USB hard drive recommendations

[NiceCupOfTea]

Hi,

I know there have been a couple of threads on this recently, but this is specific!

I'm looking for one that is either powered by USB or is wake-on-USB. It's to go into the back of my NAS and do automatic scheduled backups, so no point in it running all the time and potentially suffering from power spike issues.

Any thoughts? Need about 500GB I should think, want to keep it cheap if poss but must be reliable!

[Man-At-Arms]

Western Digital My Passport
linky

i've got a 250GB jobby, and it's wonderfully simple

[spants]

ebuyer.com had a portable 500gb samsung one for a fair price. Works well.

[va1o]

I got a Hitachi 1TB USB External Drive for £53 from Comet a few weeks ago. Its powered by the mains, but turns itself on and off automatically with the USB connection.

[Furberger]

Man-At-Arms said:

Western Digital My Passport
linky

i've got a 250GB jobby, and it's wonderfully simple

Had 2 of these, both died. Coincidence?

Your choice....

[NiceCupOfTea]

Can't find the Hitachi one at comet... Looking at 1TB ones now - I have a 1TB Buffalo Linkstation and I want to do automatic backups from it. Should have bought a Terastation with 2 1TB RAID drives...

ebuyer is showing Toshiba, Buffalo & Iomega ones between 60-80 quid...

[DeputyDawg]

NiceCupOfTea said:

Hi,

I know there have been a couple of threads on this recently, but this is specific!

I'm looking for one that is either powered by USB or is wake-on-USB. It's to go into the back of my NAS and do automatic scheduled backups, so no point in it running all the time and potentially suffering from power spike issues.

Any thoughts? Need about 500GB I should think, want to keep it cheap if poss but must be reliable!

Is that not the whole idea of buying a NAS? Not sure I understand why you would need to back it up with another external drive, unless of course you are not running Raid.

[NiceCupOfTea]

At the time it made more sense to me to use the Linkstation mostly as a backup device for all the machines in the house - it was either a 1TB single drive or a 1TB RAID (so 512GB space). I decided having the capacity would be more use, and buying 2x 1TB drives at a later stage would be pricey. That way I could use my 300GB USB drive to back up once a week remotely.

The more I use it the more I am using it as NAS and a backup device - since my laptop hard drive died and I haven't finished rebuilding it, I am using the backup of the files on the NAS as my regular files. Unfortunately my USB drive is full of stuff that I had forgotten about!

Hence the need for a decent sized 1TB USB drive that can do a weekly backup of the NAS

Want something reliable, relatively quick, and that can be powered up/down via USB so it's not spinning all the time.

[miniman]

DeputyDawg said:

NiceCupOfTea said:

Hi,

I know there have been a couple of threads on this recently, but this is specific!

I'm looking for one that is either powered by USB or is wake-on-USB. It's to go into the back of my NAS and do automatic scheduled backups, so no point in it running all the time and potentially suffering from power spike issues.

Any thoughts? Need about 500GB I should think, want to keep it cheap if poss but must be reliable!

Is that not the whole idea of buying a NAS? Not sure I understand why you would need to back it up with another external drive, unless of course you are not running Raid.

Depends, I suppose, if you are using your NAS to provide backup or just more storage.

[NiceCupOfTea]

Bit of both - perhaps should have gone with RAID but too late now, just want to make sure I'm backed up.

[GregE240]

Furberger said:

Man-At-Arms said:

Western Digital My Passport
linky

i've got a 250GB jobby, and it's wonderfully simple

Had 2 of these, both died. Coincidence?

Your choice....

Had 1 of these, died. Scores of premature failures on the internet. Luckily only 2 files corrupted so managed to salvage everything else.