which external hard drive to go with

Reliable: Western Digital

WelcomeToDa6ix wrote: ↑Lookng for an external hard drive under $100.

Ive been browsing the NCIX website and they have a few selections in that price range. Looking at either WD or Seagate.

Which of the 2 brands is better? Ive heard of a few horror stories of peoples hard drives being wiped losing all their information. Is one of the HD brands better than the other in terms of security and reliability?

Thanks.

WD external drives are usb soldered onto the circuit board, making data recovery much more difficult. You do have the option of buying an internal WD Drive that is reliable (WD blac k but not green) and buying an external enclosure. Even Toshibas are more reliable than seagate

rageking wrote: ↑WD external drives are usb soldered onto the circuit board, making data recovery much more difficult. You do have the option of buying an internal WD Drive that is reliable (WD blac k but not green) and buying an external enclosure. Even Toshibas are more reliable than seagate

Used to buy Maxtor drives a long time ago before they were bought out by Seagate - I had good experiences with Maxtor. After Maxtor, I started buying WD and Seagate drives and I had a frustrating time with most of the Seagate drives. Have been sent warranty replacement Seagate drives in the past that died under a year; long story short, I will never buy from Seagate again. We have three desktops with 10 drives in all. I've been buying WD exclusively for the last 5 years with good success. I have a mix of internal WD black and green drives and external WD Elements and WD My Book drives and all have been great. Only recently started having issues with a WD 1 TB My Book that I bought in 2009 (my first external). A SMART report shows that the number of bad sectors is high and I have not been able to correct with any tools from WD or others; I may replace this with an internal WD red variant next. Very happy with WD drives and I am sticking with them.

kottmeier wrote: ↑Used to buy Maxtor drives a long time ago before they were bought out by Seagate - I had good experiences with Maxtor. After Maxtor, I started buying WD and Seagate drives and I had a frustrating time with most of the Seagate drives. Have been sent warranty replacement Seagate drives in the past that died under a year; long story short, I will never buy from Seagate again. We have three desktops with 10 drives in all. I've been buying WD exclusively for the last 5 years with good success. I have a mix of internal WD black and green drives and external WD Elements and WD My Book drives and all have been great. Only recently started having issues with a WD 1 TB My Book that I bought in 2009 (my first external). A SMART report shows that the number of bad sectors is high and I have not been able to correct with any tools from WD or others; I may replace this with an internal WD red variant next. Very happy with WD drives and I am sticking with them.

Find out where on the drive the bad sectors keep reappearing and *****list that whole area, leaving about 1gig before and after that area. That is unless it's everywhere on the drive.

Navy85130 wrote: ↑Reliable: Western Digital None

Fixed.
If you're trusting your data to a single drive based on brand you're an idiot.

as stated above, both wd and toshiba portable drives use "frankenstein technology" whereby a usb port is soldered to the drive itself, rendering it useless for data extraction or use in a console or laptop if the usb port/enclosure malfunctions. it's planned obsolescence at its worst.

seagate portables use standard sata drives, which is more flexible for secondary use and safer for your data in the event of a usb issue.

rageking wrote: ↑Find out where on the drive the bad sectors keep reappearing and *****list that whole area, leaving about 1gig before and after that area. That is unless it's everywhere on the drive.

Thanks for the tip. The MiniTool Partition Wizard surface scan map showed bad sectors spread all over like acne; still, I'll look into what you are suggesting.

kottmeier wrote: ↑Thanks for the tip. The MiniTool Partition Wizard surface scan map showed bad sectors spread all over like acne; still, I'll look into what you are suggesting.

use hdd regenerator if you want to force the drive to reallocate good sectors for bad, then retest it again using that.

rageking wrote: ↑use hdd regenerator if you want to force the drive to reallocate good sectors for bad, then retest it again using that.

I will check that out, thanks again!

build your own; a good quality hdd enclosure + and a reliable hdd = much better product

eldiablo wrote: ↑build your own; a good quality hdd enclosure + and a reliable hdd = much better product

sure, but at 1.5-2X the price.

WelcomeToDa6ix wrote:So i see the WD my passport. WD element. WD blah blah blah......so whats the difference with all these? Theyre 1TB and around the same price range. Which is best?

none of them, they're all frankenstein drives.