Need recommendations for external backup hard drive

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Hi,

I am planning to purchase a 4 TB external hard drive. Western Digital offers one, but their drive evidently does not have a password reset feature. Can someone recommend a good, dependable drive?

Thank you very much. 🙂

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I recently purchased a 1TB Western Digital external hard drive, because I kept hearing horror stories about Seagate. In fact, I have had two Seagate external hard drives quit working.

The only thing I’ve heard bad about Western Digital is that on at least one of their models, the drive is encrypted, AND THE ENCRYPTION KEY RESIDES IN THE USB ADAPTER ATTACHED TO THE DRIVE!

The reason that is bad is because the most fragile piece of the puzzle is the USB adapter attached to the drive. That is the part which most often fails. And if the encryption key is in the USB adapter, and if it fails, bye bye data.

I know that this can happen, because a co-worker of mine who is good with computers had this happen to him with a WD external hard drive he purchased a few months ago. He has searched far and wide for a solution so that he can recover his data, but thus far, nothing.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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I recently purchased a 1TB Western Digital external hard drive ….

The only thing I’ve heard bad about Western Digital is that on at least one of their models, the drive is encrypted, AND THE ENCRYPTION KEY RESIDES IN THE USB ADAPTER ATTACHED TO THE DRIVE!

The reason that is bad is because the most fragile piece of the puzzle is the USB adapter attached to the drive. That is the part which most often fails. And if the encryption key is in the USB adapter, and if it fails, bye bye data.

About 1978/9, I had one Commodore 3040 5 1/4″ floppy disk. It had all of my data on it. It became corrupted, so I lost all of my data. It taught me a most important lesson – always have more than one copy! I then taught myself to write a program to recover the disk’s sectors to recover most of the lost data!

I now use WD My Passport USB drives. My first of these was a 60GB, then 250GB, then 320GB. Then I bought 3x 1TG drives for my triple backup system and ‘retired’ the smaller ones. Recently I bought a new laptop with USB 3, So I bought a new 1TG, USB 3 WD Passport. None have ever failed.

I use ViceVersa PRO for regular backing-up to all three USB 2 drives.

I did have a WD networked 1TG box that did live continuous back-up, but the software was continually telling me that certain files would not back-up, but gave no information. So I installed it as a second drive in my desktop and re-formatted it as WD used an odd structure. It’s also still working.

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The only thing I’ve heard bad about Western Digital is that on at least one of their models, the drive is encrypted, AND THE ENCRYPTION KEY RESIDES IN THE USB ADAPTER ATTACHED TO THE DRIVE!

The reason that is bad is because the most fragile piece of the puzzle is the USB adapter attached to the drive. That is the part which most often fails. And if the encryption key is in the USB adapter, and if it fails, bye bye data.

Excuse me if my question (see below) seems stupid, but I’m nor technically gifted.

Yesterday I was creating an image of my recently installed Win 8 upgrade, which had almost completed, as it was copying the Vista recovery drive, but the next time I looked it had failed.

An examination of the log showed that it had repeatedly tried to copy one file or whatever, then said failure due to lack of space on drive E, the Vista recovery drive.
Puzzled as to why it should have switched from the ext. drive to E, I had a look in Computer and the ext, drive G was missing. Suspecting the USB socket, which caused some trouble a few weeks ago, I switched sockets with the mouse. The mouse worked in both sockets and the ext. drive was not listed in either. Later I tried the drive with my desktop, but it still doesn’t show up.

Intending to buy a replacement, I read through this thread and was struck by your reference to the adapter being the weakest part, and wondered whether I only need a new adapter, or a new external drive.

When plugged in the light on the ext. drive flashes, indicating that electricity is getting through, so I suspect I am out of luck, but not knowing the purpose of the adapter it’s probably worth asking the question.

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I have several external drives and I find what works best is to buy a hard drive and a enclosure for it and use it as an external drive..

Every external drive I ever bought, about two of them, failed for who knows what reasons, but my drives in enclosures are still working fine.

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I have had the same experience … ditto on your comments

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I bought a toshiba 2G external drive two weeks ago for backup…so far, so good….fwiw, I had an external dock, but the connections failed….

and, does anyone have an opinion on whether to compress hard drives,internal or external?

Sherm

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Regarding external hard drives, I’ve never had a Western Digital MyBook (USB 2.0) which lasted more than about 9 months. I’ve had 3 of them and won’t be buying or using them any more.

I like using internal type drives in an External device called a docking station. This docking station model from ThermalTake is my favorite. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153112 connects via eSATA or USB 2.0. They also have models which can connect via USB 3.0. Different models hold 1 or 2 hard drives. They also work with laptop size internal hard drives.

The docking station listed is about $53 and holds 2 hard drives. Another feature is that cooling is not a problem. No fans are needed and the eSATA connection is very fast. I have 2 – 2TB drives in mine that I use for automated backup using Acronis. Every couple of weeks I switch these drives with off site drives so I always have safe backups off-site.

As far as internal or external hard drives, I’ve had problems with just about all brands. My number 1 pick would be Hitachi and number 2 would be Seagate. Just my opinion.

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Can get docking stations for hard drives Icybox do them plus Stardock. The big plus for docking stations is no installing of drives to enclosures and can swap hard drives easily. I have 5 of them and never had any problems (Yet). :rolleyes:

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Thank you everyone for your responses. They were very helpful.

I have had no problems with my Western Digital drives, so a 4 TB WD Drive or Banyarola’s suggestion are probably the way I will go. Also, I will look into docking stations/icebox/Stardock .

Again, thank you for your help.

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If you buy an enclosure, make sure it has a fan. I own one that has a fan and one that doesn’t. The fanless enclosure makes a 7200RPM drive way hot after a little use even though it’s aluminium – this would significantly shorten drive life.

“Toolless” enclosures let you replace the drive without unscrewing/rescrewing anything.

So ideally you want a toolless enclosure with a fan. And ideally it should be USB3, since this is the new, much-faster-than-USB2 standard, which won’t cost you much more than USB2. Even if your current computer doesn’t have a USB3 port (they are colored blue), your next computer probably will. USB3 is backwards compatible with USB2.

You should also buy a second internal drive for the enclosure – later, if you lack the money now. Then you can back your computer to the hard drives, store one off-site with a close friend or family member, and swap them over periodically. (Any decent backup program will let you encrypt your backups.) So in the event of fire/flood/theft/lightning strike, all of which could wipe out a singe external drive, you haven’t lost a lifetime of photographs, documents, etc. A great investment!

Add a third drive later and you’re covered for all disasters for minimal data loss, just swap the drive with the least recent backup out periodically with the offsite drive. The industry term for this is ‘grandfather/father/son backup.’

Asus N53SM & N53SN 64-bit laptops (Win7 Pro & Win10 Pro 64-bit multiboots), venerable HP Pavilion t760 32-bit desktop (XP & Win7 Pro multiboot), Oracle VirtualBox VM's: XP & Win7 32-bit, XP Mode, aged Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 2019s (8" & 10.1"), Blu-ray burners, digital cameras, ext. HDDs (latest 5TB!), AnyDVD, Easeus ToDo Backup Home, Waterfox, more. Me: Aussie card-carrying Windows geek.

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Enclosures with fans are good, as long as you check the fans from time-to-time. One of my pet whinges is that suppliers tend to use cheap sleeve-bearing fans which seize up after a while (often emits groaning noise before complete failure) rather than more expensive ball- or needle-bearing fans (as used in real servers…). Enclosures designed for fans often get much hotter when their fan fails than non-fan enclosures as they have less free air circulation.

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I had several external HDD, mostly in StarTech eSata cases. But last time I needed more storage, I tried out the Antec Hot Swap HDD Caddy with external eSata port. ( http://store.antec.com/Product/accessories-other/easy-sata/0-761345-30750-5.aspx ) This fits into a spare 5.25″ external slot. Hard drives can be hot swapped at will. It even provides a front panel eSata port – though for both the caddy and external port the caddy requires 2 free SATA ports on the motherboard. It works perfectly for me: just as fast and convenient as an internal HDD.

I now keep my HDDs in the original packing which means they’re safely portable to store in an offsite location. It also means that I only have an SSD in my desktop which means fast boot and shut down times (11 seconds to start up): a HDD slows down these times even when the boot is on the SSD.

It’s the best £19 I invested![/FONT][/SIZE]

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my 1st my book failed but had it backed up to another drive by then and got a 1tb as a replacement under warenty

You need either esata or usb 3 as full image backups can take a long time under usb 2

if needed u can add usb 3 and esata cards

my favorite backup software I have used is mcarium reflect acronis in my opinion is rubish!

mcarium will back up grub 2 linux ext4 & 3 etc.

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The INEO hard drive docking station http://www.ineotechusa.com/product-na317u+_t3527.html is cheap but does a good job. It gives high copy speeds with USB 3, but does work with USB 2 as well. There are no fans to worry about. The unit consists of a base, and you take a drive, orient it in a vertical plane and insert the drive into the base. For backup software I use Macrium Reflect.

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I use 8 WD MyBook drives (from 0.5TB to 2TB) and have never had a failure. Had a couple of warnings after power outages, but these have always been recoverable. I also have 2 Freecom Toughdrives (350GB and 500GB) for portable use. Again, never had a failure (except where a laptop refuses to power them….:()

As far as I know, these drives are not encrypted:).

Had a couple of Aria 330GB drives with NAS interfaces that worked for a while before the interface quit (in one) and the non-standard wall-wart power supply in the other:mad:.

Most of my boxes (except the 2TB Mybooks) were built for ‘conventional’ IDE/USB2 drives, so I’ve not tried to upgrade the HDDs as there are very few IDE drives bigger than 1TB: virtually all large modern drives are SATA.

Whichever drive you decide to buy, buy 2 and backup one to the other. That way, even if a particular drive goes bye-bye, you’ve still got your data. I back up my current files every couple of days and the whole shebang weekly.

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I’d break up 4TB of data into two 2TB drives, just because of the very lengthy job it would be to reconstruct a 4TB drive’s contents if anything ever went wrong with it. Enclosures and Docking Stations often add up to more expense than buying preconfigured drives. Get USB-3 or e-SATA if your computer can use those interfaces. That’s for throughput (sometimes referred to as “speed”). I also use redundant backup — mirroring one drive to another — just in case one copy is on the drive which fails eventually.

No failures in over eight years with two older WD USB-2 HDDs. I buy the simplest WD drives, with no preconfigured backup or syncing. Encryption is at your own option, but I wouldn’t encrypt System Backups because these often won’t decrypt reliably in an emergency restore operation.

-- rc primak

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It’s always funny, one person will say that WD drives are pure CRAP and the next responder will praise them.
But only a very few of those responders are professionals who deal with hundreds of different drives in some really weird applications.

Having said that, I AM a professional computer tech and I DO have several WD drives, laying around my shop, but every one of them came out of a failed WD external enclosure. I would never buy one! I only use them as temp storage or “Scratch” drives.

It’s pretty easy to back up an entire HD to another drive, either internal (fastest) or external (slowest). There is a lot of FREE software out there to do that. I won’t go there!

But the problem I’ve seen with ‘whole drive backups’ is that most people won’t take the time out of their busy day to perform the backup, at least not on a regular basis. I remember one bank, years ago, that was taking two hours every afternoon to back up one IBM PC/AT in their Trust Dept. They were running the MS-Backup in DOS and backing up to 5.25″ floppy disks.
I introduced them to PCTools backup and it only took them less than 20 minutes to do an Incremental Backup daily.

So that brings up my next tip. Once you have a backup (somewhere safe) of your entire C drive, then all you need to do daily is make an incremental backup of your data files. That can simply be what’s in My Documents, or it can extend to Bookmarks and saved eMail, etc.
I have about six locations that I backup daily using a batch file and the old DOS XCOPY command.

After installing a PCI-USB3 add-on card, I got a Toshiba USB3 External 2.5″ drive and a 32 gig USB3 Flash drive.
I plugged both drives into the USB3 card and I run the batch file every day to back up just the new files or changed files, since the previous backup. It only takes a few seconds, to keep my data backups up to date every day.
Here is the one line from that batch file that backs up “My Documents”.

xcopy “C:Documents and SettingsAlexiMy Documents*.*” “M:My Documents” /S /Y /H /R /D

Drive M is my Toshiba 1TB external drive.

Drive M is so big that it’s an ideal place for my Whole Drive backups for drive C.

Well, that just my own little backup strategy. Each person has to develop their own, or get an IT specialist to do it for them.
I set up backup strategies for my customers all the time. Each one is a little bit different, out of necessity.

Happy Computing!
The Doctor 😎

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…I AM a professional computer tech and I DO have several WD drives, laying around my shop, but every one of them came out of a failed WD external enclosure. I would never buy one! I only use them as temp storage or “Scratch” drives…

I also am a professional technician, and agree pretty much with what you say. More specifically I will not buy brand-name 3.5 inch USB HDDs due to the repeated failure of the unit I bought for my own use, and the many failures of customer’s units (all brands).

The unit I bought, about 2 years ago, first failed after about 6 months light use, and was replaced with a different model under warranty; less than 2 weeks later it failed again, but by then I was so fed up I didn’t bother with the warranty hassle.

Instead of a ready-built brand-name unit, I then bought a 3.5in. 2TB Seagate SATA HDD and a Vantec NexStar USB2 enclosure, which has never faltered and does not run hot even though it has no fan. Since then I have bought 3 more of these which I use for various purposes. Occasionally I have had to run a CHKDSK repair scan on one or other of these drives, but apart from that I have had no failures, even though these days I use these much more.

My work involves onsite work, mostly for home users. Most customers know to not leave their external drives powered on when not in use, but those who make this mistake are soon faced with hardware failure (most often the unit’s power-supply cooks itself).

Edit:
During about the past 6-12 months I am seeing more and more users, especially with laptops, who have 2.5in. USB HDDs; these units seem to be far more reliable than the early efforts.

About 6 months ago I bought a 2.5in. Seagate GoFlex 750GB USB HDD which I carry in my work bag for use on customer’s computers. It is connected to a computer probably 4 to 6 times each week and so far I have not had any problem with it.

Note that these units are quite sensitive and must be handled gently, especially when connected and powered on.

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Most customers know to not leave their external drives powered on when not in use, but those who make this mistake are soon faced with hardware failure (most often the unit’s power-supply cooks itself).

I have a hand-me-down from my son – a 300 GB external HDD with an enclosure.

I recently had to have my Win 7 operating system reloaded due to a virus that deleted a whole bunch of dll files, among others, on my OS, so I have resolved to try to be more consistent about backing up.

My question is twofold (and I have read answers pro and con regarding whether or not to power the external HDD down when turning off your computer for the evening).

First question: would the members of this forum generally agree that for relatively infrequent use (say, about once weekly), that the external HDD should be shut down except while in use, as the above post espouses?

Second: If I decide that powering down the external HDD is the thing to do, then that raises another question, which is this:
My hand-me-down has a dedicated on-off switch on the back of the enclosure, which necessitates me manually powering on the HDD when I want to back up, and to remember to turn it off when the backup is completed.
Now, to get to the question: Does anyone know of a good solution (perhaps an in-line timer mechanism that could be programmed to power on or off at specified times)? And if so, is this able to be purchased retail, or, as I read when doing some Googling, something that someone has to build with parts from Radio Shack, etc.?

Suggestions and comments welcomed.

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Much as I like using batch files, The Doctor’s one I feel has a distinct disadvantage over more conventional backup strategies. It overwrites yesterday’s files. I have always found that the most often needed backup is to recover from a screw up and I want to get at a previous version of a file.

I would set an environment variable in the batch file to be today’s date in the format YYYYMMDD called dt then use the batch file commands

md “M:My Documents%username%%dt%”
xcopy “C:Documents and Settings%username%My Documents*.*” “M:My Documents%username%%dt%” /S /Y /H /R /M

My experience over the last 30 years concurs with Bob Primark and moon, I have found almost no difference in reliability between drive manufacturers. I find Seagate and WD both very good. I have 3 WD 3TB drives in my server, running 24/7 which are used as backup and main storage for videos and pictures. 2 Samsung 1TB drives in one of my test PCs (came out of server after upgrading) and a floating Samsung 1TB used as my working backup drive in various Startech hot swappable drive bays. And Seagate drives as the main working drive in my main PC as well as a couple of SSD’s as Boot drives.

My own opinion is worry less about the drive manufacturer and focus more on your backup strategy. When, how frequent, how much history/versions, image backups of OS partitions (so you don’t have to reinstall everything after major screw ups). I use the free Macrium Reflect for this, (also great at cloning drives). Also consider whether the backup should be encrypted. If you are using a backup drive that is encrypted make sure you have the key in duplicate places. If it is on a thumb drive have a copy of it and test it. Test your recovery before you need it in earnest.

Good value for money 4TB drive is currently the Seagate Barrcuda ST4000DM000 that you can get from newegg for about $190 or in the UK at dabs.com for GBP150 then use either an external enclosure or a hot swap enclosure like the startech.com DRW110SATBK

Bob Robinson

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I am not convinced that one brand is better than another. From all the reviews i have read over the years, as well as myown exprience, it is the luck of the draw. I hve used many of the major brands at one time or another, and none has actually failed. Maybe I have not been hard enough on the hard drives…:-)

Sherm

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If your using the drives for Image backups it not a good idea to compress it as sometimes the restore might not work if it has not got options to uncompress the Image.

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The closest I can come to recommending “a good, dependable drive” is Samsung – but they sold their drive business to Seagate well over a year ago and there’s no guarantee that quality has not suffered since (as of last summer they were still being produced to the Samsung design rather than being rebadged Seagate drives as some were suggesting; unfortunately, they may now be difficult to find at all, since Newegg uniformly lists them as ‘out of stock’ though you can still find their user reviews if you search by product ID). Their 5400 rpm 2 TB HD204UIs, 7200 rpm 1 TB HD103SJs, and 7200 rpm 500 GB HD502HJs were unequaled in quality and performance by their contemporaries. I would have given WD Caviar Black drives at least ‘honorable mention’ in this context (since my recollection is that their reported quality was at least in the same ball park), but a quick check of Newegg’s user reviews suggests that quality may have dropped slightly of late (though their performance should still be as impressive as ever).

Otherwise, the best advice I can offer is to check Newegg’s (and to a lesser degree Amazon’s) user reviews of various disks, noting whether the more recent ones demonstrate any trend (after discounting those whose authors just don’t have a clue and are merely parroting what they’ve heard elsewhere, though that may not always be obvious), and take your chances. Though I used to buy Seagate drives almost exclusively I haven’t been impressed by their reviews for quite a few years now (I’ve only purchased one at all recently and that only because it was an incredible sale, though initially it looks OK and its performance is top-notch), WD’s reviews have declined recently as well, and the couple of other remaining vendors’ have never been all that good.

If you want to purchase an internal hard drive plus an enclosure, I’ve had good luck with the Rosewill enclosures that Newegg sells (which are often available at significantly discounted sale prices) – in particular, the fanless ones that offer either USB 2.0 or USB 2.0 plus eSATA connections. Even without a fan the disk temperature in these enclosures is only a few degrees C above what it is sitting out in open, free-to-circulate air (so it’s fine unless your drives tend to run somewhat hot to begin with), and as long as you’re not planning to switch the disk in and out frequently (the enclosure-to-disk connection is quite tight and must be disconnected with care) they offer more protection than a docking station plus a more secure connection that can’t be jostled loose. I’ve found that some enclosures and docking stations limit eSATA speed to about 130 MB/sec regardless of what their specs say, but that’s close enough to raw disk speed for most purposes and a considerable improvement over the 30 – 32 MB/sec that USB 2.0 provides (USB 3.0 is much faster, though some reports suggest that it as well may not be fast enough to handle raw transfer speeds from the outer cylinders on the faster current drives).

All that said, just letting your external drive sit unprotected somewhere that it’s not likely to be jostled (and where air is free to circulate) and connecting it using an eSATA or USB cable (plus power cable) is a reasonable option if you exercise reasonable care (and avoid touching any exposed traces on its backplane), especially if you’ll have it connected only infrequently.

Installing an additional hot-swappable drive bay in your (desktop) computer is a good option if you won’t normally need to use the additional disk elsewhere (in the exceptional case you could still use a cable to the unprotected drive as described above). For that matter, you can use such an internal insert externally and connect it with cables, using the ‘caddy’ to protect the electrical traces on the disk backplane. Or you can buy two, install one in your desktop computer, use the other as a portable external enclosure with cables, and use the two caddies to keep two disks ready to use either way.

Probably more options than you needed to know about, and there are yet more. Good luck!

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I have had a 1 TB Samsung StoryBook for a couple of years and it has been rock solid. But I gather from another post in this thread that Samsung sold its hard drive business to Seagate, so that’s not an option anymore. I bought withing the last two months two Toshiba Canvio 3.0 USB drives, both 3 TB. They have worked without problems for me. Before you buy, visit the Best Buy reviews; some of the posters have not had good luck with their drives, mentioning the data connector as the weak link. I have not had this problem. I think a bit of care and they will be fine. The 3TB drives sell for $119.99, a real bargain.
Good luck with your selection.

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All due respect to DRWho, but in all the time (since 2001) that I’ve been running what are now six WD external USB HDDs, not one has failed or developed a bad sector. One drive got its file system messed up thanks to Acronis products (which I no longer use). But outright failures? Never a one.

Of course, in the five years since I got my first Seagate external drive, this too has been absolutely error-free and trouble-free. So it seems to make no difference — I don’t see a brand-specific pattern of external USB HDD failures.

My five-year-old Toshiba branded portable external HDD has overheating issues. It’s the only one of the whole bunch with this issue.

-- rc primak

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Thanks for responding Bob. Your experience parallels my experience with WD USB external HDDs. No failures yet after 2.5 year. I think I will stick with WD.

Have a good one,

moon

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I am old, on limited income, and cheap. Not all in that order. I have an older Dell Computer. 160gb hard drive. I know…. small these days. But 133gb free of 160gb.
Hand full of pictures and not many important documents. Keep it clean, slim and fast. I bought an external drive a couple of years ago. A slim Rock Mobile Disk. 160gb ($29). I keep backup images of my Windows 7 desktop and Vista laptop using free software. I keep a couple of my kids images on there also. Never has failed me. I keep a tool folder with probably about 30 or more repair software. A whole lot of virus cleaning tools. Free of course. I am not a safe surfer. I am looking constantly for answers to problems. Self inflicted or not. I once watched our local baseball team on a Chinese site. Not broadcast here. Funny hearing it being described in Chinese.

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