I just would like to know if anybody use portable external hard drives, are they reliable, dependable? I hear they can crash any time for no reason and when that happens you can lost all your data with no way to recover your files.....can portable hard drives stay on for long hours? I read somewhere that they over heat easily ....any input will be great, thanks!
I guess it depends on who you ask. I have a "portable" hard drive (WD My Book) that never goes anywhere. It's essentially an extra internal drive that just happens to be external. Hard drives are inherrently sensitive to shock and vibration, I think. Many of the "portable" units that are sold are just an old school internal drive tossed into an external enclosure with a USB (or Firewire) port. I think some are made with laptop drives. Maybe they are more reliable. I would think laptop drives would be likely to be designed from the ground up to me more resistant to shock. Anyway. My My Book is at least a year old and I haven't had a problem with it. But like I said. It never moves.
aha, maybe thats the trick for the portable external hard drive to not crash or just die after a few months like I had read somewhere else. ...I don't plan to move my portable hard drive neither, I just need extra space (hard drive) where to storage my files. ...buying an external hard drive is cheaper than buying a new laptop with bigger hard drive than the laptop I have right now.....I guess if I buy the portable I gonna put not so important files in it first and have it on 24/7 for the first week ..If after the first punch nothing happens, I guess it will be alright in the future :) ...but I still would like to hear more opinions if posible
The ones using laptop drives are better all round for portable use, and not just because they're simply smaller and lighter than 3.5" desktop drives. 2.5" laptop drives can be powered from the USB port. You don't have to carry around a power supply, just the standard USB cable. You can plug it straight into a laptop and read the drive while away from a power socket. They produce a fraction of the heat of desktop drives, you don't need a well ventilated enclosure, or a noisy fan to keep them from overheating. Since they're designed for mobile use they're generally less susceptible to shock, they're expected to be moved around while in use in a laptop. The disadvantages are that they're slower, more expensive, and store less data. The speed isn't really significant when you're using them over USB (that'll restrict speed anyway). If you're going to carry it around with you then I think the increased portability is worth the limitations. If you're mainly going to have keep it running on your desk, just lugging it with you once in a while, then a cheaper desktop drive might be a better option. Some enclosures are very badly designed and the drives run pretty hot, others keep the drives cooler than they are in most computer cases, Antec's fan-cooled MX-1 for example. I don't personally like the ready assembled external hard drives available from Maxtor, Western Digital, etc. You can't easily reuse them with a different drive, and if the enclosure is damaged then you can't remove the drive without invalidating the warrantee. Sticking a drive in an enclosure is such a simple job that I can't see the point in getting one ready made, not unless you get a really good deal and it saves you some money. As for drives failing, that can happen with the drive in your PC also. If you're bothered about losing data then make sure you have a backup copy. That's one of the main uses of external hard drives...
Should have refreshed the thread before posting... If you're constantly near a wall power socket then a 3.5" drive definitely seems like the best option. I use a couple of 750Gb drives in Antec MX-1 enclosures, running constantly (24/7) and attached using eSATA for increased speed. In those enclosures they stay nice and cool and are no more likely to fail than internal drives. Frankly you're dead wrong if you think that running any drive for one week will indicate that it'll have no problems in the future. Drives can fail at any time, without any warning, no matter what conditions they're kept in. I've had drives in my PC fail instantly after running flawlessly for six months, with no (easy/cheap/practical) way to recover their data. You're constantly gambling with your files if you only keep them in one location. Storage is so cheap now that you should make sure that anything important is backed up. Contrast the cost of a 500Gb drive with the wasted time and hassle of losing your most important 500Gb of files...
My past is a foreign country. Most things are different there, including word usage. 503 Posts 12/06
Posted - May 1 2008 : 11:05AM
I have 4 portable LaCie hard drives that vary in capacity (250 - 500 Gb) that I've purchased (facory re-con) over the past 5 years. All are really permanent drives. I rarely unplug them and move them about. The first one I bought was for back-up. It still is. All appear to run 'hot' and at first I was concerned. None have ever failed, but then neither has any of the internal drives I've had in the many PCs that I have owned over the past 25 years. I read that hard disk failures only account for 5% of the problem of lost data. But it is true that when they fail there is no warning and very little one can do to retrieve the data. Recently a friend told me that his internal hard drive failed, suddenly and without warning and it contained some very valuable business data. He sent the drive to a company that specializes in retrieval of data from failed (head crash) hard drives. They were able to retrieve only about 1% of the data.[xx)] When it happens to you it's not 5%, it's 100%.
Not usually. Sometimes I forget and leave it on when I go to bed. The My Book line spins the drive down after a few minutes of activity though so it's not like it runs constantly. But of you're going to use one, you might be better off just turning it on with your computer if you're planning on using it and leaving it on until you're sure you're done with it. I'm not sure a lot of starts and stops are good for them either. I have another Seagate drive that I bought a generic enclosure for. Sometimes I leave it on for a week at a time. It's been making strange noises ever since about 6 months after I bought it but it hasn't failed in over 3 years. It's basically a throwaway drive. I use it for things that aren't really important just to keep them from cluttering up my primary drive. I also use it if I need temporary storage space or if I need to reformat my main drive. But if it ever fails, it won't be a big deal. I used it for over a year for my primary drive in my old system and a couple of years like it is. I got my money's worth out of it. Like I said in another thread. You can never have too much hard drive. But it's generally better if you have several medium sized drives rather than one big one.
