Which External hard drive?

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I’m looking for an external hard drive of at least 5TB.  I keep reading the reports, and everyone likes one or the other, and everyone hates one or the other.

Recommendations?

Chuck Billow

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Kaj4strom

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Have you started by reading the existing topics on the subject?

1) External Hard Drive Options
2) External Hard Drive

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SueW

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You know, something that might be important?

What purpose would the external drive be for?

Portable as in, be carried around, possibly even operated from a laptop on battery? Ruggedness requirements?
Stationary with performance?
Stationary with reliability?

Connectivity requirements – traditional USB, Thunderbolt, Ethernet, wireless, Firewire, …?

Rough budget category?

Heh. I was just checking about LaCie 2big… pricey, have to like the concept of mirrored external drive, Murphy will probably sooner or later strike with the management tools required to work with the mirroring. Though I do note that they at least do offer source code for the RAID manager tool.

A Qnap TR-002 at least is supposed to have physical switches to set it to RAID1 (mirror) mode …

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After reading existing commentary, I think Western Digital is the right pick.

 

Thanks all.

Chuck Billow

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At that size I would be considering a Network Attached Storage device.

cheers, Paul

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CWBillow wrote:

After reading existing commentary, I think Western Digital is the right pick

+1. I have a 8TB external WD Elements attached to a laptop which is on reading/writing 24/7 .

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Chuck:

One thing to watch out for: encryption built into the USB-to-SATA adapter (every external USB drive has a built-in USB-to-SATA adapter). If the USB-to-SATA adapter goes bad, and if you did not first disable the built-in encryption, you will no longer be able to access the data on the drive! I had a co-worker (i.e. an IT professional) who had a Western Digital external hard drive about eight years ago. This happened to him. He was unable to solve the problem, although he tried very hard for a while.

I have no idea if this is still a problem, but I would definitely disable any encryption which is built into an external USB hard drive before using the drive.

Some other thoughts:

* If you ever intend to plug your drive into a computer which is very old (i.e. the Windows XP era or older), keep in mind that the old computer might not be able to read a drive which is over 2TB. That may not be a concern, but I just thought I’d mention it.

* If your external drive does not have its own power supply (that is, if it draws power only from the USB line), get a name-brand powered USB hub with its own power supply, and plug your hard drive into the hub. Sometimes not enough power is provided through the USB port to adequately power your device; but if your hub has its own power supply, it should have no trouble powering your hard drive.

* Make sure your USB hub has at least some USB3 ports, so that you can run your drive at its maximum speed by connecting it as USB3. Name-brand is very important here, because USB3 is relatively new, and you want to make sure your hub and any cables work for USB3. I suggest Cables to Go for any extension cables – that’s what you’ll get if you buy them through Dell.com. I have had no-name USB3 cables which were no good for data – they were good only as charging cables.

Good luck!

Jim

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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satrow

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I wouldn’t expect the USB to SATA adapter to have encryption unless it was a special adapter. An external disk can have encryption but those tend to be pricey.

cheers, Paul

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WD (and probably others) do use special adapters for many of their ext. drives, some of those drives also include encryption (was auto-installed by default on some WD drives, as was compression = nightmarish if ‘something’ goes wrong), eg: https://support-en.wd.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16157

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One of my clients has had an external hard drive failure. The drive needs to be initialized. This particular drive was purchased at a store about a year ago. It is a WD Mybook. The case cannot be opened unless you are willing to destroy the case. I did just that.

Inside I found a Seagate drive manufactured in 2008. Using recovery software, I found over 200,000 files (none of the backups). The files that were recovered were the same files that you would find in a typical Windows installation.

Clearly, a older/used drive was installed at the factory.

I have always been suspicious of those pre-assembled external drives. Simply, because you have no way of knowing what is inside. This is a case that proved my concerns.

I strongly recommend you “build” your own. It is extremely simple. Buy a top-end external drive housing — available for as little as $30USD. Buy a top-end 3.5″ internal drive and assemble them. Cost is only slightly higher. Assembly is very simple.

CT

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SueW, satrow

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Hello
I too am looking for an external drive.
I think NAS is the way to go.
I currently have a 2-drive 4TB Synology ethernet unit, and would like to get another ethernet drive (either 4TB or 5TB).
My router/ethernet is full – can I daisy-chain another router from that router to give me the additional eithernet connection? Is there such a thing as an ethernet expansion?
Also, in researching external drives, I keep reading about “gaming drives”. I don’t know what those are. Is that category relevant for my needs?
Finally, I’ve been generally happy sith the Synology unit except that on power failures, I have to re-log into the drive from my laptops and desktop.
Any other thoughts would be appreciated.
thx
…..Art

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WSartl52 wrote:

can I daisy-chain another router from that router

Get an Ethernet switch ($15-20 for 4 ports) to add more ports.

Get another Synology if you are happy with your current one, or put bigger disks in the existing unit.

Ignore “gaming” drives.
Ordinary drives are fine for a low use NAS. Windows makes your disk work harder than a NAS and you never use NAS spec drives in your PC.
Buy NAS drives if you are using them hard – several machines reading and writing all day.

Don’t forget to backup your NAS. Controller failure can take out all the drives.

cheers, Paul

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