singleviking Loc: Lake Sebu Eco Park, Philippines

Actually, if you do your homework and shop during sales, the WD Black drives aren't that much more expensive. You need to keep to under 2 Terabytes or so but they are only a pittance more than the RED or BLUE and using them in HOT SWAPPABLE 5.25" front panel BAYS makes plugging and unplugging them almost as easy as the external USB drives. I think I last paid about $20 or so premium for the BLACK series over the others and I haven't had an HDD failure in 30 years. That hasn't stopped me from doing regular backups though.

jpanar Loc: Reston, VA

I've had great luck with Western Digital "Books," but nothing beats backing up to the internet for reliability. I now organize my photos in a separate file (not "My Pictures" if you're using Windows) and then a subfile by date and topic. My workstation constantly backs up using Carbonite. You can adjust how much processing power is being used while you are not at your station or when you're working.

Pentony Loc: Earth Traveller

I backup on an external 1TB Toshiba, and duplicate that backup using DVD's.

I am shopping for another external HD, a different brand for no particular reason, for duplicating the duplicate while continuing using DVD's. DVD's don't get reused. Once almost full they get stored.

I use one SD card per camera. Never swap an SD card between cameras. Once an SD cards is almost full, it gets labeled and stored, rather than deleted, reformatted and reused. I replace a used SD card with a new SD card.

The only thing I'm not doing yet is storing off site. I'm not interested in the cloud or NSA. I'm not using those social networks. Hopefully by only being on UHH I'm flying under NSA's radar. (lol)

I may buy a third external HD. I have a USB cord which hooks to my computer for attaching five externals simultaneously. Forgot where I bought that cord; probably at a Robotics show.

Everything is stored in two bags for quick departure in the event of a hurricane. Since I reside in a detached house made with cinder blocks, away from the ocean and rivers, the possibility of a fire or flood are minimal.

No matter what one does, there is always the possibility of lost data for unforeseen circumstances, Murphy's Law.

lukevaliant Loc: gloucester city,n. j.

do not use seadrive,full of failures,that is why they changed from maxtor to seagate ! no customer support ata all. iomega is the best. go to tigerdirect.com for best prices :D

singleviking Loc: Lake Sebu Eco Park, Philippines

Just so you know, all the IOMEGA stuff is made in Laos and makes huge amounts of money for the communists there. I walked through those "Killing Fields" when I was in Vietnam and it wasn't pleasant. Poh Pot and his family are the owners of the plant although he died a few years ago. And where in the world do you get the idea that anythong made by IOMEGA is the BEST? Bullshit. They make nothing of server quality and don't come close to SeaGate or WD or even Samsung or any of the other HDD manufacturers.

saichiez Loc: Beautiful Central Oregon

Actually, my conclusion is that the internal interface with the drive mounted directly to a bus port on the board is far superior to the USB interfaces and other external interfaces. Remember that with all internal drives you are using an interface that is not running as fast or efficiently as the bus speed interface. Plus you have another circuit board, accompanying the drive in the external enclosure. These lesser capable interfaces often simply work the externally located drives too hard.

In twenty plus years of working on computers for my self and clients, I have never encountered the rate of failure for internal drives that I have for external drives. This is why on desktop computers, I favor mounting extra drives inside the computer direct to the buss. Many desktops have motherboards that will drive up to four hard drives on the internal bus. It takes very little more work to put a drive inside the computer and configure it in the BIOS to run on the internal drive system.

singleviking Loc: Lake Sebu Eco Park, Philippines

Most HDD failures are caused by poor voltage from the power supply. USB drives use the power supplied through the USB port while internal drives use a seperate power cable. Your power supply has to be able to handle all those drives so to have a little 350 watt PS and then use 4 HDDs or 2 USB drives and an internal video card and the MOBO is taxing that poor power supply to the limits. Geez, the new CPUs use almost 100 watts or more of power alone when fully running at speed.
That's why I recommend the use of at least a 500 watt power supply or larger to handle the growth of system components and their power needs. It just makes sense to plan ahead instead of saving a few pennies and having serious problems in the future.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

From what I've seen, Seagate USED TO BE one the sturdiest and most reliable but that was long ago. Now consumer drives are all Chinese crap and none are more reliable than any other. I'd say to buy two from two different manufacturers and mirror image backup on both. Unplug them both and let them sit on a shelf not running until you're ready for another backup which lowers the number of hours of spinning and protects them from voltage spikes. Then which ever one dies first, you still have a second copy to mirror image onto another new one from yet another manufacturer.

I had a 3.5" internal drive die once in an H-P desktop PC and it was a Western Digital.

I had a 2.5" internal laptop drive die and it was a Seagate.

I had an external Western Digital with all my old family photos that were scanned and a bunch of my CDs in MP3 format. Its motor stopped spinning one day and so I couldn't retrieve anything but I damned sure wasn't going to pay $700 to retrieve stuff I could re-scan.

I've got two old 80GB Seagate externals in the garage that didn't actually die but they scrambled the data and FAT table for some unknown reason so they weren't readable until I formatted them both and started over. Now they work but what good is a 80GB drive that weights as much as a battery backup in the era of 2TB coat pocket sized drives?

LGilbert Loc: Earth

You have to be careful how you read statistics. There are more Seagates sold than everybody else combined, thus, numerically, there will be more failures even if the percentage is very low. So, the complaints are useless from a statistical reliability perspective unless you have the metrics on the number of units sold verses type of failures compared to the industry average.

Personally, I have a Seagate 1T external drive that has worked perfectly for two years. I'm about to buy a second Seagate 3T drive, using the 3T for my data/photo repository and the 1T for my backup program data storage (backing up the 3T drive and my main computer storage in a compressed format). Additionally, I have Carbonite backing up the main machine data and the external drive into the cloud. It's always a good idea to have two backups, one local for convenience, and one NOT ON SITE in the event the local is murdered, stolen, lost in a divorce, confiscated by a SWAT team, attacked by a virus, small child or pet, or otherwise rendered into junk by the actions of its owner....

RocketScientist Loc: Littleton, Colorado

When it comes to hard drives, there are 2 kinds. Ones that have failed and ones that will fail. All brands come under these two categories.

JR1's methods are a good solution. If you want to put less effort into it, get an external unit that at least mirrors the data on on 2 drives (known as RAID1) or better yet, something that has 4 (or more) drives and utilizes RAID5 for near bullet proof storage.

jerrylh Loc: Texas

I have a friend that is a professional TI guy that is responsible for the safeguarding of his companies software. He cannot loose anything, ever. What he does is:
1. Hard Drive backup on an Enterprise rated WD drive.
2. Primary Cloud.
3. Secondary Cloud located in a different place than the primary.
4. Gold archive disk.

I personally backup to a 2TB WD "black" external drive once a week. I verify the backup once a month. I change to a new drive about every 3-4 years by cloning the old drive to a new one. I use Acronic software for my backup. Acronic for there 2013 version offer a plus version that they said can migrate programs from one operating system to another. I don't know anyone that has tried it.
I have setup a business backup that is done progressively all the time.
I setup another business that does full backup at 4 pm each day. This business had a HD failure on a new Dell. The backup restored 99% of all the files.

In my 40 years of computer use, and this include taking care of a number of relatives and friends computers, I have experienced 5 HD failures. One failed because it was filled too 99% capacity. Never fill a drive more than 85% of capacity. 2 failed drives were WD, one was a Seagate, the other was repaired by HP, so I do not know what it was.

I recently read two articles about hard drive reliability. Both said the larger capacity drives are not as reliable as the older drives. It said a 3.5 drive should be good for 5 years and a 2.5 drive for 3 years and laptops less time because they are often moved when they should not be moved and this adds to the wear.

I went into both Seagate and Western Digital websites today to find out what they are doing with warranty now. I could not find it on Seagate. WD had 2, 3 and 5 years. One of the articles said the major manufactures were reducing warranty times because they know they do not last as long as they once did. Also, it said solid state drives do not yet have the reliability of the mechanical drives. PC World magazine evaluated both Seagate and Western Digital for a number of different things for 4 different kinds of HDs and they said WD was better then Seagate on all of them.

bunuweld Loc: Arizona

Agree. I check Amazon user reviews often.

bunuweld Loc: Arizona

I have no direct experience with solid-state external drives, but I am keeping an eye on prices, which will surely go down in the next couple of years. Samsung seems to be a leader in good quality SSDs. Last I checked a 1-TB was $800.

singleviking Loc: Lake Sebu Eco Park, Philippines

HDD technology has sure come a long way since the 20 and 80 Mega bit drives. The interface has gone from megabits per second to the new SATA 3.0 standard of 6 Gig per second.
I designed the WD HDD controller chip while at Bell Labs and it was the Rolls Royce of HDD controller chips.

Jas Loc: Calabasas, CA

JR1,
I looked up the Docking Station link you provided, but do not understand its advantages. I have several external hard drives, and all came with a short USB plug, which I easily and conveniently swap out whenever I wish. How is using the docking station a better way to go?