I'm in the market for a new external HD. Any you would recommend?
There was recently a comparison of Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba. Western Digitals are the best overall, with failures occurring steadily, but not many, over a five year time scale; less than 5% fail overall. Toshiba, after six months, was the best. Around the same failure rate as WD, but over that short time, and then virtually no failures. Seagate was abysmal. 15% failed rather quickly, and after three years nearly 30%.
I would definitely go WD. But I'm also biased because A: I like their products and B: I've done some work involving their hard drive disks and have a greater knowledge of their products than others. Edit: Responded to the wrong comment. Oh well.
Right. So check it: every external drive you've ever seen is an internal drive with a dingus attached. That dingus takes it from SATA (typically) to USB or Firewire or Thunderbolt or whatever. Probably less of a problem with USB, but with Firewire it really fucking matters. For the longest time those of us who dealt with media and macs shared little lists of who was using a particular chip (Oxford 911). That only covers Firewire, though, and has long since been superseded. Seagate USB drivers are flaky as fuck. I've got like four WD Mybooks, all of them triple interface (USB3, Firewire 800, eSATA). The USB interface is usually great but slower than eSATA. Firewire works so long as you aren't expecting to use it for Time Machine that much. Probably not problems you run into on the PC side, but here in the land of Mac it matters.
That could be it. What sort of interfacing do you have on the computer side? I'm a big proponent of eSATA; the cards are cheap and they basically allow you to connect an external drive using the exact same protocol as an internal drive, no fuss, no muss. On the downside you need to unplug it before you disconnect it, but that's pretty minor most of the time.
Oh ok. It's USB. I don't move a whole lot of files too often, I just like to put everything on the external as I've had several computers stolen and had various mishaps where my computer at the time was rendered unusable for whatever reason. Whenever I'm able to get a new computer I think I might just get a desktop since I don't really need to bring a computer around with me (though that could change). Anyway, thanks.
Seagate's supposedly crap. I've had mine for a while now and I actually have a hubski sticker over the brand -- heh -- but I'm pretty sure it's a standard WD. I've never had a single problem, nor do I expect to. They've gotten kinda cheap.