I'm in the market for a USB external hard drive. My price range is around $50-$60 and I'm not looking to buy used. As I've never owned, or even used one of these before, I thought I'd see what experienced users thought. I know there are a lot of different opinions, but I was hoping there might be a consensus around one or two that everyone could agree is a good investment.
Just realized this should've probably gone in Hardware. Sorry about that. Moderator please move if you think it would get better exposure there. Thanks.
Please keep in mind my price range is $50-$60. I'm assuming that'll be about 500GB which is fine for my purposes. I should've entitled this thread "Looking for help finding the best external HD I can get for $50-$60."
I've purchased (at 2 different times) a MATSUNICHI 1tB Portable USB3 HDD (5-1/2" x 3-1/4" x 5/8", USB powered) and both have worked flawlessly for my uses. Both were purchased at $49. USD (On Sale) from TigerDirect.com... they seem to go on sale every so often. I've not ripped it open to see whose HDD they use but they use an Innostor USB3 interface chip in the package (that's how it announces itself to Windows). The WRITE/READ speeds are appx. 140mBs across the USB3 under W7 using the latest Intel USB3 driver for my mainboard.
My preference is to buy an enclosure I like, then add a hard drive. I have had very good luck with Seagate and when they were available- Hitachi and Samsung. My experience with Western Digital Black has been excellent and poor for the WD Blue and Green drives. Unless you are contemplating a SSD, heat will be an issue, so I believe an enclosure with a fan is a good idea. I own 3.5" desktop hard drives only and for my use, I cannot tell any difference in 7200 rpm vs. 5900rpm because my external drives are connected via USB-2. If you have the cash and inclination/need to someday run multiple external drives, consider an enclosure that can hold multiple drives. I own three Sans Digital TR4Us and love them. I can run up to four drives per unit and hot-swapping is allowed. The TR4U is discontinued but occasionally available at the Sans Digital website or websites such as Amazon and Ebay. Good luck in your search.
I agree to buy an enclosure and to add a hard drive my preference is a 2.5" USB powered drive I have two of them using the MiniPro 2.5" SATA to USB 3.0 External Aluminum Hard Drive enclosures one with a HGST Travelstar 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache drive and another with a WD BLACK SERIES WD7500BPKX 750GB 7200 RPM drive they run cool and have been very reliable. http://www.amazon.com/MiniPro-External-Aluminum-Drive-Enclosure/dp/B003VKTJGW http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236561 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145875
How big of an issue is heat really? Quite a few of the ones out there seem be completely enclosed and a lot of them have very positive reviews, no mention of overheating. I'll be using it to archive files and backups. No heavy long-term use. Do most external hard drives have the ability to power down when not in use? Is it controlled by Windows or does it just depend on the drive itself?
Here's a WD My Passport Ultra 1TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive that's within your budget... Don't know how long they'll be available at this price.
Thanks everyone. I bit the bullet and got a 1TB Seagate at our local Best Buy. Spent $75 for it but I think it should be a pretty good one. So far it working great. Very simple, like a USB flash drive. Just plug it in and start copying.
I wasn't sure if you meant USB stick or just an external drive you can plug into your PC via a USB port. Or how much size you wanted it to have. I have gonna say you could get a Kingston DataTraveler 4000 16 GB for about $60. It has very tight encryption. I have a 32 GB one and can run an entire OS + the TOR browser bundle on it. As for external HD's I swear by Western Digital... for internal drives as well actually. They've just proven to be so durable and dependable to my experience. I have a 500 GB WD Elements external drive. It's as simple as can be, plug and play with no drivers, setup, etc... and just works. It takes a lickin and keeps on tickin.
I've got 7 or 8 flash drives already but I'm always running out of space. I've been putting off investing in a portable hard drive but I finally decided to just do it. I don't think cooling is going to be a big issue, but after I used it a long time yesterday I noticed it was a little warm so here's what I did. A picture says it all. I already had the fan so I broke it out and put it to good use. I also found the Seagate Drive Settings app at their website. You can change the power down settings with it. By default it uses whatever setting you have in the Windows Power Settings. The drive came with Seagate Dashboard. You can change power settings with it, but it has a bunch of other crap I don't want and the installer alone is 140MB.
