before i go on amazon and get bogged down in reviews, I need a new portable USB HD that I can plug into my PC and make a back up of my files and also store flac music files to play through a PI streamer.
1TB would do it easily, nothing fancy, around 40quid would be good. any recomend something cheap and cheerful please?
make sure its USB3 and a big name brand - check reviews to make sure is not a complete lemon.
long warranty does usually mean manufacturer stands behind drive.
Personally I would split replaceable music and irreplaceable files - files would get an extra backup to an online service.
make sure its USB3 and a big name brand
Pretty much what I was going to say.
If you ask five IT spods to recommend a hard drive manufacturer you'll get five different answers, and some of us have (too) long memories. Personally I'd favour either Western Digital or whatever IBM / Lenovo / Hitachi / HGST are called this week.
Someone will be along shortly to tell you to buy a NAS you don't need. Or an Apple Mac or something.
Oh yeah, and go for 2.5" over 3.5" form factor, unless things have changed since I last looked the latter will likely require an external PSU whereas the smaller drive will be powered from the USB bus.
Huh. Seems HGST is now Western Digital now. I knew they'd been bought out but hadn't realised they'd dropped the brand name. So there you go, WD then.
perfect info, thanks, didnt know about usb3 or the 2.5 part, much appreciated.
i'm going to have to start another thread though about cloud back up, i had never considered that.
I hate to be the voice of dissent but a portable magnetic drive as a backup? It's like having an 80's Austin Montego sat on the drive incase your Honda Civic ever has mechanical problems.
You can get 1TB SSD's for <£80 now, and a £3 USB-eSATA cable. Think of the £40 extra as both an insurance policy against the first time you knock it off the desk and it dies and it'll seem like a bargain when you're not looking at a loading bar with hundreds of hours remaining.
If you're going down that road then I'd be fitting the SSD as the system drive and relegating the redundant HDD to backup porpoises. If I had a hundred quid to spend on an SSD for a backup, I'd probably buy two HDDs instead.
Which is a point - you say PC, if it's a desktop and you've no need for portability you could just add it as a second drive internally. Granted as a backup goes it won't help you if the house burns down or you're burgled, but a USB drive won't help either unless you store it at your mate's house.
... and as for performance, you probably won't gain much if anything with an SSD unless the PC has a USB3 port. A modern HDD can max out a USB2 bus (or come pretty damn close).
Somewhat counter-intuitively though, if you do only have USB2 ports BTW it's probably still worth getting a USB3 drive. I've played with a lot of USB pendrives and consistently seen better throughput with USB3 drives over USB2 when plugged into a USB2 port.
If you ask five IT spods to recommend a hard drive manufacturer you’ll get five seven different answers
FTFY 🙂
Oh yeah, and go for 2.5″ over 3.5″ form factor, unless things have changed since I last looked the latter will likely require an external PSU whereas the smaller drive will be powered from the USB bus.
But a 3.5" drive is usually faster, and cheaper for the same capacity.
Depends on how 'portable' it needs to be, if it is just plugged into a PC the separate power supply won't make much difference. And can be useful to switch it off at the wall.
It's for back up, I would use 3.5" drives. Get at least 2 and rotate them every other day weekly or whatever schedule you alight on.
We've had one WD disk die on us in the last year.