Anybody have and recommendations for a good external hard drive? I want it for storing family pictures, videos, etc. Nothing real important. Ive seen a bunch of em from different manufacturers, Iomega, Fantom, ZyXEL, Western Digital, etc.

I recommend the WD my passport, I have one at home and at work. I think they are either 500GB or 1TB.

Synology

External harddrive or a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device?

For external harddrives (and harddrives in general) I stick with Seagate. I've had the best luck with them. Only a handful of bad sectors on all of the Seagates I've owned, installed, or touched. WD on the other hand, I've lost count of how many dead as a brick drives. I stay away from them. Samsung and Fujitsu I don't have much experience.

NAS device: Synology + some Seagate harddrives. Love the Synology devices. Great interface. Hackable to allow running full Linux processes and commands.

I've used Lacie and how good luck with them. Inexpensive and sturdy (Fran seems to drop hers on the floor all the time ;-). )


Sam

Seagate here as well.
Not had any problem........ yet.

Have had a couple of 1 terabyte Seagate drives fail recently. Read/write head failure. :bang:

Thanks for the suggestions.

Seagate hands down. They are R&D'd right in your back yard. Always back up on multiple drives and DVD's. You can NEVER have too much backup.

noticing that as well the TB and 1/2 TB barracuda drives packed in externals started failing, though not branded externals. Problem with Iomega and the non drive manufacturers is they put whatever is most cost effective in there so you don't know what's in the chassis. I tend to go with the WD or seagate for the simple fact it's their hardware inside. Not that it makes a difference in the long run, but at least you know what your dealing with. Anyone can slap a SATA controller onto a third party drive. Drive manufacturers tend to put the good stuff in as it's their name on the package.

I recommend Seagate. It's one of the best!

This external HDD by seagate (Shown in photo below) is a good solution.

https://www.productwiki.com/upload/images/seagate_expansion_external_drive.jpg

Mostly because they are cheaper/on par with the physical disks and are very easy to take apart.

Make sure you buy 2. A friend of mine "backed up" ALL of his digital pictures to his external hard drive to free up space on his computers. The external hard drive failed and he permanently lost 12 years of pictures of his kids growing up.

Remember if its not in more than one place it's not back up. It is simply moved.