to sleep, but I need a new hard drive for about £40 – £50.

Who makes the most reliable these days?

I think maybe an external one would be best but Im not sure. I guess id get about 500gb for the price. It'll be used for storing music, pics, vids etc.

What would you recommend?

I love Samsung and Seagate drives. You can get 1TB these days from Samsung around 50£ fairly fast and very quiet. Get the F2 or F3 variety can't remember what they call them these days.

I was thinking of a Seagate or Western Digital.

Are these sort of external drives any good?

Seagate freeagent

Have never had portable Samsung drives. They look cool but don't know much more about them. I'd trust them as long as they have a Seagate drive in there, normally though are a bit slow. Depends what you want them for?

Never trust any drive. Assume any of your drives will fail at any time and and plan accordingly. Even a 5 year warranty only means they'll give you a new, blank drive if it fails 🙁

So those smaller, usb powered drives will be slower than a proper external drive with its own power supply?

I will be using it day in – day out to listen to music off, wathc films off etc.

I'll keep a back up of my stuff on the drive I've currently got, but I cant fit anything else on it at the moment.

Well I am going by experience not warranty let alone that their external ones are not warrantied as long as their internal ones.

Yeap bigger powered drives will be faster. Though as long as you stay away from High Def movies you can play SD movies even off of the hard drive ok. Music wont be a problem. Do make sure though that the one you buy has a drive rotating at least at 5400rpm, 4200rpm drives are horribly slow.

Ta for the help, I reckon some sort of 500gb Seagate or WD will do, 7200rpm

drive rotating at least at 5400rpm, 4200rpm drives are horribly slow.

Normally i'd agree, but if it's USB 2, you can only get 35ish MB/S anyhow which a modern 4200 rpm drive should reach (mine does – and it draws less power/gets less hot)

If it's e-sata you're going for, disregard this! 🙂 7200 is the way forward

Hm cool 4200rpm drive reaching 35MB… Mine is 4200rpm and i am lucky to get 25MB

Mine is 4200rpm and i am lucky to get 25MB

which is more than enough for watching movies…

Yes but copying 100GB off of my HD to backup is a pain, heck copying files for work is a bit slow, and 25MB for HD content still not enough. It is awefully jerky. Put the movie on my internal SSD and things fly.

59 times the pain – if you dont care about portability a nice big 1TB external at 7200rpm for 50-60£ is perfect and very fast.

Hm cool 4200rpm drive reaching 35MB… Mine is 4200rpm and i am lucky to get 25MB

depends entirely on the density of the data, i.e. how much it stores, and how many platters that data is spread over.

Also I think 1080p BR is capped to 54mbit (about 7 megs) a second anyhow

I need to go to a site and transfer about 600G of data onto an external HD. They've said USB should be OK. Is it worth getting a faster speed or will the USB be limited beyond a certain drive speed?

There is a revolution coming. It's not far off now. It's called SSD and within a couple of years spinning platters will be things of the past in new equipment. Mark my words. 64 Gig are cheapish (100 quid) now, but this time 2012 you'll be looking at 500M for the same price I reckon. In a box that is both silent and (relatively) cool. And these things are ULTRA fast. Look how quick the SSD notebooks are to boot up.