External Hard Drive

[bigmanszetec]

I am after a good reliable external hardrive that I can use with my Laptop and my Mac Mini.
Looking for about 320GB of space and a budget around the £100 mark.

What are the brands to look out for, and avoid in this area, as I have no idea.

Thanks

[XJSJohn]

i got a pair of 500GB Packard bell externals purely because they were cheap to act as backup drives for my media server whilst moving house.

well worth avoiding if you are going to use them regularly, they run so hot that they would have to break if you were going to use them for any other task than as a backup.

(they were cheep at £80 a go though, so pays your money)

Lacie have always been a good brand for daily use externals.

[cjs]

I have an Iomega 320gig, it works well, is quiet and runs cool. I think I payed around £80.00 for it however they were on a special on ebuyer.com recently at £69.00????. Also comes with some backup software that works well.

If you have a Mac it may be worth trying to get a Firewire version that will run a bit quicker than USB.

[Fidgits]

I've got a maxtor oneTouch and have no complaints.

Not the cheapest on the market, but good sturdy build, with stand, USB connection, on USB2.0 file transfer nice and fast, comes with backup/recovery software...

[PJ S]

Just as cheap to buy an enclosure and drive - the latter of which should be Samsung.
Otherwise, you'll not go far wrong with LaCie.

[bigmanszetec]

Cheers guys, LaCie and Iomega were the brands that came up when I was looking around, so will probably go with one of them.

Thanks again.

[PJR]

www.dabs.co.uk have some really good deals on externals at the moment. Last time i looked, a 320gb usb LaCie drive was around £75. Or 500gb for £105. Plenty of other sizes and brands there too.

P,

[ThePassenger]

One thing to keep in mind is be gentle with it, especially when it's actually powered up and spinning. Poking my head in to a lot of these things the drive mounts don't have much if any ability to deal with bumps/knocks.

Powered down and with the heads parked out the way they're happy enough in a laptop bag bouncing around though.

[lilford christie]

I would heartily recommend Seagate external drives.

I Have been using one for about 18months at work to backup 30,000 files every Friday, to then take off the premises and my 160gb model has worked flawlessly. It gets used and relied upon non stop , dropped in car parks (blame company MD!), left in car boots all winter (blame M).

On the other hand I bought a 250GB Freecom drive, for home and it stopped working after its first use! All I had done was take it out the box, use it once, carefully store it and then it failed!

I'd recommend MISCO.co.uk for service, delivery + price

[bigmanszetec]

Thanks for everyones reponses.

I have just brought a LaCie 320GB from amazon for £60. Has plenty of postive reviews and was pleased with the price.

cheers
Will

[tog]

I have several LaCie d2 drives, and have not yet had one fail, but as with all hard drives it's only a matter of time, so whenever I buy a drive now I buy two and make sure one is mirrored onto the second, and store them apart from each other. Just my 2p worth.

[RVVUNM]

Aldi have a iQon 500gb external hard drive on offer at the moment for £89.99. Careful you don't catch anything from the chav's in there though!!