Most reliable external hard drive

I can't for sure say it's not just all hype, but I know a decent amount of people swear by glyph and G-drive hard drives. I do know that glyph uses a special version of the seagate barracuda (seagate barracuda IV). However this might not be any different than a normal barracuda. it could be that glyph wants some extra characters at the end to make us think it's "better" than what is available. if anyone knows if the glyph drives are anything special I'd be very interested to know. they sure do cost a lot!

also i think there is some merit in saying that keeping your hard drive cool extends its life, so If stability was of the utmost importance I'd get one with an aluminum chassis and a fan.

manufacture links:
www.glyphtech.com
www.g-technology.com

Hi, since the year 2000 I bought a lot of brands of hard drive for my personal use. Most of them operated 12-14 hours per day everyday. I had some good brands and bad brands and things I swore I would never touch again with a 12 foot pole.

To consider:

- ANY and ALL hard drives are bound to fail
- Always keep a backup, even if it's a backup of your backup (once a month) (unless you don't care that much)
- Some brand WILL be less reliable than others....
- ... but within brands, even the most reliable ones, some models or lines will be lemons and will fail. Those are the ones that people will write reviews on and give ANY brand a bad reputation. Just go ahead in Google and type "(BRAND) problem" and I'm sure you'll find lots of scary things for all brands

My experience:

I've had Maxtor, Hitachi, IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, Quantum, LaCie, Iomega, Samsung, and a couple more which I don't remember. I mostly stuck with reputable brands. I had, most of the time between 2 and 4 hard drives running in a computer but with adequate number of fans.

So on *my experience*, the worst brands I would never buy again are Maxtor & Western Digital. I had 5+ of each of different models and years and quality and they all failed miserably. I hate those drives. I still have nightmares of these "clicks of death". Although I'm sure that many people will argue "that they have 100 and never had a problem with them" I steer aways from these...

Right now, I have 6 Seagate drives of Enterprise level (sidenote: if you worry about quality, no matter the brand, ALWAYS buy the ENTERPRISE or PRO version of the drives, NOT the consumer, cheaper $ ones. For a 10-15% more cash, you get a BIG increase in reliability and functions). Those Seagates have been flawless for 3 years, no problems of any sorts, just perfect. I also still have one external LaCie 750 gb hard drive. Although it's my first drive from that company, I've heard a lot of good things from them, and of yet did not have any problem. One of the reasons I bought Seagate drives is that they are one of the only brand with a 5 years waranty. This TELLS A LOT.

So there you go. Just to make sure, let's answer your question; buy :

- any brands, as long as you DO NOT buy the CHEAP CONSUMER MODELS: AIM for enterprise grade, for a little 15% premium, it's MORE than worth it
- buy the mainstream, popular model, they usually have less defects
- stay clear of one brand: Maxtor. All others are "OK"
- keep proper case ventilation to keep drives cool.
- keep backups. Even the best drives WILL fail

Hope this helps!

I have now lost 2 WD external hard drives. Each one holding hundreds of photo's. While some were wildlife (not a big loss) most were family photos and sports photos of my kids. I will never have those times again to be able to replace those shots. I too do not use them heavily. I have never over written files, and compared to the size of the hard drives I was not even close to using even half of the space. I read try shorter USB cables, try downloadable software, none of them worked. I tried multiple pc's. This latest drive will "install" but then is not listed to access the drive. Tried drive manager and it doesn't show up. Am I stuck with having to burn pictures to God knows how many cd's to save my pictures?

For all of you out there I would Never buy WD, I had repaired over 30 of these stupid hard drives, The Most RELIABLE HDD are: (1) Seagate (2) Hitachi (3) Toshiba Now the Toshiba drives are OK I still work on them every now and then. Mac, uses them a good bit, you buy a MAC you get what you pay far, a cheap intel board and graphics go along with them too. Now Back to the Seagate, I had one in my desktop since 2004, it STILL WORKS and I put it through TONS of abuse! The computer used to aggravate the Sh** out of me, so i kicked it and everything, and through it outside! Still to this day that dang 160 GB 7.2k Rpm drive Still works, it amazes me. Now compare that to a External WD drive that fell once and the Needle broke, four months later after I fixed that SAME drive, the person bought it back to me and the Logic board had overheated. (The Lovely CLICKS OF DEATH!!!!). So what ever you do NEVER NEVER NEVER buy a WD one day you will regret it when you loose over 1TB of documents, and files, like my client lost and had to pay just to get them recovered! Yes he Did get his stuff back after spend 90 dollars on the logic board and 49.00 in Labor and File transferring.